"Art is either plagiarism or revolution." Paul Gauguin
In Japan my wife and I took cooking lessons. The rest of the class was entirely 20-something females preparing for marriage. Our giggly classmates were eager to translate for us (as are many most hospitable Japanese people). The lesson for the day was kaiseki, a style of cooking that worships food beyond the normal reverence Japanese show for it. No culture applies artistry to food as do the Japanese.
But kaiseki is something else. It is employed for special occasions and special guests. Extraordinary attention is paid to presentation, color, and balance showcasing the best, freshest ingredients. The core recipe might be something they cook any old day, but for kaiseki they pay extreme attention to detail. If a carrot is to be julienned, each sliver should be just the right thickness and length. Great care and thought goes into the aroma, flavor, taste, and textural relationships between dishes, and of course they are plated like sculptures. By taking such great care, the cook is expressing respect for the guest.
The same can be said for the modernist chef who places microgreens on a plate with tweezers. The subject of much derision by many Americans, tweezer food is a form of kaiseki. It is how a western chef shows respect for the guest.
American barbecue evolved in the South guided by enslaved peoples. It is the ultimate American peasant food, and I don’t mean that in a derogatory fashion. Every culture has notable peasant foods made from inexpensive common ingredients designed to fuel farm and factory workers. They are made with sausages, pasta, polenta, beans, rice, potatoes, and they include dishes that have become revered such as ratatouille, Mulligan stew, carbonara, barbecue ribs, and pulled pork.
But American barbecue can use some artistry. Drive around the country and, despite some regional variations, barbecue restaurants and steakhouses feel like franchises. The food they churn out is delicious, but there is a boring sameness. For most of them barbecue remains traditional, tied to the past, tied to the South, and although the cooking equipment is modern, the menu has changed little. Barbecue has not evolved. And for you, this may be just fine, but for me? I crave variety. When I travel, the people I hook up with all ask me what I want to eat and my answer is "anything but barbecue." Been there done that, got stains on all my shirts.
Judge a barbecue competition and the entries all look and taste pretty similar. Yes, most of them taste fantastic, but the taste profile is pretty compact and the scores reflect it. On the popular 1 through 9 scoring system most entries score 7, 8, or 9. Most of the cooks use practically the same techniques, spices, and sauces. The flavor profiles vary little. Gawd help you if you entered ribs smoked with dried herbs and finished with a hoisin-based sauce sprinkled with orange zest. The traditionalists would whine "this is not barbecue."
This misguided concept of authenticity is a plague. Example: Pesto is a classic Genovese paste usually served on pasta. It is traditionally made of fresh basil leaves, olive oil, garlic, pine nuts, Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese, and salt. But I like to add a splash of lemon juice to brighten it. It really lifts the dish. But boy do I get hate mail for my recipe with this transgression! Heck, there is even a raging debate over what is authentic country music.
Traditionalists need to wake up and look around. Traditions evolve. The times they are a changin’ and creativity and innovation are the driving forces behind almost everything.
This insufferable devotion to authenticity has slid into the "cultural appropriation" debate. The one that accuses me of cultural envy if I sing hiphop because I’m not black, or wear cowboy boots in Chicago, or cook stir fry in a non-stick pan. Are tomatoes really traditional in Italian cuisine? Tomatoes came from Mexico, right?
The odd thing is, if a pianist plays an up-tempo version of Somewhere Over the Rainbow, nobody will come running down the aisle screaming that she has broken the law. Food snobs are plentiful and damnable.
The thing is there is no such thing as authentic. Pick any dish from a restaurant menu in Beijing and ask 50 people around town how they cook it and you’ll get 50 recipes. I can assure you, barbecue served today in Kansas City tastes nothing like the father of KC barbecue, Henry Perry, cooked it in 1908.
"Authenticity? When I’m in Italy I want to taste real Italian food. But I’m in America, a melting pot of culture, so I think there is nothing wrong with melting some cuisines together." Wolfgang Puck
Creativity, innovation, and originality is what makes a chef a culinary artist. Creativity makes food better.
That sort of innovation turns me on when I am cooking and when I am eating. There are a handful, only a handful, but a growing handful, of pitmasters who have dared to break out of the mold. One is Bill Durney of Hometown Bar-B-Que in Redhook, NY. There is always something off the hook marvelous on the menu. How about some Jerk Baby Back Ribs garnished with crispy fried garlic and shallot slices, peanuts, and a hoisin based sauce? Or an incredibly juicy Oaxacan-Style Chicken Tacos, marinated and air chilled for five days, grilled over wood to 145°F, then marinated again, then grilled again, served with a salsa verde, and pickled onions? Just listen to how he does his Vietnamese Wings: Whole wings are smoked then fried, sauced and then the sauce is caramelized on the grill, and finally, garnished with toasted sesame seeds, cilantro, and sliced scallions. Not enough for you? Try the Fried Korean Ribs, Lamb Belly Banh Mi, and Pastrami Bacon. He says "I don’t do traditional regional barbecue styles. I do New York style barbecue. International." The traditionalists whine "this is not barbecue."
Then there is Heirloom Market BBQ in Atlanta. Cody Taylor is a good ole boy from Knoxville and East Texas and his wife Jiyeon Lee is from Korea. They met in culinary school. Talk about fusion: They inject brisket with miso! They glaze ribs with gochujang chile paste! There’s kimchi slaw for the spicy pulled pork! They smoke tofu!
In Houston, Don and Theo Nguyen say they draw from their Vietnamese roots, from Aaron Franklin’s book "Franklin Barbecue, A Meat Smoking Manifesto", from David Chang, and from AmazingRibs.com for inspiration for their Khoi Barbecue pop-ups. Khoi is Vietnamese for "smoke". Their menu changes often but features things like brisket pho (a rich noodle soup), Brisket bún bò Huế (another noodle soup redolent with lemongrass), beef rib ramen, beef rib panang curry, smoked chicken and rice with yuzukoshÅ (a chili paste with yuzu, a citrus), and a barbecue sauce with fish sauce hiding within. In an interview with Daniel Vaughn of Texas Monthly magazine, Don was asked why he bothered selling brisket, ribs, and sausage by the pound like so many other Texas BBQ joints when the Vietnamese specialties were enough to draw the crowds. "If you want to riff and play jazz and play blues, you gotta learn the basics," Don explained. In other words, to be an artist you must first master the craft.
Jimmy Bannos of "The Purple Pig" in Chicago is producing flavors and combinations of novel ingredients woven together by flame and smoke to raves by mainstream restaurant critics if not the barbecue puristas. A typical menu might contain lamb ribs cooked sous vide and then smoked and then grilled with a Middle Easter spice blend. And grilled broccoli with an anchovy vinaigrette with roasted garlic and toasted breadcrumbs (so good we have a similar recipe on page ???).
In California "BBQ Queen" Winnie Yee-Lakhani’s puts her char siu (Chinese barbecue) and brisket into puffy steamed bao buns and makes sausages spiked with galangal and lemongrass. And the authenticity sticklers whine "this is not barbecue."
Of course all this is barbecue. Durney, Taylor, Lee, the Nguyen boys, Bannos, Yee-Lakhani, Brigit, and I are just pushing it in a new direction. To us, cooking is like jazz. You hear a lick and you take off with it.
I hate to tell you this, but in recent years the barbecue world has grown a substantial population of snobs who are as insufferable as wine snobs. I do not make the comparison lightly. I spent 18 years in the wine world, many of them as the syndicated wine critic for the Chicago Tribune, Washington Post, AOL in its heyday, and as an lecturer at Cornell University. Most wine lovers are down to earth, but there are plenty who will fire both barrels at you if you serve your reds too cold, too warm, too young, without sufficient breathing time, or from a screwcap bottle. Me? Serve me anything and I will enjoy it with a smile. The difference between a wino and a connoisseur? $20 a bottle.
Likewise, barbecue snobs oppress their neighbors when they are invited over for a barbecue and it turns out to be hamburgers and hot dogs, not brisket. "This is not barbecue" they whine. Then there are the charcoal snobs who put down people cooking on gas grills with "you might as well be cooking indoors." I’ve got news for you, the vast majority of modern ribjoints use gas for heat and wood for flavor, and it is pretty hard to find a great steakhouse that isn’t using a gas grill or broiler.
"Unless you invented fire you didn’t invent barbecue and you don’t own it." Mike Mills, BBQ Hall of Famer
Let’s take a deep breath and shred a few of their shibboleths and set ourselves free, because the recipes herein are barbecue freedom on a plate.
The snobs love to say there is a big difference between barbecue and grilling. When asked they usually explain that grilling is high temp cooking. But what is high temp? Anything over 300°F? So 299°F is barbecue and 301°F is grilling? I dare you to tell BBQ Hall of Famer Myron Mixon and the scores of other champions who cook their briskets at 325°F or higher that it isn’t barbecue. Instead of talking about the differences between "grilling" and "barbecue", they should be talking about the differences between "indirect convection heat cooking" and "direct radiant energy cooking." Kinda boring but far more accurate. Keep reading and we will get there.
I’ll tell you what’s authentic: Digging a hole in the ground, filling it with logs, burning them down to embers, covering the hole with a grid of green saplings, and throwing a whole animal on them. Definitely not the steel tubes that the traditionalists cook on. I am sure that when the first steel pits were introduced knuckle draggers whined "that’s not barbecue."
They say true barbecue is an American invention. So Chinese restaurant barbecue isn’t real barbecue because it is rarely smoked? Hello! They’ve been doing this in China with and without smoke long before humans set forth in North America. And at the time of this writing, the most avid BBQ fanatics are the ones who enter competitions, and at the time of this writing, the hot technique for chicken is to poach or braise thighs in aluminum pans with margarine and barbecue sauce, and when it comes to pork ribs, pork butt, and beef brisket, they wrap them all in aluminum foil after a few hours of smoking, braising them for much of their cook. These creative techniques create wonderful food, but are clearly not traditional barbecue.
"Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep." Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert
They think barbecue was invented in the US. But Homo erectus was probably the first of our ancestors to discover cooking in Africa, and for sure she didn’t use Weber smokers. Chef David Chang of Momofuku and many other superb restaurants said on his Netflix series "Ugly Delicious" that "It’s not that I hate authenticity, it’s that I hate that people want this singular thing that is authentic." Amen brother!
Finally, I ask you, what is more authentic than expressing yourself and your creativity?
In Japan my wife and I took cooking lessons. The rest of the class was entirely 20-something females preparing for marriage. Our giggly classmates were eager to translate for us (as are many most hospitable Japanese people). The lesson for the day was kaiseki, a style of cooking that worships food beyond the normal reverence Japanese show for it. No culture applies artistry to food as do the Japanese.
But kaiseki is something else. It is employed for special occasions and special guests. Extraordinary attention is paid to presentation, color, and balance showcasing the best, freshest ingredients. The core recipe might be something they cook any old day, but for kaiseki they pay extreme attention to detail. If a carrot is to be julienned, each sliver should be just the right thickness and length. Great care and thought goes into the aroma, flavor, taste, and textural relationships between dishes, and of course they are plated like sculptures. By taking such great care, the cook is expressing respect for the guest.
The same can be said for the modernist chef who places microgreens on a plate with tweezers. The subject of much derision by many Americans, tweezer food is a form of kaiseki. It is how a western chef shows respect for the guest.
American barbecue evolved in the South guided by enslaved peoples. It is the ultimate American peasant food, and I don’t mean that in a derogatory fashion. Every culture has notable peasant foods made from inexpensive common ingredients designed to fuel farm and factory workers. They are made with sausages, pasta, polenta, beans, rice, potatoes, and they include dishes that have become revered such as ratatouille, Mulligan stew, carbonara, barbecue ribs, and pulled pork.
But American barbecue can use some artistry. Drive around the country and, despite some regional variations, barbecue restaurants and steakhouses feel like franchises. The food they churn out is delicious, but there is a boring sameness. For most of them barbecue remains traditional, tied to the past, tied to the South, and although the cooking equipment is modern, the menu has changed little. Barbecue has not evolved. And for you, this may be just fine, but for me? I crave variety. When I travel, the people I hook up with all ask me what I want to eat and my answer is "anything but barbecue." Been there done that, got stains on all my shirts.
Judge a barbecue competition and the entries all look and taste pretty similar. Yes, most of them taste fantastic, but the taste profile is pretty compact and the scores reflect it. On the popular 1 through 9 scoring system most entries score 7, 8, or 9. Most of the cooks use practically the same techniques, spices, and sauces. The flavor profiles vary little. Gawd help you if you entered ribs smoked with dried herbs and finished with a hoisin-based sauce sprinkled with orange zest. The traditionalists would whine "this is not barbecue."
This misguided concept of authenticity is a plague. Example: Pesto is a classic Genovese paste usually served on pasta. It is traditionally made of fresh basil leaves, olive oil, garlic, pine nuts, Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese, and salt. But I like to add a splash of lemon juice to brighten it. It really lifts the dish. But boy do I get hate mail for my recipe with this transgression! Heck, there is even a raging debate over what is authentic country music.
Traditionalists need to wake up and look around. Traditions evolve. The times they are a changin’ and creativity and innovation are the driving forces behind almost everything.
This insufferable devotion to authenticity has slid into the "cultural appropriation" debate. The one that accuses me of cultural envy if I sing hiphop because I’m not black, or wear cowboy boots in Chicago, or cook stir fry in a non-stick pan. Are tomatoes really traditional in Italian cuisine? Tomatoes came from Mexico, right?
The odd thing is, if a pianist plays an up-tempo version of Somewhere Over the Rainbow, nobody will come running down the aisle screaming that she has broken the law. Food snobs are plentiful and damnable.
The thing is there is no such thing as authentic. Pick any dish from a restaurant menu in Beijing and ask 50 people around town how they cook it and you’ll get 50 recipes. I can assure you, barbecue served today in Kansas City tastes nothing like the father of KC barbecue, Henry Perry, cooked it in 1908.
"Authenticity? When I’m in Italy I want to taste real Italian food. But I’m in America, a melting pot of culture, so I think there is nothing wrong with melting some cuisines together." Wolfgang Puck
Creativity, innovation, and originality is what makes a chef a culinary artist. Creativity makes food better.
That sort of innovation turns me on when I am cooking and when I am eating. There are a handful, only a handful, but a growing handful, of pitmasters who have dared to break out of the mold. One is Bill Durney of Hometown Bar-B-Que in Redhook, NY. There is always something off the hook marvelous on the menu. How about some Jerk Baby Back Ribs garnished with crispy fried garlic and shallot slices, peanuts, and a hoisin based sauce? Or an incredibly juicy Oaxacan-Style Chicken Tacos, marinated and air chilled for five days, grilled over wood to 145°F, then marinated again, then grilled again, served with a salsa verde, and pickled onions? Just listen to how he does his Vietnamese Wings: Whole wings are smoked then fried, sauced and then the sauce is caramelized on the grill, and finally, garnished with toasted sesame seeds, cilantro, and sliced scallions. Not enough for you? Try the Fried Korean Ribs, Lamb Belly Banh Mi, and Pastrami Bacon. He says "I don’t do traditional regional barbecue styles. I do New York style barbecue. International." The traditionalists whine "this is not barbecue."
Then there is Heirloom Market BBQ in Atlanta. Cody Taylor is a good ole boy from Knoxville and East Texas and his wife Jiyeon Lee is from Korea. They met in culinary school. Talk about fusion: They inject brisket with miso! They glaze ribs with gochujang chile paste! There’s kimchi slaw for the spicy pulled pork! They smoke tofu!
In Houston, Don and Theo Nguyen say they draw from their Vietnamese roots, from Aaron Franklin’s book "Franklin Barbecue, A Meat Smoking Manifesto", from David Chang, and from AmazingRibs.com for inspiration for their Khoi Barbecue pop-ups. Khoi is Vietnamese for "smoke". Their menu changes often but features things like brisket pho (a rich noodle soup), Brisket bún bò Huế (another noodle soup redolent with lemongrass), beef rib ramen, beef rib panang curry, smoked chicken and rice with yuzukoshÅ (a chili paste with yuzu, a citrus), and a barbecue sauce with fish sauce hiding within. In an interview with Daniel Vaughn of Texas Monthly magazine, Don was asked why he bothered selling brisket, ribs, and sausage by the pound like so many other Texas BBQ joints when the Vietnamese specialties were enough to draw the crowds. "If you want to riff and play jazz and play blues, you gotta learn the basics," Don explained. In other words, to be an artist you must first master the craft.
Jimmy Bannos of "The Purple Pig" in Chicago is producing flavors and combinations of novel ingredients woven together by flame and smoke to raves by mainstream restaurant critics if not the barbecue puristas. A typical menu might contain lamb ribs cooked sous vide and then smoked and then grilled with a Middle Easter spice blend. And grilled broccoli with an anchovy vinaigrette with roasted garlic and toasted breadcrumbs (so good we have a similar recipe on page ???).
In California "BBQ Queen" Winnie Yee-Lakhani’s puts her char siu (Chinese barbecue) and brisket into puffy steamed bao buns and makes sausages spiked with galangal and lemongrass. And the authenticity sticklers whine "this is not barbecue."
Of course all this is barbecue. Durney, Taylor, Lee, the Nguyen boys, Bannos, Yee-Lakhani, Brigit, and I are just pushing it in a new direction. To us, cooking is like jazz. You hear a lick and you take off with it.
I hate to tell you this, but in recent years the barbecue world has grown a substantial population of snobs who are as insufferable as wine snobs. I do not make the comparison lightly. I spent 18 years in the wine world, many of them as the syndicated wine critic for the Chicago Tribune, Washington Post, AOL in its heyday, and as an lecturer at Cornell University. Most wine lovers are down to earth, but there are plenty who will fire both barrels at you if you serve your reds too cold, too warm, too young, without sufficient breathing time, or from a screwcap bottle. Me? Serve me anything and I will enjoy it with a smile. The difference between a wino and a connoisseur? $20 a bottle.
Likewise, barbecue snobs oppress their neighbors when they are invited over for a barbecue and it turns out to be hamburgers and hot dogs, not brisket. "This is not barbecue" they whine. Then there are the charcoal snobs who put down people cooking on gas grills with "you might as well be cooking indoors." I’ve got news for you, the vast majority of modern ribjoints use gas for heat and wood for flavor, and it is pretty hard to find a great steakhouse that isn’t using a gas grill or broiler.
"Unless you invented fire you didn’t invent barbecue and you don’t own it." Mike Mills, BBQ Hall of Famer
Let’s take a deep breath and shred a few of their shibboleths and set ourselves free, because the recipes herein are barbecue freedom on a plate.
The snobs love to say there is a big difference between barbecue and grilling. When asked they usually explain that grilling is high temp cooking. But what is high temp? Anything over 300°F? So 299°F is barbecue and 301°F is grilling? I dare you to tell BBQ Hall of Famer Myron Mixon and the scores of other champions who cook their briskets at 325°F or higher that it isn’t barbecue. Instead of talking about the differences between "grilling" and "barbecue", they should be talking about the differences between "indirect convection heat cooking" and "direct radiant energy cooking." Kinda boring but far more accurate. Keep reading and we will get there.
I’ll tell you what’s authentic: Digging a hole in the ground, filling it with logs, burning them down to embers, covering the hole with a grid of green saplings, and throwing a whole animal on them. Definitely not the steel tubes that the traditionalists cook on. I am sure that when the first steel pits were introduced knuckle draggers whined "that’s not barbecue."
They say true barbecue is an American invention. So Chinese restaurant barbecue isn’t real barbecue because it is rarely smoked? Hello! They’ve been doing this in China with and without smoke long before humans set forth in North America. And at the time of this writing, the most avid BBQ fanatics are the ones who enter competitions, and at the time of this writing, the hot technique for chicken is to poach or braise thighs in aluminum pans with margarine and barbecue sauce, and when it comes to pork ribs, pork butt, and beef brisket, they wrap them all in aluminum foil after a few hours of smoking, braising them for much of their cook. These creative techniques create wonderful food, but are clearly not traditional barbecue.
"Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep." Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert
They think barbecue was invented in the US. But Homo erectus was probably the first of our ancestors to discover cooking in Africa, and for sure she didn’t use Weber smokers. Chef David Chang of Momofuku and many other superb restaurants said on his Netflix series "Ugly Delicious" that "It’s not that I hate authenticity, it’s that I hate that people want this singular thing that is authentic." Amen brother!
Finally, I ask you, what is more authentic than expressing yourself and your creativity?
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