BBQ Jew

The North Carolina tourism folks really need to get their sh*t pork together.  First, South Carolina launched a statewide barbecue campaign with accompany billboards, highway maps distributed at visitor’s centers, and a slick website. As if that wasn’t bad enough, now comes word that Alabama–yes, the football state–has a NCAA basketball tournament-inspired BBQ Bracket.

Alabama beating NC to the punch on a basketball tie-in for barbecue?  South Carolina doing more for their highways than NC?  Say it ain’t so.

With all due respect to the people of Alabama–who put white sauce on their barbecue and may well bathe in it too–and to the hash-eaters of South Carolina, this shouldn’t be happening.  North Carolina should be leading the way in barbecue tourism, not lagging far behind.  In the immortal words of Walter Sobchak’s best friend, The Dude, “This aggression will not stand, man.”  Or maybe it will.  At this rate Oregon will be promoting barbecue before North Carolina does.

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I recently came across a simply great article about Sam Jones, Rodney Scott, cooking pig, friendship, the SFA, tradition, the American South, and a whole lot more.  It’s called, “The Southern Foodways Alliance Wants to Complicate Your Meal.”  Check it out at: http://bittersoutherner.com/southern-foodways-alliance-part-2#.UuBzZtIo6t9

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Tune in to WUNC-TV tonight at 9:30 p.m. to see an episode of North Carolina Now & Then (a special series celebrating NC Now’s 20th year on air, if I understand correctly) that includes Bob Garner’s first barbecue feature from 1994.  In the episode, Bob Garner visits Lexington, NC to talk about their barbecue traditions.  Should be fun.

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I was searching for a feel good barbecue story to share in honor of the holiday when this one popped into my inbox. Divine intervention?  Perhaps.  Either way, it’s a nice story about Inspire Bar-B-Que in Washington, D.C., so check the video out.

Oh, and Inspire appears to be a wood-burning joint, which qualifies as a Christmas miracle in and of itself.  Learn more about the restaurant and its philosophy at http://inspirebbq.com/about.html

Merry Christmas.

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I believe the children are the future, teach them well and… they will cook a pig?  That seems to be the plan in Thomasville, where students at New Hope Christian Academy have opened their own business called Butch Cassidy Barbecue (motto: “Barbecue worth stealing”).

Read more about the high school sponsored endeavor at http://www.the-dispatch.com/article/20131104/NEWS/311049998 or visit the Butch Cassidy Barbecue website.  Oh, and try not to worry that these kids are cooking with propane, as evidenced in the picture in the Dispatch article.  Hopefully they’ll learn right from wrong by the time they get to college.

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Here’s a neat new video by Bob Garner and The Pit restaurant: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=80m1Od3Gvco.  (You can see the Spanish language version here, if you’d like to replace Bob’s narration with that of a Spanish speaking woman.) The four minute long video gives all the background on NC barbecue that anyone really needs, and will surely make you salivate while you watch.

In addition, there’s a companion video about barbecue sauce, with an emphasis on NC and SC.  This is Bob’s “grad school seminar” companion to his above “NC BBQ 101 lecture”.  It’s an excellent account of BBQ sauce’s variations and history, well worth the nearly 8 minutes.

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Surely everyone agrees that there is no better sandwich in North Carolina than a barbecue sandwich. Wait, what?  Not everyone agrees?  Well, I guess not…

We Tarheels can at least take solace, as we often do on a number of subjects, that we are not from South Carolina, where apparently the best sandwich is a tuna melt.

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Here’s a nice article about a new book–which I’m midway through reading at present–by my BBQ comrade-in-arms Lake High, Jr.  Not only does Lake have one of the best names I’ve ever encountered, but he is a nice guy and very knowledgeable about barbecue in SC and beyond based on my email correspondence with him.

In A History of South Carolina Barbeque(available at your local Amazon.com), Lake makes a strong case for South Carolina as the birthplace of barbecue, though I’d still argue that us Tar Heels perfected the art and have better maintained it over the last few hundred years!  But us fellow Carolinians should probably put our sniping aside and focus on real foes like gas cookers, chains that rhyme with Mickey’s Barbecue Shit, and other such things.  Plus, if the Texans hear us feuding with our neighbors to the South, they might well invade.

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