Showing posts with label grilling. Show all posts
Showing posts with label grilling. Show all posts

Peace, Love, & Barbecue: Recipes, Secrets, Tall Tales, and Outright Lies from the Legends of Barbecue Review

Peace, Love, and Barbecue: Recipes, Secrets, Tall Tales, and Outright Lies from the Legends of Barbecue
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Peace, Love, & Barbecue: Recipes, Secrets, Tall Tales, and Outright Lies from the Legends of Barbecue ReviewPeace, Love and Barbecue: Recipes, Secrets, Tall Tales and Outright Lies From The Legends of Barbecue
Mike Mills & Amy Mills Tunicliffe
A Book Report by Gerry Dawes (Appeared in Food Arts magazine.)
This is a book report, not a review. I wrote the June 2004 Food Arts Silver Spoon Award piece about Mike Mills, the Southern Illinois Barbecue Legend Mike Mills, who, with his Apple City Barbecue Team won the Memphis in May World Championship Barbecue Cooking Contest more times (three, four in ribs) than any team in history. Mills has long been a friend of mine and still is, despite the outright lies he told about me and a lot of other people to his daughter, Amy Mills Tunicliffe, who wrote her father's story's in the remarkable, but veracity-challenged Peace, Love and Barbecue: Recipes, Secrets, Tall Tales and Outright Lies From The Legends of Barbecue.
At least I am in good company. Bill Clinton, Calvin Trillin, Tom Viertel (producer of The Producers, Smokey Joe's Café, Driving Miss Daisy), the New York super-restaurateur Danny Meyer, Chef Michael Romano and star Vogue food writer Jeffrey Steingarten, along with most of the `cue superstars world are all in this book on down-home and championship circuit barbecue. In the foreword, Meyer, Mills's partner in New York's Blue Smoke Barbecue joint, wrote a pean to pig and to Mills. The exalted Vogue food writer, Jeffrey Steingarten, who wrote the saucy introduction calling Mills "one of the greatest barbecue cooks of all time," once wrote an article claiming that Mills's Memphis Championship Barbecue restaurants in Las Vegas are his favorites, only after Nobu.
While this indispensable guide to American barbecue could have been just that, a guide, it is much more. It is a loving (the "Love" in the title is no tall tale or outright lie) look at the Who's Who of American Barbecue as seen through the eyes of this country's greatest barbecue hero, who, like some starry-eyed youngster (Mills is in his 60s), often refers to these barbecue legends, his peers, as "awesome."
Mills takes us on visits to all the great barbecue legends of the south (and a few in the north as well), eating their barbecue,"visiting" with them, letting them tell their stories, and then trying to pry cooking and recipe "secrets" out of them, which is no easy task since they will sometimes tell him the ingredients (usually minus the "secret"), but they often won't give him the recipe quantities. (Mills plays this game himself; he told Steingarten that he would give him the recipe for Mills's celebrated 17th St. Bar & Grill `Magic Dust' Dry Rub, but then he said, "I would have to kill you.")
Besides picking pork, Mills picks the brains of such American Barbecue superstars as Don McLemore and Chris Lilly at Big Bob Gibson Bar-B-Q (Decatur, Alabama); Desiree Robinson at Cozy Corner (Memphis); Billy Bones Wall (Midland, Michigan); Vencil Mares, The Taylor Café (Taylor, Texas); Paul Kirk, The Baron of Barbecue (Kansas City, Missouri); Wayne Monk, Lexington Barbecue (Lexington, North Carolina); the legendary El Mitchell, Mitchell's Ribs, Chicken & BBQ (Wilson, North Carolina) and many others. The story about Rick Schmidt, the owner of Kreuz ("Krites," Lockhart, Texas), ceremoniously moving-along a road thronged with his loyal barbecue customers-the hot coals, which have never been allowed to got out, from the old family establishment to his new place after a family feud with his sister is alone worth the price of this paperback book.
There are "secret' barbecue recipes galore-Mama Faye's Home Style Potato Salad, 17th Street's Tangy Pit Beans, Big Bob Gibson's White Sauce, Wilber Shirley's Hush Puppies, Eades Family Banana Pudding and Strip and Go Naked Punch (don't ask!)-enough to open the world's greatest barbecue joint. However, if you did, several somebodies would have to kill you and, besides, you would be too disabled by the hernia you would get from lugging in the 100-pound sack of sugar it would take to make all these sauces, potato salad, salad dressings and iced tea, many of which call for a minimum of two cups of sugar, refined white sugar, by long-standing habit.
The last chapter is devoted to a good nuts-and-bolts barbecue tips and a terrific list of this country's greatest real barbecue joints, but he whole book is full of Mike Mills's indispensable barbecue (and life) wisdom, practical tips, recipes and, indeed, secrets like my Gerry's World's Finest Barbecue-Friendly Margaritas. It seems that one day down at Mike's 17th Street Bar & Grill in Murphysboro, Southern Illinois, he induced me to give him my Andalucian Sangria Recipes, then after we drank two pitchers of white and red sangria, he wormed the margarita recipe out of me. However, I didn't give him the "secret" twist that I put in them, otherwise I would have had to kill him.
But, on second thought, I couldn't kill him. He might have another great book like Peace, Love and Barbecue in him. And I certainly wouldn't want to deprive the world of that.
The book is awesome.
- The End -
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Seven Fires: Grilling the Argentine Way Review

Seven Fires: Grilling the Argentine Way
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Seven Fires: Grilling the Argentine Way ReviewBefore I describe this book, there is something you need to know about me. I am not your usual "grill guy". To the contrary, while I have grilled my entire adult life, it was a technique that I never took too seriously. I'm an excellent all around cook, so the grill was just another one of the tools in my arsenal.
However, my real passion is traditional, hardwood smoked barbecue - something that you really can't buy at a restaurant or make on a grill. It is a unique blend of art and science that is slowly being replaced by gas fired cookers that sort of flavor the meat with wood smoke rather than cooking the meat with it. If you have had the real thing, then you know the difference. Words alone will not describe it.
Because of this, the grill to me was only another tool based on inferior fuel sources. Gas versus charcoal? Who cares, there is nothing that special about the taste of either. They both allow you to keep your kitchen cool, be outside and get grill marks on your food. Sorry, I don't feel the magic.
This was my stance until a week or so ago when I caught an article in the New York Times about grilling with wood. The article really brought the whole problem I had with grilling into focus - grilling with gas or charcoal doesn't really add that much desirable flavor. But grilling with wood ......... that is something I could work with. In the article, they made brief mention of Francis Mallmann's new book Seven Fires - Grilling the Argentine Way. They baited me just enough to know that I had to have it because Memorial day was close at hand and offered the opportunity for some experimentation with wood grilling.
I have collected cookbooks for years, which includes a large section dedicated solely to (real) BBQ and grilling. They all pretty much read the same, some good old boy is telling you how to cook meat and make some sides to go with it. Mallmann's book breaks that mold.
First, the book is as much about culture and a passion for food as it is about cooking with wood. Secondly, it is well organized and thoughtful - giving a glimpse to the experience and mastery of the author. Lastly, it is a work of art - beautiful photographs showing not only prepared food, but of the people that enjoy it and the gorgeous land that inspires it. I'm a tough critic of food and books about it, but I can honestly say I found it inspirational. It speaks to the heart first, the stomach second. Passion is the key ingredient for exceptional food.
I read the book cover to cover my first day, used the next day to strategize my cooking setup to utilize the principles and on the third and fourth days we cooked with wood. The recipes are straightforward, have small ingredient lists and turn out just as described. Day One was Pork Tenderloin with Burnt Brown Sugar, Orange Confit and Thyme. Day Two was Chicken Chimehuin (flavored with garlic, rosemary, lemon juice and lemon confit). In a word, extraordinary.
My bottom line: buy the book and be prepared to never see grilling the same way.
If you want to read about my first wood grilling experience and see pictures of the results, visit http://cincyhounddog.blogspot.com/2009/05/hound-goes-gaucho.html
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