Professional cooks from around the country come to Kalamazoo's Ribfest every August to battle for the best barbecue rib awards. All of them have original recipes and specific cooking methods. With so many different ideas of what makes barbecue barbecue, there’s sure to be differences of opinion.
Dallas Green, the owner of Cowboy’s Barbecue and Rib Co. in Texas, says great barbecue is all about the sauce:
“Meat is meat. Barbecue is the sauce. So you really got to have a great sauce to be able to compete. And we’ve been making the same sauce for 30 some years. And we use a very expensive ingredient, we use molasses."
Green says they use tomatoes to cut the molasses and then add a little Texas spice. While Green feels barbecue is all about his sauce, Donna Rice, who owns Desperado’s BBQ and Rib Co. in Ohio, thinks authentic barbecue is about the combination of sauce and great meat.
“First of all I think you have to start out with a good piece of meat," Rice said. "And then we have a seasoning that has no MSG, no salt, and we sprinkle that on, and then we put it in the smoker, and we take it out when it’s done and baste it with some award-winning sauce, and I think that’s what makes great barbecue."
But Rice says barbecue changes across the country. She also says great sauce can’t help make a bad piece of meat taste good and that you need both to have great barbecue. Other differences in what makes great barbecue involve cooking methods.
For brothers Abe and Matt Trevino, the owners of Bomba’s and the winners of last year’s Ribfest, smoking the meat is the way to go. They have a food truck and also barbecue for Barn Brewers Brewery in Lawton.
“Yeah there [are] some people that think their trick is just the sauce or parboiling the ribs, there [are] just different things but we smoke ours fresh," Abe Trevino said. "They’re fully smoked; they’re seasoned with our own rub and our own sauce. And I think that having that uniqueness of doing it all ourselves from start to finish it sets it apart from somebody else’s.”
But instead of smoking the meat, Moe Pritchett, the owner of Big Moe’s in Kalamazoo, grills it. He says smoking and barbecue aren’t the same thing.
“Some people like low and slow, and they call that smoking a type of barbecue, and it’s actually smoking meat and that’s not really barbecue to us," Pritchett said. "But some people mistake it for barbecue and so those are some differences in opinion. There’s nothing that says smoked meat isn’t barbecue other than my opinion. And so we do it a little different than most, we grill the sauce into the meat while it’s cooking, and we call that barbecue whether it’s chicken or pulled pork.”
Matt Trevino is the chef at Bomba’s. He says that no matter how you do it, barbecue is a passion.
“It’s really cool because it’s not something you can do quick[ly]," Matt Trevino said. "You have to watch it, you know, and you can’t keep lifting the smoker up, you have to just pay attention to what you’re doing really, what ribs you’re getting. And it is about the rub on there and the marinade.”
What do you think makes great, authentic barbecue? Tell us on our Facebook page at facebook.com/wmuk1021.
