nathanm

I am making a map of the best / most iconic barbeque towns in the Southeast. I can't list every town with a BBQ pit, but there are some that are much more famous than others, and which have a style that typifies their region. Here is my initial list - please tell me what I am missing. Usually there is a great BBQ place associated with each town, knowing that would be helpful too. I am particularly interested in places that are typical of the region that they are in. Alabama ------- Decatur Hoover Georgia ------- Atlanta Illinois -------- Murphysboro Kentucky -------- Lexington Owensboro North Carolina -------------- Ayden Chapel Hill Goldsboro Lexington Raleigh South Carolina --------------- Holly Hill West Columbia Tennessee --------- Henderson Lexington Lynchberg Memphis Nashville Parsons Texas (I know Texas has its own forum - I will post there too) ----- Dallas Lexington Llano Lockhart Lulling Taylor One amusing thing is that towns named "Lexington" seem to have an advantage. There must be some great barbeque in Arkansas, Virgina, Mississippi and other states where I don't any any names yet. Looking forward to comments and additions!

As mentioned above, liquid smoke is distilled from real smoke. It is analogous to vanilla extract, or a similar flavor extract. Some brands add vinegar, molasses and similar things, but many brands (including Wright's) is just the smoke extract. In sauces or similar contexts this undoubtedly works pretty well - it is a flavor extract so there is no reason it wouldn't work in a similar fashion to others. Some of the brands seem to be a bit harsher flavor than others in this context, but I am sure one could play with the amount to add and come up with something. My interest is in trying to use it for meat smoking. As mentioned above there appear to be a couple ways people do it, but my experiments so far have not been successful.

I have always regarded liquid smoke as the work of the devil, and in no way a substitute for real smoking of meat or barbeque. At most it is a way to add a bit of smoke to a sauce or other non-meat application. But recently I have seen some scientific papers where they argue that in blind taste tests some people actually prefer it to the real thing. That probably depends crucially on the real smoked meat they compared to. However, it made me think that maybe - just maybe - I was too quick to write it off liquid smoke (LS). Also, there is a new book out called Cheater BBQ that strongly advocates it. There are four basic ways to use liquid smoke: 1. In the marinade, or brine, left to soak into the meat prior to cooking. 2. In the cooking liquid. The Cheater book advocates putting the LS directly into a crock pot /slow cooker with cubed pork butt or spare ribs, which are then slow cooked for 6-8 hours before being put in a hot oven to make a nice crust. 3. Applied right at the end to the meat (and/or in a glaze) then heated in hot oven or under broiler to brown the surface. 4. Commercial meat packers uses spray it into a smoker, allowing it to vaporize. You could likely simulate this in one of those stovetop smokers. The temperature would be lower for the LS. I tried an experiment with #2 today, trying both Stubb's Hickory and Wright's (also hicory). The flavor was OK, but very weak. There was a hint of smoke flavor, but only that. I also tried approach #3 and it had an objectionable harsh aftertaste, particularly from the Wrights. Besides the supermarket brands there are commercial suppliers like Red Arrow. Anyway, I am interested in whether anybody else has some positive LS experience they want to share. Given the reputation of LS among real BBQ lovers negative experience is almost too easy, so it isn't as valuable

Both prerended fat, and fat from confit. The key point here is that cooking in the fat does not matter. Just put the same fat on at the end. Note that duck legs and thighs still have some fat in them, so any way that you cook them some of that fat will render out and be on the meat. So even if you use a neutral oil to cook confit it will still have some duck fat taste/smell.

I would be shocked if there was any difference using MRI, but I have not checked. The operative point for cooking is that we could not taste any difference. For fat we used either neutral oil (canola or similar) or rendered fat (pork or duck). It doesn't really matter as long as you use the same fat for the test. Obviously, one can taste duck fat versus neutral oil, so if you compared traditional confit to meat annointed with neutral oil you can tell a difference. But confit in oil versus annointed with oil has no difference in taste, and ditto for rendered fat. Fat does oxidize, and that change can be tasted in at least some cases, so there probably is a slight taste difference to oil that has been heated in the open air at 70C for 8 hours, versus one that was brought to temperature quickly. At least some of the "aging" that happens with confit stored after cooking is fat rancidity. It's also one of the reasons that aged beef tastes different - up to a point a little rancidity is helpful. The main point of our work is that there is nothing special about cooking immersed in oil. Sous vide, or low temperature steaming (in CVAP or combi-oven) is basically identical in terms of what happens to the meat.

Just to be sure, cook one without bacon fat, then annoint with liquid bacon fat for a minute or two, then try to wash it away and use that as a control. Since it takes soap to wash bacon fat smell off my fingers, I assume that even rinsing it hot water may not be enough.... but the control will tell you.

Wouldn't that run the risk of melting the bag? I imagine most vacuum sealer bags aren't intended to go up to temperatures high enough to kill botulism spores. What about going the nitrite route? You can get SV bags that will take pressure cooking - they are called "retort pouches". However, there is another factor - pressure cooking will very change the texture and flavor, much more than aging will. You can experiment with this and see how difference the taste is. If you want to pressure cook sous vide, conventional Ball / Mason canning jars work very well. By pressure cooking you are basically canning the duck confit. I am skeptical that SV sealed confit will "age" - my own experience is that it stays the same. Of course part of the point of SV sealing is to prevent oxidiation, so that is quite plausible. I am also quite skeptical about aging on pressure cooked confit because regardless of whether it is in a retort pouch or a mason jar, it will be sealed, and so very little aging is likely to occur. Nitrate cure will have a pretty dramatic effect on taste - if you want ham tasting duck confit, then go right ahead, but this is NOT going to taste like non-nitrate duck confit. Aging in the sense of fat oxidation is another story - that will certainly happen to some degree. Part of the issue with confit was to use the congealed fat to prevent oxidation of the meat itself.

We didn't try this, but I expect that what would happen is that fat soluable flavors might transfer from the cooking fat to the fat in the meat. But probably not very much. So if you cook duck legs in bacon fat, there will be some flavor transfer. However, if you steam duck legs and then toss them in bacon fat, you'll get some flavor that way too. If the taste is strong enough (which bacon usually is) I think this they would taste pretty similar.

The key issue with this whole topic is that it is about an experimental result, rather than opinion. It seems irresistable for people to theorize about it. One chef told me "I don't agree with this" so I said "why, have you tried it?". He was puzzled - he thought that it was something you should take as an article of faith, or that his training and experinence should dictate the answer even though he had NOT tried it. A lot of the discussion about SV confit versus traditional has this character - people want to rally around the traditional method, as an article of faith or ideology. The fact is that unless you do a careful, blind taste test under controlled circumstances it is very easy to have an opinion that has no basis in fact. The issue with traditional vs SV is complicated by the fact that the traditional often has poor temperature control. When we do traditional SV for comparisons we control the temp and time to make it the same. But if you don't do this and use whatever temp your oven produces, it may be different for that reason. It is possible that some confit has some degree of rancidity/aging, but frankly virturally no confit that is served in a restaurant is aged for very long. Our experiments show pretty clearly that none of us (including trained chefs and serious eaters) could tell "true" confit from SV, or from non-confit (low temp steamed, SV without oil) when done under controlled conditions. This includes having time and temp be the same, and brushing the non-confit with oil/fat because you can tell that. So if you don't "agree" fine, it's your perogative to believe what you want to believe. However, I urge you to try the experiment.

The time-temperature trade offs are many. In general to get similar results to traditional confit you should do 70C to 80C for 8-12 hours. Note that there is a lot of range there, but there is a large range in what people is "correct" so ultimately it is up to you. The jelly separates out in the bag, just as in the jar.

The NYT piece only covered this briefly. Here is a better discussion of the issue. Most chefs believe that cooking meat at moderately low temperature (typically 160-180F)submerged in fat - called confit - produces a special flavor and texture profile to the meat. The classic dish is duck leg confit, which was traditionally used to store duck legs - the legs would be salted, then cooked in fat, and after cooking the fat allowed to congeal around the meat which would tend to isolate the meat from air and help it keep longer. Sous vide confit puts some fat in the bag with the meat, and that seems to work very well. I experimented a bit with that (see the sous vide thread, and a thread on duck confit). Sous vide confit is a lot less messy than a big pot of fat, and requires less fat - like a teaspoon full per bag rathre than a pot full. But I wondered if there was really anything to this. I didn't believe that the interior of the meat could actually be affected by being cooked submerged in fat. Fat molecules are way too large to penetrate into the meat. Some people say all sorts of weird things about how confit might work, like the fat forces juices to stay in the meat, but those are like stories of searing meat to "lock in the juices" which have been shown to be wrong. So, we cooked both duck legs, and pork shoulder several ways. Traditional confit style, sous vide confit (with fat in bag), sous vide (without fat in bag), and low temperature steaming (in combi-oven or CVAP, at typical confit temperatures). Cooking times and temperatures were the same between all of the tests. It is easy to see/taste if there is some oil/fat on the meat so after cooking we added some oil or fat to the meat that wasn't cooked confit style. We had one person handle the cooking and plating, and then we did careful taste tests. None of us (trained chefs and sophisticated eaters) could tell which sample was which better than random. Our conclusion is that there is no human perceptable difference in cooking via confit. Yes, this flies in the face of tradition, but LOTS of traditional "knowledge" turns out to be wrong when examined in detail. Some people will have a hard time accepting this. My answer is simple - TRY IT. If have not tried it in a controlled, disciplined and fair way, then there isn't much point in arguing about it, because this is not a matter of opinion or faith - it is a simple experiment.

The book project is coming along very well. Yes, it is going to be expensive. Current plan is ~1500 pages, bound into 3 volumes in a boxed set. We looked at a physical prototype of the book yesterday (with blank pages)- it weighs about 30 lbs. One thing I found interesting is that they say that there will be between 1 and 2 lbs of ink! We have not set pricing yet, but it will likely be in the $300 range. Heston's Big Fat Duck coobook came out at $250, and the el bulli books are $350. We have about 3X the number of pages as el bulli books, and almost that multiple for Heston's book. So if we had the same price per page it would $1000+. The Joan Roca sous vide book is $200 for a much smaller number of pages - indeed our sous vide chapter is longer than his book. We hope to eventually produce a cost reduced version. Heston has done that with a much cheaper $75 verison of his book, but it did not come out until long after the main version. I know there will be people who will be upset about the price. I'm interested in getting feedback on this. I think that a lot of the issue is that cookbooks are typically priced very cheaply. It is a bit odd that to eat Thomas Keller's food you pay $250 per person at Per Se or French Laundry - the book is about the same as the tip on one meal. We have taken a no-compromise approach to making the book with both thousands of person-hours of effort by a large team. We also have no-compromise in terms of photographs - we have color photos on every page. That is really expensive to produce, and expensive to print. Cookbooks published in the US cut corners everywhere - there are very few photos and the like. Most European cookbooks do too, but to a lesser extent, and books like Big Fat Duck cookbook, or el bulli cookbooks have much higher production values. However these books tend not to have as much in the way of step-by-step directions.

This is a reply to the various confit posts above, mentioning the NYT article.... We tried many experiments on whether there was anything unique about confit. We tried both sous vide and low temperature steaming, and we tried both traditional (i.e. open container) confit and sous vide confit. The bottom line is that none of us (including a kitchen full of professional chefs) could tell better than random which meat was cooked "confit" and which was cooked in other ways. We could differences between time and temperature, but not which ones were cooked immersed in oil. Of course the times and temperatures we kept the same. Of course we could see, feel and taste oil on the surface, so the non-confit cooked samples had oil put on the first. We did this both for duck fat and for neutral oils. You can tell duck fat from a neutral oil, of course. But we couldn't tell confit cooked in duck fat versus steamed/sous vide without oil and then annointed with duck fat. Similar results for confit cooked in neutral oil. This all makes perfect sense. The fat molecules are too big to penetrate the meat, so cooking in fat couldn't be doing all that much. We thought that maybe cooking without oxygen (when submerged in oil) might matter, but it doesn't. We couldn't tell low-temperature steamed (combi-oven)from sous vide. It is very amusing to me how shocked and in some cases upset people get when this is revealed. Most chefs believe strongly that there is something special that occurs during confit cooking process. There isn't.

There is no hard and fast rule for how much to reduce spices or herbs in the bag. SV requires less than conventional beacuse it is sealed and the volatile flavor compounds don't go into the air. The things that make your kitchen smell good are flavors that evaporated out of the pan and are now in the air. It does make the kitchen smell great but you lose the flavor in the food which is generally more important than kitchen ambience.

In case anybody is interested, I will be speaking at the Starchefs 2009 International Chef's Congress on Sunday, September 20 in New York City. Information can be found here. My talk will be an overview of my upcoming cookbook (due to come out about a year from now). Chris Young and several chefs who are working with me on the book will be presenting with me and we'll do some cooking demos, including sous vide. Note that the title for my talk given on the Starchefs web site is NOT correct - the correct title is "Techniques of Modernist Cuisine". In addition to my talk there are two other presentations specifically on sous vide - one by Bruno Goussault, who is credited by many as being one of the founding fathers of sous vide. Daniel Humm of the restaurant Eleven Madison Park is also giving a sous vide presentation and demo. I expect that sous vide may appear in other The congress runs from September 20 - 22. There are many other interesting chefs speaking and giving demos. Chef Sean Brock who has posted to this thread is giving two presentations according to the schedule. Maybe I'll get to meet him in person. Grant Achatz, Juan Arzak, Jose Andres, David Bouley, Daniel Boulud, Pierre Gagnaire and many other famous chefs will also be presenting. I think that you have to be a "foodservice industry professional" to attend, and there is a fee depending on whether you are an "industry" person, or work in a restauant. I am not really involved with Starchefs, so I am not sure exactly what they mean by "professional" - I'm just glad they invited me to give the talk.

No, that is not correct for many reasons. Beef cooked to a the same internal temperature - say 130F/55C should be more or less the same chemically, but it will NOT look the same with different cooking methods. Most people assess "doneness" by color or visual appearance. Cleary that is your goal in asking for photos. But that depends crucially on several things, most important of which is access to oxygen. Sous cooked meat can be much less red, until you let it sit in the air where it becomes redder. The length of cooking time can also affect redness. Indeed as mentioned in other posts on this thread, long slow cooking can under some special circumstances fix the meat color to bright red even at very high temperatures (160F or above). Conversely, if cooked without oxygen you can have fairly colorless meat at quite low temperature - especially intially when first taken out of the bag and cut. The cut and grade of meat can affect redness too - look at heavily marbled Japanese wagyu ("Kobe") beef - it looks light pink even when raw! In fact, the sous vide cooked steak cooked for several hours at 130F/55C will look different if you cut it immediately after taking it out of the bag, or cut it and let it sit in the air for a few minutes. It will not in general look identical to a quick grilled steak. Similar yes, after it has a chance to get oxygen on it, but it is incorrect to expect it to look the same. Another factor is that most conventionally cooked meat has a strong temperature gradient - if the center is at 130F/55C, then that is often only a thin strip exactly at that temperature. As you move away from the center the temperature changes - getting quite high (and the meat gray) near the edges. So you can't expect sous vide that is perfectly uniform to look the same unless you isolate a small portion. Photos over the internet are nice to look at, but don't expect them to accurately convey doneness. You won't be able to tell the difference between different levels of doneness. To really get good color reproduction you need a calibrated monitor, and color management software, and the right viewing conditions in the room. Web browsers and JPEG files are typically NOT color corrected this way. You also need to take the photo with proper white balace and camera profiling. For my cookbook we are going to try to print some meat color tables that are accurately printed, but this is a real challenge. Don't expect that eGullet photos show you accurate color. In fact, look at this thread or other threads - a very common remark people make about their own photos is that they don't look the way the food did on the plate. That's because of all of the variations in camera, JPEG processing, monitors and color management. The photos on the Certified Angus beef site show all of these effects. The likihood that you could match color closely enough to tell the difference between say "very rare" and "rare" is slim to none unless you had calibrated files, calibrated monitors, color management software and the whole works. The photos on the certified angus site are almost after the meat has had a chance to get oxygen for a while while the photographer set up the lights. This would make them significantly redder than they would be immediately upon cutting. But, even with all those limitations, the photos look wrong to me. "very rare" to me means that there is some translucency characteristic of partially raw meat. This starts to fade with cooking, then goes away completely leaving a red, but opaque meat surface. This is always a bit hard to see in photos because it depends on a subtle optical quality of the meat, not just the color. However, I don't see that in their "very rare" which to me means that it is NOT "very rare". Or, if want to call what they say is "very rare" then you need to define a "very very rare" which seems like a bit of a waste to me. That is consistent with the fact the Certified Angus people are about 10F/5C too hot on most of their grades. For me "very rare" would be more like 120F than 130F. But anyway, it seems that the Certified Angus people have a very different idea of beef doneness than I do, or for example than the chefs at the culinary school I attended in France. Which is fine - this is all about taste, so there is no absolute right or wrong.

The ranges for rare, medium rare etc are all over the map. Many sources disagree strongly about this. The Wikipedia entries listed above are more or less consistent with my own taste. For beef, I would say that 130F/55C is medium rare. Rare is 120F-125F (48-52C).

Sodium nitrate surely works, but it gives a ham-like taste to meat, not just color change. Heating to 115F for a while does promote some enzyme action, and acts to tenderize meat. I have tried this for tenderness and it works, but I have not noticed a color retention difference.

I agree with this, but there is some variation here. Some older PID controllers, water baths, or immersion circulators have no auto-tune function. This is true of many of the used baths on eBay. Many circulators with a built-in tank for the bath have no autotune function because the bath size can't change. They still ought to have auto-tune becase different fluids will lose heat differently, but many don't. There are also "continuous autotuning" or "adaptive autotuning" or just "adaptive" controllers that are constantly in autotune mode - you never need to tell it to autotune, it figures it out for itself. Some controllers boast fuzzy logic or neural network controllers - these are common variations on adaptive control. Adaptive control is best because it simply adapts to the situation at hand no matter what. However this is only very new and high end PID controllers and/or high end water baths or immersion circulators that have this feature. None of the systems "knows" how much water is there, because that isn't relevant. What is relevant is how much heat from the heating coil does it take to change the temperture in the bath. During autotuning (or during adaptive autotuning) the controller tries to calibrate how much heat it takes to raise the temperture. The relationship between heat in and temperature depends on many factors - temperature of the bath, temperature of the room, degree of insulation, size of the water, initial tempertaure, surface area, is the bath is covered with a lid (changes evaporation), what liquid is in the bath (water evaporates, oil does not), how much cold food is in the bath and so forth. Any of those factors can effect the heating performance, and thus the PID parameters. However, PID controllers without an autotune can still do a pretty good job, so don't despair if your bath doesn't have this feature.

The heat loss from the bath depends on the factors cited above. If the heat loss is too large then the bath won't perform as well. Most water baths are limited to 1800 watts because they use a standard 20 amp electric circuit. This is much less powerful than an electric stove. If you have a high heat loss rate, or too large a bath of water, it won't be able to keep up. In practice, precision is rarely a problem. Most waterbaths, including Polyscience, will be quite accurate at normal sous vide cooking temperatures. It is important to cover the bath (with a hard cover, or with saran wrap) to stop evaporation - that can cause both large heat loss, and also cause problems if you run out of water. Temperature precision and accuracy are a much bigger problem with combi-ovens, which are nowhere near as accurate or precise as a waterbath. They are still OK for most sous vide cooking but you must watch the calibration carefully.

Both are important. Stability is important because many temperature controlled devices have large swings - for example Combi-Ovens typically have swings of several degrees C. This makes it impossible to hold to a constant temperature. When a vendor quotes stability they usually mean for one sensor - typically the water inlet for the circulation pump. A second kind of stability is that within the tank there can be variation in temperature. In a stirred, pumped or circulating bath this variation is minimized, but it is never zero. In an unstirred bath it can be quite large, hence reasons to stir (including with an aquarium air pump in an improvised set up). Accuracy is also important of course. However, stability is a property of the machine that you can't really change (without changing the PID controller and/or the heating element). Meanwhile every water bath lets you calibrate the sensor if it is off. Of course you want both accuracy and stability for precise work. With swings of +-5C, it hardly matters what the accuracy is. With 0.1C swings, accuracy becomes much more important.

Carmelization is well understood- it is the oxidation of sugars. Different sugars oxidize at different temperatures. All you need is sugar and heat to carmelize. Since it is partial oxidation, there is always a risk of going to far to complete oxidation - i.e. burning. Maillard reaction involves a reducing sugar and an amino acid. It is related to, but somewhat different than, carmelization. In many food contexts both carmelization and Maillard reaction are going on simultaneously. Because the term "carmelized" sounds delicious, it has become popular to the point of over use in cooking discussions. This is especially true restaurant menus. Often the "carmelized" item is at least partly browned via Maillard, but you don't find "Maillardized" on many restaurant menus however. And just to be gross for a moment, the reason that most soils, compost and excrement are brown is because of Maillard reactions. Yes, you could use a water bath to control either carmelization or Maillard reaction browning. The temperatures are above boiling point of water so you either need to use a very high pressure autoclave, or you need to work with oil. Oil will work fine in most "water" baths - in that case you are using it as a very accurate deep fat fryer. However, the bags normally used for sous vide won't work - they melt. Even high temp retort pouches melt. Precise temperature control from a "water" bath with oil is helpful in some browning tasks, but not as much as you might think. Because the temperature is above boiling point of water, you must watch it to prevent burning. It isn't a "set and forget" operation like sous vide cooking often is. The difference between saute and deep fat frying is that the latter using sufficient oil to submerge the food, while in saute it is a film that acts to aid heat transfer from the pan to the food. The food is typically only heated from one side at a time, while deep fat frying involves immersion.

This is always a good idea. Water is cheap enough that you really should use fresh water on a daily basis. It is possible to get away with re-using water (and I have done that myself), but why risk it for utterly trivial cost.

Alas, we kept getting ambitous, so no the book is not close to publication yet. We are working away - there is a team of 6 people working full time on the book. I don't have a firm schedule yet, but will certainly post to the thread when we do. ← Just a suggestion for indexing once you finish: It might be handy to have a main component cross reference by temperature, and another by time. It would simplify making a menu based on complimentary techniques. Stu ← Thanks for the suggestion! I'll see what we can do.... the book is large and we have a lot of recipes so a full cross index like you suggest might be unweidly, but perhaps not, I will try it...

Bob ← I think that the lactic acid process started prior to cooking. It might have continued a bit after cooking, but the lactic acid and other spoilage bacteria products then stayed in the bag and ruined your meat. Without lab tests we'll never know. I do flat iron steak all the time up to 48 hours.