Fire starters: saucy or dry, sweet or spicy, global barbecue has ignited menus as a high-impact starter

Prepared Foods, Jan, 2003 by Alice Van Housen

There was a time when barbecue was strictly a summer affair, served at casual (even seedy) barbecue shacks, where the usual battery of red-sauced meats were slung into plastic baskets with disposable knives and forks, enough paper napkins to mop up fingers, and just enough sliced white bread to sop up the sauce.

This stereotype is being radically revised by today's chefs, who are creating a new role for barbecue by adapting a global perspective and menuing barbecue items as starters. They're serving not only American favorites, but Jamaican jerk, satay with peanut sauce, Asian barbecue and Latin American sausages. And they're putting barbecue items on the menus year-round.

Many are using creative barbecue starters to whet appetites and encourage trial, while others see starters as a way to have some fun with traditions. "With starters, you can use an application that someone might not try as an entree," observes Chris Ward, executive chef-partner of the Dallas-based Restaurant Life Group. And small-portion premieres of familiar classics such as baby-back ribs or pulled pork--or more unusual, flambeed chorizo-offer patrons a chance to sample more than one tasty treatment in a sitting.

Steven Raichlen, author of "The Barbecue! Bible," notes that one manifestation of barbecue's exploding popularity is "high-falutin' chefs reinterpreting down-market barbecue foods."

At Home Anywhere

Perhaps as a response to the boom in appreciation for regional American cooking, traditional barbecue is showing up year-round and far afield from its origins. Danny Meyer (co-owner of Union Square Cafe and Gramercy Tavern, among others) recently opened Blue Smoke in New York, offering Manhattanites a variety of smoked meats in varying regional styles.

In Beverly Hills, former Tampa Bay wide receiver Keyshawn Johnson's contemporary Southern restaurant, Reign, serves a down-home appetizer of charcoal-smoked Old School Kansas City-style barbecue baby back ribs, using a family-secret tomato-based sauce with molasses and beer.

"Barbecue taps into a patriotic pride, as well as a deep appetite for things that are enduring and real," Meyer says.

Indeed, true regional barbecue is uniquely American, with roots in the festivals and social rituals of the Old South. The Southern "barbecue belt" shares the tradition of slow-cooking the meat, with variations on smoking, pits or spits, and usually one of the regional (and micro-regional) sauce and/or rub styles--the relative merits of which are hotly debated.

Practical Advantages

Romanticism aside, barbecue offers the practical benefits of using lower-cost cuts and holding well for catering. And, notes chef-owner Ben Barker of Magnolia Grill, Durham, N.C., "While barbecue is not easy to do, once you get the systems down, you can replicate them fairly consistently from day to day, so it makes good sense from an operational standpoint."

Barker (license plate: PIGDADDY) "plays with pork a lot." One of his popular permutations, a surf-and-turf starter he calls "a generous dosage of Dixie on one plate," consists of three grilled Carolina white shrimp atop pulled pork barbecue, plated with three smoked baby-back ribs, creamy slaw, corn relish remoulade, corn sticks made with bacon, and Vidalia onion mustard. Barker's use of cole slaw and cornmeal echoes the time-honored slaw-and-hush-puppies accompaniments ($10.50).

Barker uses a drum smoker with a separate firebox, in which he can do hot or cold smoking (he typically slow-smokes at 175[degrees] F to 200[degrees] F. His baby backs are dry-rubbed, smoked for two hours, and slow-cooked overnight for eight hours at 200[degrees] F on a rack in the oven "so the fat falls away." Prior to plating, he brushes them with a sourwood-honey, cider vinegar and red pepper flake glaze and finishes them on the grill.

Atlanta-based Chef David Berry takes another approach to those rustic roots. Berry likes the fat-to-meat ratio and bone-in flavor of pork shoulder. He hickory-smokes for 12 hours at 250[degrees] F, then pulls the fat out before shredding the meat, which exhibits a "velvety, silky texture." He uses North Carolina-style, vinegar-based barbecue sauce, puts the pork on a cornmeal pancake, adds a dollop of slaw, and drizzles with a tangy, tomato-based sauce containing molasses and brown sugar.

Among the "Southern comfort food" at Chicago's Creole, the pan-smoked pulled pork is doused with a vinegar-based cola BBQ sauce. Chef Bruce Evans suggests this as a saucy starter served on buttermilk biscuits ($4.95).

James Beard award-winners Debbie Gold and Michael Smith take the traditional Memphis dry-rub to new heights with an intriguing, aromatic spice-rubbed pork brochette. At 40 Sardines in Overland Park, Kan., they plate the brochettes with chanterelles, red onion grits and a red wine glaze.

World View

Exploring mare global terrain, popular pork starters include Jamaican jerk, satay with peanut sauce, and grilled sausages with anions and bell peppers. More esoteric preparations might include an Asian variation, pan-smoked over high or low heat with soaked tea leaves or moistened wood chips.