Part science, part art, barbecue represents the pinnacle of live fire cooking: large, tough cuts of meat or whole animals transformed into sumptuous piles of the most tender and deliciously sweet-savory meat by salt, smoke, heat, and time. We admire it; we love eating it; we wish we could make it all the time.
Great barbecue—the best barbecue—requires several lifetimes’ worth of practice. Separate the science from the art, however, and you can devise methods for making incredibly good barbecue that are replicable even for people who don’t have a masters in fine barbecue arts.
That’s where we come in. We’ve cooked hundreds of pounds of meat and came up with dialed-in recipes for making masterful ’cue using any method you can think of, trusting to the sound science of brining and seasoning meats, of developing pellicles, of transforming tough collagen into silky gelatin, of the host of chemical reactions that make our foods brown and super tasty. If you own a smoker, we’ve got you, even if you’ve never smoked a day in your life. Got a sous vide setup? Ditto. If all you have is a conventional oven, we’ve got that covered, too. We’ve even got a recipe that replicates true blue long-smoked barbecue with a microwave oven.
