From time to time we offer guest blogs on Barbecuebible.com and this one comes especially close to home. It was written by my cousin, Larry Hoffman. A musician and composer, Larry goes to Austin once a year for the Eastern Kings Blues Festival, and he always checks in with “Cousin Steven” to ask where he should eat. Over the years, he’s established his barbecue bona fides, so I asked him to write a blog on his discoveries this year. If you’re interested in learning more about his music, check out his website:...
Read more →Many of you dream of turning your passion for barbecue into a business. Mark Van Blaricum from Kansas City did it. His Pita for Good food truck has become a mecca for KC grilled food lovers, and I’m personally gratified to have played my small part. Do you have a foodie success story? Share it on the Barbecue Board. –Steven It happened fast. I got Steven’s Planet Barbecue as a gift; found a lamb purveyor at my local farmer’s market; and tried the Moroccan...
Read more →Excerpted from Steven Raichlen's Beer-Can Chicken. Chances are, if you’ve visited the Pacific Northwest you’ve enjoyed one of the most distinctive American ways to grill fish: on a cedar or alder plank. The process satisfies and gratifies on quite a few levels. First, the wood imparts a unique flavor all its own—a spicy, wine-like flavor in the case of cedar; a woodier, smokier flavor in the case of alder. It also tends to absorb...
Read more →It’s tough work, as the cliche goes, but someone has to do it. Part of my job—one of the best parts—is keeping tabs on the best new barbecue and grill restaurants. 2016 has been a banner year for live-fire cooking. The Grillworks wood burner has become the new stove in restaurants from New York to California. Elsewhere, chefs have taken a giant step backwards, installing wood-burning hearths that would have been at home in colonial kitchens. Here are a dozen of my favorite new restaurants for 2016. Boston/Cambridge: The Smoke Shop It’s about time. Boston chef Andy Husbands has had a...
Read more →Smoked steak at Miller's Guild in Seattle Ah, the good old days. When legendary masters like Arthur Bryant and Sonny Bryan manned the barbecue pits. A lot of people complain that barbecue just isn’t what it used to be, and they’re right. It’s better. It’s better in traditional barbecue hotspots, like Kansas City and Dallas. It’s better in places where you’d never expect to find killer ’que, from Brooklyn to Minneapolis to L.A. A new generation of pit masters and grill masters has applied time-honored smoking and grilling techniques to the kind of meat most of us want to eat today: humanely and locally raised animals...
Read more →Ribs at Q39 in Kansas City, Missouri What are the best cities in North America in which to eat meat? A reporter from a major American newspaper asked me this in an interview recently, and it got me to thinking. Where should the unrepentant carnivore go to eat his/her fill of red meat? Herewith, Raichlen’s Top 10 Meat Cities in the U.S.: Austin, Texas: Where else do people start lining up at 8 a.m. at Franklin, La Barbecue, Micklethwait Craft Meats and other great barbecue joints that won't open until 11 a.m.? Doesn't...
Read more →To hear Hugh Mangum tell it, he never set out to become a Brooklyn brisket mogul, nor did he aspire to serve the biggest, baddest beef rib in Manhattan. No, the musician was happy in a career that most guys would kill for: earning a living as a drummer touring with Jacob Dylan and the Wallflowers. The owner of Mighty Quinn’s Barbeque in the East Village comes by his passion naturally. Although he grew up in Santa Monica, his Houston-born father always kept an assortment of Texas-style barbecue pits fired up...
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