You Don't Win Friends With Salad

One of our team members, Chris, and I were roommates in Williamsburg, Virginia in the spring and summer of 2007. We lived in a house with two other friends, a dog and a half-acre back yard. It was the perfect venue for a lazy Saturday (or mid-week) BBQ and the time in my life that cemented my love of barbecue from a cook's perspective.

Times change, people move and the logistics of getting your friends together for an afternoon cook-out become increasingly complicated. The members of Shirtless Mike's BBQ team all live in Arlington now, with Chris and Adam both commuting great distances, Richmond and Southern Maryland respectively, making the lazy afternoons in our large backyard a fond but distant memory.

To most guys grappling with the competing tensions of careers and bills and the rest of the less appealing features of the "real world," a hobby like ours gets pushed to the wayside. The weekly barbecue becomes emblematic of a simpler period in their lives when time was in abundance and wasting it was a noble end in itself.

My hope is that competitive barbecue will save us from that unappealing (and unappetizing) fate; that the rigors of looming competition and the fear of failure will force us to commit to our craft.

Barbecue season kicks into full-swing on Memorial Day weekend and our competition is now less than two months away. We will be hosting our first BBQ team practice this Saturday and I expect it to be full of missteps and kinks. We've invited our friends to join in the fun and act as guinea pigs with the understanding that practice makes perfect and with the sincere hope that the promise of a big platter of charred meat will offer us all a reprieve from the demands of adulthood, if only for an afternoon.

Homer Simpson put it best:

"All normal people love meat. If I went to a barbecue and there was no meat, I would say 'Yo Goober! Where's the meat!?'. I'm trying to impress people here Lisa. You don't win friends with salad."

The Wide World of Barbecue

In addition to longer posts about our team and the DC Barbecue Battle, I plan to publish shorter features a few times each week highlighting stories on the web about grilling, meat and competitive barbecue.

This week's post features a team of very ambitious cooks in Uruguay who held a cookout using 6 tons of charcoal, 12 tons of beef and a grill one mile long. Uruguay's record-breaking barbecue now tops the Guinness Book of World Records.

I've got some serious meat envy.

The Equipment

Barbecue Gadgetry (well, any form of gadgetry) is a source of pleasure for guys around the world. Part of the joy of barbecue, in addition to the fire, the smoke and the primal satisfaction that comes when you bite into a big chunk of charred flesh, is the chance to play with really big, pretty expensive toys.

When I think about a barbecue, I immediately conjure up the Rockwellian image of the 1950's dad in the back yard flipping burgers over dancing flames on a shallow charcoal grill. To an entire generation of men, this image defined "a barbecue."

As Americans in the 21st century reconnected with the "food-as-pleasure" side of human existence and celebrity chefs like Bobby Flay began to equate grilling with "outdoor cooking," the love affair between men and their grills evolved in lock-step. A dozen commercial manufacturers now build machines that can best be described as outdoor kitchens.

A friend's father, who I am certain never prepared anything more complicated than a grilled steak in his life, purchased a stainless steel commercial grill several years ago. This behemoth monument to meat contained an infrared grilling surface in addition to a gargantuan high-heat traditional propane grill, an outdoor refrigerator and a set of side-burners. His grill was a thing of beauty, a work of modern mass-manufactured art, and completely, fundamentally unsuited for barbecue.

I use my friend's father to illustrate the essential distinction between barbecue and "a barbecue." These high-end grills were designed and built to host "a barbecue"-- a massive, 400-guest, burger-and-hot dog-with-all-the-trimmings affair that could make my friend's father the subject of neighborhood lore for years to come. Yet, while his grill could put a sear on a steak that would give some men a hard-on, the idea of slowly smoking a piece of meat over the course of hours was as foreign to him as making a souffle.

In its most basic form, barbecue is created by introducing heat along with smoke to meat, at a low temperature, over a long period of time. That's what Shirtless Mike's BBQ aims to do. To accomplish this task, we need something quite different from the high-end stainless "super grill."

We need to barbecue.

We will be using my big, beautiful, weathered Char Griller Smokin' Pro with a side fire-box and my teammate Adam's Char Griller Super Pro. There is no stainless steel or propane to be found here, just cast-iron and layers of smoke, fat and "seasoning" caked on through countless Saturdays in the sun, beer in hand, doing what we do best.

The Competition

Safeway's National Capital Barbecue Battle, in the shadow of the Washington Monument and the Capitol Dome, attracts contestants from around the country for two days of live music, fantastic food and that one-of-a-kind smell of savory, smoky meat dripping over open heat.

The 16th annual contest is home to the DC Lottery Barbecue Challenge on Saturday June 21st and the main event, the U.S. National Pork Championship, on Sunday, June 22nd. Within these two competitions, a wide range of barbecue will be grilled or smoked and presented for consideration.

In a future post, I will break-down the rules of each competition and offer a brief tutorial on what makes something "barbecue." More importantly, I plan to discuss what makes "good barbecue" and, hopefully, we'll all learn what makes barbecue "award winning."

On the first day of the competition, Shirtless Mike's BBQ will enter some variation of our much-loved Saturday afternoon staple, beer-can chicken. Moving past its redneck roots, our beer-can chicken is brined in cider-mulling spices, dry-rubbed, then slow-smoked over a sweet and savory mix of apple juice, beer and spices and basted with our homemade honey-spice glaze. I will be writing much more about this time-honored BBQ classic, but for more information check out the definitive resource on all things beer-can chicken.

On day two, we will be entering an as-yet-to-be-determined recipe for pork shoulder, using a variation on a dry rub as well as a homemade vinegar-based sauce. Familiar to fans of pulled-pork, the shoulder contains part of the pig's front leg and has a large amount of marbling throughout the meat. As any barbecue lover knows, marbling + smoke + time= juicy, tender, unforgettable barbecue. This fatty and flavorful cut carries out this BBQ philosophy to its natural high point.

I hope to include a brief guide to barbecue butchery in this space, but for the time being, the always-useful "A Cook's Thesaurus" has this entry and diagram on the pork shoulder.

Introducing Shirtless Mike's BBQ

I've created this blog in anticipation of the DC Barbecue Battle, our first foray into the very wide world of competitive barbecue (more on that to follow).

I anticipate this blog will serve as an outlet for my many food-related, stream-of-consciousness ramblings on barbecue, meat, grilling and the logistics of building, promoting and fielding a BBQ team.

Much has been written and produced about barbecue in the past several years. You can't turn on basic cable without catching a re-run of some overweight huckster waddling around the South, stuffing his face and making small-talk with other fat, hairy, possibly-inebriated barbecue enthusiasts. From Steven Raichlen's award-winning and informative books on BBQ and BBQ culture to the proliferation of BBQ-themed television of varying degrees of quality, the American media (and presumably the American consumer) has embraced the joys of being a carnivore.

You might be thinking: "Why start another blog about barbecue?" or "What makes you so damned special?" or "Hasn't Anthony Bourdain already written the same thing?"

The answer is simple-- I'm not special (don't tell my mom). I'm just another guy prattling on about his life-long obsession with fire, smoke and meat.

I know I can't offer some unique insight into the art of finger-lickin-good barbecue. I'm clearly not qualified.

I will also try to avoid employing a semi-detached journalistic perspective on why barbecue is "a true American art form." I'll gladly leave that task to the next frat-house-hero-turned-American-Studies-major who wants to sit outside, drink too many beers and call it "research" for his thesis.

My real goal to provide readers (if any exist) with a story about how three friends took their favorite Saturday afternoon hobby a little bit too seriously and wound up in a grueling 48-hour barbecue marathon against some of the best BBQ cooks in the country.

Welcome to the newly-launched Shirtless Mike's BBQ Blog.

Shirtless Mike's Spatchcocked BBQ Turkey

Ingredients and Basic Prep Instructions



The Bird:

1 Big Turkey, spatchcocked (butterflied), preferably free-range

Trim the excess skin and bits of the backbone/rib cage that may be protruding after the butcher is done removing the backbone. Make sure the giblets and neck are removed as well. Using your fingers, separate the skin away from the white meat, forming pockets between the skin and the flesh. You can do the same for the thighs if you're so inclined, but it isn't really necessary as the underside of the meat will be exposed once the backbone is removed.

The Brine:

1 Gallon of Tap Water
1 Cup of Fine Salt
1 Cup of Sugar
2 Teaspoons (half a palm full) of Cider mulling spices
1 Teaspoon of Black Peppercorns

Be certain that the salt and the sugar dissolve completely. Keep the bird in the brine for about one hour per pound. It is better not to leave it in long enough than to leave it in too long and pickle your turkey. No one likes a pickled turkey. Make sure to rinse off the bird and pat it dry once you take it out of the brine.

The Rub:

Equal Parts:

Fresh Rosemary
Fresh Thyme
Fresh Sage

Plus:

2 Cloves of Garlic
Black Pepper
Kosher Salt
Olive Oil

Use enough of the herbs to form a loose pesto by gradually adding olive oil to the mix of herbs, garlic, salt and pepper as you run the food processor. Since you've already brined the turkey, you can go easy on the salt. Rub the bird all over, making sure to get as much of the paste as you can in between the skin and the meat. Cover the underside of the bird as well.