Extreme Barbecue: Smokin' Rigs and Real Good Recipes

Text copyright © 2007 by Robert Daniel Huntley and Lisa Grace Lednicer.

Photographs copyright © 2007 by Layne Bailey. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher.

Page 9 constitutes a continuation of the copyright page.

ISBN 978-1-4521-3310-2

The Library of Congress has previously cataloged this title under ISBN-13: 978-0-8118-5318-7

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Chronicle Books LLC

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San Francisco, California 94107

www.chroniclebooks.com

Table of Contents

Dedication

To Susan, for allowing me to follow my food muse across several continents, and Lauren and Daniel, for eating my Boston butts before I learned to smoke ’em.—Dan

To Drew, for believing in me and believing it was possible. —Lisa

Acknowledgments

Many people helped us during the writing of this book. It would be impossible to single everyone out, but here are a few who deserve special thanks:

First and foremost, our editor, Bill LeBlond, and our agent, Susan Ginsburg, for taking a chance on us;

Charles Eisendrath and the Knight-Wallace Fellowship program, for bringing us together and encouraging us to give voice to our wildest dreams;

Nicole and Layne Bailey, whose advice, enthusiasm, and hard work made this project better than it would have been otherwise;

And our families—especially our spouses—who endured broken commitments and endless debates about the finer points of brisket, chicken, and pork, and managed to remain cheerful and upbeat even when we weren’t.

From Lisa . . .

Many thanks to Anne and David Lednicer, for dropping a great profile idea in my lap; Jim Monihan, Rick and Kate Naug, and Jim Minion, for introducing me to barbecue in the Pacific Northwest; Ed Roith and Carolyn Wells, for putting up with my endless questions about contest judging; Rabbi Larry Halpern, whose enthusiastic blessing for this project meant the world to me; Jenn Oberheuser and Amanda DeSilver, astonishingly gifted food enthusiasts; Rick Browne, for cheering me on; Luciana Lopez, for being a much-needed sounding board; and all the cooks and rig-builders in this book who made the writing of it such a grand adventure.

From Dan . . .

Thanks to the three guys who introduced me to barbecue—and helped me to see through the smoke: my dad, Baxter Huntley; my father-in-law, Carroll Robinson; and my former gym teacher, Ken Weaver, who loaned me his cooker to smoke my first whole hog in 1990; Kathi Purvis, who introduced me to Carolyn Wells, Jim Tabb and the Kansas City Barbecue Society, and John T. Edge and the Southern Foodways Alliance; Mike Gordon, for taking me to Birmingham to meet food maven George Sarris; also Observerites Tommy Tomlinson, Jim Walser, Jack Betts, John McBride, Lolo Pendergrast, Diane Suchetka, and Ashley Barron (and her sisters); food book authors Marialisa Calta and Linda Eckhart, who both said write this book; Parisienne Brigitte Cox, who changed my life when she placed a dime-size slab of foie gras in my mouth; my many sous chefs at barbecues and oyster roasts at our weekend house on the Catawba River: Barb and Bob Leverone (who loaned me their camera and Mac knowledge), Mabel Huntley, Davis Allred, Carl Wharton, Walter Mull, Laddie Sartin, Steve Floyd, Ralph Coomer, Carrie Sturrock, Kris Klepinger, Seth Sutel, Andy Finkel, and Henry Gilbert; and my Napa Valley buddies who found me a genuine pig cooker in wine country when we needed one most: Andrea Immer and Sarah Jane Tribble.

Additional Photo Credits:

Dan Huntley: pp. 63, 85, 88, 92, 112, 114, 120, 123, 159, 163, 183, 211

Bob Leverone: p. 74

Barb Leverone: p. 81

Mike Gould: p. 175

Judy Siviglia: p. 236

William McJunkin: pp. 255, 256

Photo on p. 68 courtesy of John Willingham.

Photo on p. 150 courtesy of David Klose.

Photo on p. 213 courtesy of Weber-Stephen Products Co.

Photo on p. 244 courtesy of La Caja China Cookers.

Clay Bush of Las Cruces, New Mexico, checks his smoked chicken on his custom smoker.

INTRODUCTION

NO MAN IS AN ISLAND, John Donne said, and by our philosophy, no one truly cooks—or eats—alone. In all its forms and in any context, cooking is a connecting experience, and for many it is about passion: for life, for art, and for the people you care about. When you take the time to prepare a meal for those who give meaning to your life, they taste more than the food—they also taste the love and energy you’ve baked into your casserole or massaged into the brisket sitting in your oil-drum smoker.

For a certain class of hands-on backyard chefs with a quirkier side, that love and energy extends beyond the table to encompass the tools for preparing food—and not just using them, but creating them. Populating one extreme of the food-enthusiast spectrum, these are the contraption makers—the folks who’d rather spend hours shaping iron and metal into a humdinger of a rig than buy a sterile, slick-looking machine at an anonymous superstore.

Anybody can buy a gas grill at Sears and char some burgers in the backyard. But imagine the looks on your friends’ faces when they see you grilling twenty whole chickens bathed in garlic on a rig that looks like a cast-iron satellite dish you found on the side of the road. Contraption cooking is more than the application of meat to fire. It is cooking on a rig so personal or outrageous that it allows a backyard chef to become a rock star. Maybe you have had the pleasure of eating such fabled fare; now we hope to give you a roadmap for finding your own culinary spotlight. As celebrated in the juicy pages of this book, contraption cooking generates great adventures, and great stories.

We’ve collected our favorite tales here, to entertain, inspire, and whet the appetite: how an ancient General Electric refrigerator–cum–smoker united two generations of a Midwestern clan spread halfway across the country; how a single father’s beehive-shaped, wood-fired oven has become the center of his home; how a dead man’s inventiveness lives on in the form of a massive iron rig named Lester.

The Roots

The obsession with building a better mousetrap seems to be coded into Americans’ DNA, and the development of new and improved cooking machines has long been a particularly hot pursuit. From Ben Franklin’s iron furnace stove to George Stephen’s first Weber grill, we have a long, colorful history as a nation of culinary rig inventors. In a recent example of this combination of instinct and ingenuity, the bust of the Texas oil economy in the early 1980s led to a new career for some down-on-their-luck oilmen, who began making barbecue pits with the oil drums, pipes, and welding equipment left idle and abandoned in the refinery fields.

America is no longer known for its manufacturing prowess the way it once was, as more and more production is outsourced offshore. Health department regulations have largely shut down some of the older customs, such as selling food cooked underground. In an era of diminished outlets for invention and sanitized codes for cuisine, the rig builders in this book are keeping both industrial and folk traditions alive, a beautiful thing even if the results sometimes look bizarre. You may mock that rusted-out, banged-up barrel smoker, but all doubts go out the window when you taste a glistening piece of chicken, or your mouth waters as you watch morsels of pork butt fall off the bone. And therein lies one of the truisms of contraption cooking: a lot of the time, the crummier the rig is, the better the food tastes.

Contraption cookers can be as simple as a piece of string used to truss and roast a chicken in front of an open fire (see page 29), or as elaborate as a two-story mobile smoker with a winding staircase (see page 98). Building them often involves what is best described as junkyard serendipity: stumbling across a heap of broken-down machine parts and having the vision to recognize them as something potentially wonderful. There must be a willingness to improvise—say, reclaiming a chrome bicycle wheel instead of getting a sheet metal guy to design the perfect cylindrical grate to hold your charcoal off the base of your cooker. Like great French chefs who never run to the grocery store if they’re missing an ingredient or two, rig builders make do with what they have.

The Regions

Extreme barbecue can’t be found in the Yellow Pages or at the mall; the world in which it exists lies well beyond the interstates. The people who build these rigs and cook this food are found at backyard cook-offs and barbecue contests, catering their buddies’ weddings, or throwing graduation parties for their nieces and nephews. They practice their art with meat ranging from simple spareribs to a whole hog dressed up in Mardi Gras beads, sunglasses, and a straw hat.

One of the first things to learn about homemade barbecue cookers is that there is definitely no standard rig. Beyond the common denominators of metal, brick, or stone (or cardboard! see page 80) and fire, the rigs are as varied as the foods cooked in them—from an Italian pork roast braised in a wood-fire bread oven to oysters roasted in galvanized trash cans.

Likewise, there are no geographical rules. You can find practically any kind of contraption cooker in any part of the country—we saw a Southern-style pork rib smoker in the heart of Vermont and an underground hot rock barbacoa goat roaster in North Carolina.

That said, there are, naturally, certain cooking rigs you see more of in certain regions. The South abounds with whole-hog smokers, partly because the warm climate allows a longer outdoor cooking season and fosters ambitious rigs to match, and partly as a legacy of the nineteenth century, when pork, firewood, and time were all abundant. And we’d be surprised (well, actually, nothing surprises us anymore) to find Native Americans in North Dakota smoking fresh salmon over an alder vertical roaster in the style and spirit of their Pacific Northwest ancestors.

Americans move around a lot, and there’s both a supply of and demand for tastes that have spread across the country’s expanse. You’ve probably noticed that transplanting an American regional culinary style to another part of the country is a common technique in the restaurant business—for example, you might find a busy barbecue restaurant in Portland, Oregon, run by an African American who brought his smoker with him from Mississippi. Whether they’re labors of love centered around home or prized possessions displayed at contests, many extreme cooking contraptions are built to travel as needed. Since a lot of these rigs aren’t hammered down, we had to travel more than thirty thousand miles—ranging from Seattle, Washington, to Shelby, North Carolina—to chronicle this tribe of traveling chowhounds.

If You Have a Sense of Adventure . . .

This book is more than just recipes; it’s the stories of the people behind the smoke. It’s for anyone who’s ever had a Pavlovian response to the smell of burning hickory and the sound of meat sizzling over a hardwood fire. It’s for folks who’ve made do with a rinky-dink charcoal grill on wobbly legs and wanted more. For anyone who likes their cuisine con brio, these contraptions let you go where most weekend chefs fear to tread.

Use this book as you would the blueprints for a basic starter house, but feel free to improvise. Install skylights. Or a fireman’s pole. Or the kind of stuff you’d find in the Batmobile. Steal ideas verbatim from these pages, or use them for inspiration and go prowl scrap heaps, flea markets, and garage sales for equipment of your own devising. If you want more, get your camera and head for the meat-cooking meccas along the backroads of America, or hit some of the hundreds of barbecue competitions around the country. Bring the pictures back to your welder buddies with two cases of beer and the promise to cook brisket, pork butts, chicken, and anything else every Fourth of July if they’ll build at your command. Your motto should be: I need more funk in my life, and I’m starting with cooking contraptions.

This is your chance to drop your identity as a parent, spouse, sibling, and/or wage slave and be the P. T. Barnum of your neighborhood. It’s a proven fact that anything cooked outdoors tastes better. And, take it from us, practically any food you cook on a homemade contraption will taste doubly better. Come out of the kitchen, drop the twenty-minute-meal mindset, and build a cooker so amazing that your friends will stay for hours after the sun goes down, kicking the tires on it and muttering, Man, how’d you do it? Couldja build me one? Just keep the rig, the smoke, and your beer-swilling buddies outside, and you’ll be a hero in your household.

DIFFERENT REGIONS of the United States claim different bragging rights for the origins of barbecue. One of our favorites comes from a guy who swears it originated in the mid-twentieth century at a Texas bar and pool hall named the Bar B Cue, and there are references from the mid-1700s to George Washington attending barbeques in Virginia.

Perhaps more objectively, historian Dr. Walter Edgar (as well as the Oxford English Dictionary) believes the term barbecue is derived from babracot, a Carib Indian word referring to a grid of green wood fashioned to hold meat over a fire. Pigs were first brought to North America by Spanish explorers in the mid-1500s, according to Edgar, who has researched and written extensively about barbecue. (As for eating it, he’s partial to the mustard-based sauce served over pulled pork in the South Carolina midlands.) Caribbean pirates of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries made forays along the southeastern coast, bringing with them the babracot style of cooking whole animals on a raised grid over coals, and, as Edgar writes, the tradition drifted inland along the southeastern coast like wafts of hickory smoke.

As we explored the barbecue of the eastern United States, we found three compelling stories representing the more or less stereotypical image of a Southern white male cooking whole hogs in a smoker/grill made from an oil drum. But moving up the coast, the pot thickened to a stew rich with various historical and cultural influences.

In Charleston, South Carolina, Jimmy Hagood gave us a tour through his two-story smoker/grill with a spiral staircase. Steve Watts in Gastonia, North Carolina, cooks hobo-style on a campfire, using heated flat stones and a large tin can. T. R. McGrath of Newport, Rhode Island, is a third-generation master of the clambake, heaping fresh rockweed on a bed of hot stones to steam his seafood feast. In Niagara Falls, Canada, Reg Pelletier built a massive smoker whose air flow he can control with the simple twist of a lever. And we found Betsy Barstow’s family in Adamant, Vermont, cooking a traditional New England bean hole bean supper—roasting huge pots of beans buried beneath a fire pit of simmering embers—in a style that dates back to Colonial America and earlier.

Goat ribs just beginning to draw back from the end of the bone, cooked to perfection by Maximino Rios in an underground Mexican-style barbacoa.

Read on for the stories and recipes of nineteen cooking rigs from east of the Appalachians, showcasing a diversity in fire-cooking techniques as extreme as the region’s shifts in landscape.

Mike Shugart

How can you not love a cooking rig named for a dead man named Lester?

Would it help if it cooked Boston butts to beat the band?

We heard about Lester more than two years before we actually laid eyes on the sucker. A group of deer hunters in Chester County, South Carolina, first told us about this legendary cooker. Their tales got taller as we dug deeper—about an inventor/engineer who had built the cooking rig to beat all rigs, with a Ferris wheel contraption that rotated the meat; about how it had all these switches and valves and regulators; about how the instructions were written down in soapstone on the iron sides of the rig, but then a storm blew the roof off the hunt camp shed and washed the instructions away and the inventor died before he could get back to his meat machine. . . .

After more than two dozen dead-end phone calls, we finally thought we’d hit pay dirt. There was dirt, all right, when we made a boozy late-night trip down an endless unpaved road, through woods and pasture, to the Sweet Hope Hunt Club, only to hear, Oh my God, someone has stolen Lester! Call the damn po-leece! On another hot tip, we found our way to a dusty machine shop, but this time we got, You’re looking for Lester? You mean Lester Shugart? The fellah that made that cooking machine? Well, I’m sorry, son, but you’re about nine years too late. Lester has done passed on.

Unable to confirm that it was anything more than a meat myth, we finally marked the Holy Grail of cookers off our list as unfindable. The very same week, Lester’s nephew, Mike Shugart, called. I hear you’re looking for my cooking rig, he said.

Lester built his namesake at his machine shop in the early 1980s, customizing it for inside cooking by routing the smoke out through the shop’s ventilation system. Eventually, Lester loaned it to some buddies and the cooker ended up at his hunt camp.

After Lester died in 1996, his widow, Genevieve Shugart, rounded up his nephews and cousins to go through his machine shop and see if there was anything they wanted before she sold it all. Mike ended up with the cooker, since he had helped build it and, later, helped Lester cook on it. With the help of a half-dozen friends, he moved the cooker from the hunt camp to his river house on Lake Monticello.

Mike Shugart turns meat in the Lester Rig.

Mike Shugart’s dad died when he was eight. Lester took him under his wing at his machine shop, took him to job sites and down to his house on Lake