Posted by Bruce Bilmes and Sue Boyle
, January 28, 2010 16:19
Roadfood.com asked the question, What's the Most Important Feature In Great BBQ? Roadfood.com readers made it a two-way race, and The Cook edged out The Meat by eight votes out of the 955 cast. There are a few ways to interpret the question, any and all of them valid (there’s only so much space for the poll – no explanations possible!). Here’s how we see it: if you came up with a great barbecue sauce, how much would that define the great barbecue? Could you take just about any meat and any pitmaster and turn the results into great barbecue through the use of the right sauce? For us, at least, the answer to that particular question is no.
We’d say the same thing about the setting and the rub. The other three are trickier. Can you even have barbecue without wood? Plenty of restaurants serve something called barbecue that never saw wood smoke. Some of it can be pretty decent, too, but great? Never, not in our opinion. Which is why we voted for wood. Of course, you can’t really have barbecue without the meat, but we don’t see the question as a choice between meat or no meat. Rather, it’s a question of which particular cut of cow or pig or lamb or whatever is used. And, for sure, that choice is important, but we think a great pitmaster could turn just about anything handed to him into top-quality barbecue. Which is why we’d pick The Cook as our second choice, and maybe we’d even change it to our first choice.
There’s our two cents. Anyone else care to weigh in?
