It’s Official: Barbecue Is No Longer Easy

Not that Americans haven’t always taken barbecue seriously. The debate over tomato vs. vinegar in the universe of sauces (essentially Memphis vs. the Carolinas) is decades old and worthy of a Netflix miniseries. Meanwhile, the vaunted title of “pitmaster” has been around for 80 years, according to expert John Edge. But the true craft was something few tried to master in their home kitchen.

This summer, a handful of cookbooks revel in the time and effort that goes into achieving authentic barbecue. They’re the opposite of the fast, all-purpose volumes of yore. These books are the storytelling, podcast versions of cooking; they happily devote entire chapters to what wood to choose.

In Whole Hog BBQ (Ten Speed Press, $30), Sam Jones focuses on one particular recipe: the one in the title. Jones is a third-generation North Carolina barbecue master, whose family started the James Beard Foundation Award-winning Skylight Inn. “Cooking a whole hog doesn’t have to be that complicated,” he and co-author Daniel Vaughn write. “It’s a long process, but with a pickup truck and the right guidance, you could be serving one tomorrow.”

It takes about 16 hours to cook a 180-pound pig that feeds around 100. (Jones factors in time for cooks to get a little sleep.) He includes diagrams for building a cinder block pit, but for those who aren’t inclined to wrangle a prepped pig into the pit and then figure out how to turn it over around hour 6, there are recipes from his restaurant Sam Jones BBQ, including pork spare ribs that are brined overnight, rubbed with spices, and smoked, which you can then augment with collard greens, pimento cheese, and other fixings.

Steven Raichlen, author of more than 30 cookbooks and the poster boy for the basics of cooking over fire, takes on the hottest trend in barbecue with The Brisket Chronicles (Workman Publishing, $20). He tells readers to wait out one of the frustrating secrets of the meat-of-the-moment: the “stall” that occurs a few hours into cooking when the temperature refuses to budge. (It’s the result of evaporating moisture, which cools the meat.) His recipes run the gamut from burnt ends with smoky barbecue sauce to spice-crusted “old school” pastrami, which calls for a curing salt to get that pink interior and requires 12 days of brining and around 10 hours of cooking.

Paula Disbrowe’s Thank You for Smoking (Ten Speed Press, $30) encourages cooks to add the alluring flavor of smoke to every ingredient in their kitchen, offering intricate instructions for smoking pantry items such as spices and garlic. She dedicates considerable space to doing the same for beans and vegetables. (Another giant trend this year: green, or meatless, grilling.)

Even the more conventional Southern Smoke, by chef Matthew Register (Harvard Common Press, $25), still advocates the low-and-slow approach for dishes such as Smoked Boston Butt. He also advises readers to go deep on the details and to buy a notebook to record thoughts on wood and even weather. After all, you’ll have plenty of time to think while cooking a 12-hour pastrami.

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