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I purchased Low and Slow when I saw it sitting in my neighborhood costco. There are few books that draw me in and cookbooks on BBQ can do it with just a great tagline like “Everything you know about BBQ is wrong”. There was another book I read that was like this The Book Of General Ignorance and I learned quite a bit from that book so after flipping through Low and Slow I took it home with me.
Learning BBQ for me has been a journey. One that started with baby back ribs and has taken me from a trashcan smoker through a Walmart electric smoker I returned because it didn’t work well (they don’t sell it anymore or I would have linked to it) to Smoking on my gas grill to a $50 craigslist purchase of a used offset smoker. There are certain arts which have become lost in this age of McDonald’s and Whole Foods and Mac and cheese. If you are able to make anything (and I mean anything) you are revered these days and everyone looks at you like if there is an apocalypse and they are choosing teams you would get picked a lot sooner because you can cook. My brother and I make our own bratwurst, I brew my own beer, he makes his own salsa, among many other edible projects. Homemade is a treat that people love and with my brother and his cabinet smoker and edible treats as inspiration, I expanded into the world of BBQ.
I love ribs and used to only get them once a year, when the Naperville Exchange Club hosts its Ribfest event. You could always count on qualitry and variety and there really is no comparable way to have ribs. If going to a restaurant for their ribs is like visiting a vineyard to try their wine, Ribfest is like having all those vintners bring their wares to one place to compete for your wagging tongues. This year I sampled 8 vendors and based on their smokey flavor, fall off the bone quality and slab quality Texas Outlaws was the best for 2009.
But I digress, this is supposed to be a post about making ribs, and I am doing pretty good at avoiding the topic.
The first time I made ribs they were amazing. The second time they were jut as good. After that I have gotten progressively worse at making them and no cookbook has been able to rescue me thus far. Everything else I have gotten better at, from burgers, to chicken, to any other grilled or BBQ fare, but the ribs remain a mystery.
Low and Slow is a 5 lesson approach to attain BBQ glory and after reading all the preface about don’t use briquettes and don’t skip chapters…I used briquettes (just as the firestarter…hey I will not just throw them out but I WILL NOT BUY ANY MORE) and I read Lesson 1 about chicken and lesson two about fire control before skipping to lesson 3 about Ribs. Its possible the author of Low and Slow (Gary Wiviott) will see that I linked to his cookbook with this post, read it, and be dismayed that I didn’t follow his plan exactly. If you are reading this Gary, please know that I fully intend on completing your course in the fashion you lay out in the book, I just had a hankering for some ribs and could not wait through that much chicken to get to it.
The book is clever in the way it tailors recipes exactly to three types of cookers, the Weber Bullet, The aforementioned offset smoker, and a standard weber grill. These tailored recipes are intended to teach you about how your smoker cooks, and after you master how your cooker cooks it is up to you to tailor other recipes for your cooker.
I made ribs, used Raichlen’s basic BBQ rub on them, used applewood splits and turned out some decent ribs on my first try. I say decent because on this go round I learned that the fire can reach its way out of my firebox and burn some bark onto your ribs. I plan on doing some more BBQ this weekend or next week and trying again, maybe some more ribs or back to lesson 1 for the chicken. Either way if you want to learn BBQ this book is a good read and it basically hammers home that in order to be great at something practice and repetition is the key. If you want to be great at cooking BBQ you have to cook a lot of BBQ.
I think I am fine with doing just that.