It's hard to do barbecue on the road. You start with the advance intel reports on the region identifying likely targets of opportunity. Then there are the dossiers of the pit-masters that need to be collected and reviewed. You make a call to the forestry service to check on any problems with the hickory or cherry wood harvesting. Talk to the guy at the farm bureau about how the hogs have been running this year. But the advance stuff is only half the game. Most of it goes out the window when you get the real 411 from the boots-on-the-ground.
You think I'm kidding, son? You think this is all fun and games? Barbecue is SER-I-OUS business.
Well maybe I stretched a little with the forestry thing. And I don't recall actually talking to anybody about hogs. But scouting out the best barbecue is a serious thing. The classic method can be pretty time consuming -- drive around looking for a shack with the Mercedes and the F-150s parked out front. The best barbecue places tend to cut across class lines.
This being the age of the internet, we started with Chowhound and the debate about the best barbecue in Tuscaloosa -- Archibald's vs. Dreamland. The edge seemed to be towards Archibald's, so we checked out an interview Amy Evans did with George Archibald Jr. as part of the Southern Foodways Alliance series The Southern BBQ Trail. Finally, we asked around while we were in Birmingham. Carol Griffin of Chez LuLu was a bit taken aback, "Y'all have heard of Archibald's?" but said that was the place to go.
The second great contribution of the modern era to the barbecue search is the GPS navigator. No more of those instructions that start out, "You go down the road a piece, till you see some cows on the left, then you ..." We punched in the address and were quickly led the back edge of little bedroom community in Northport, across the Black Warrior river from Tuscaloosa.
You pull up into a driveway on an embankment and you know you're in the right spot because there's a large pile of split hickory logs standing next to a tall gray chimney. On the other side of the chimney is a little shack. Inside the screen door is a counter with three or four stools, two refrigerators and a sink. If ten people came in at the same time the fire marshal might have to close the joint down. On the far wall ("far" being about 6 feet) is a large metal door built into the side of the chimney that slides open to reveal a grate sitting about waist high over the pit. Slabs of ribs and mounds of pork shoulder stretch back into the darkness. There's a garden hose with a spray nozzle hanging from the pit door handle. A counterman is taking orders and there's a woman tending the pit. I'm guessing she's Mrs. Paulette Washington, George Jr.'s sister. According to the dossier she takes over in the late morning and works till George comes back at three. Every five minutes or so, she takes that hose and sprays it into the pit, kicking up a cloud of smoke. That's when you realize that the pit / restaurant distinction is a false dichotomy. There is just the single edifice -- the smokehouse -- part of which is more accommodating to people wanting some 'cue and the other part more accommodating to pork in the process of becoming 'cue,
Archibald's Rib Platter
We ordered two large rib platters and a sliced pork platter. The counterman sets out three paper plates on a little table next to the pit door and covers each with a couple of slices of Sunbeam bread. Miss. Paulette grabs a wicked looking polearm, (actually a kitchen fork clamped onto the end of broom handle) and begins wrangling in the pork. She does all of her work right there at the edge of pit. She chops up the ribs on a block of wood set into the brick lip and piles them on to the plates. From a piece of shoulder she slices off meat and weighs it out on a little kitchen scale. She takes each plate and ladles on the sauce from a pot sitting on the grate. The counterman piles on two or three more pieces of bread, covers each plate with a sheet of butcher paper and sticks in a couple of toothpicks to keep it all together.
We sit at the counter and eat our pork. The ribs are large and meaty, crisper at the thin end and still a little fatty at the thick end. The flesh comes off easily enough, but I wouldn't say that it just falls apart. Sitting there that afternoon, I couldn't really taste any smoke, which I thought was kind of odd. It was clear that they cook over a hotter fire for a shorter period of time than some folks do. We got a couple of orders to take back to Columbia and I tried some later that night. Nice smoky flavor, not dominating; but a clear compliment to the pork flavor. Very nice balance with the nod being given more to the pig than to the wood. What had changed? Then I realized the futility of trying to taste a subtle hickory smoke flavor while sitting in a smokehouse. When everything tastes of smoke, nothing tastes of smoke.
The sauce is a thin vinegar base, with some ketchup, mustard, and a fiery pepper kick. More like a North Carolina sauce, which narrows it down to about 3,000 possibilities. I believe I read somewhere that North Carolina has more barbecue styles per capita than anywhere else on earth. If I could get hold of Hoppin' John Taylor, expert on all things in the Carolinas, he might be able point me to someone who could determine that Archibald's sauce was closest in style to those restaurants on the right hand side of Highway One (going south) between mile markers 43 and 57. Which of course is all the difference in the world from those restaurants on the left hand side.
Lacking those resources and left to my own devices, I can only add some general observations about the sauce. The fieryness suggested to me a pepper vinegar, either store bought or made themselves. I suspect they are adding their own peppers and letting them steep, in part because the heat is fairly intense, while the acidity is fairly low. There's just a bit of body to the sauce, suggesting perhaps some kind of culinary gum. This might come from ketchup or from certain kinds of hot sauce. When we got our order to go, they gave us two large (16 oz) Styrofoam cups of sauce. Looking into the cup, I was reminded of art class and the cup of water I used to clean my brushes after painting a sunset. Its a ruddy orangey, red, with flecks of yellow. However it is made, it is to my mind just what you want in a sauce. Thicker sauces take over, obscuring the meat. The pure vinegar sauces lack enough body to really add anything.
Since we didn't get to Dreamland, I can't chime in on which is better. I can say that this the way I think barbecue should be. The pig is primary. The smoke and the sauce is secondary. When you start selling the smoke or hyping the sauce, you have lost the main focus. As for technology, I suspect that it is still possible to find great 'cue without the internet and GPS, but one day we will look back and wonder how we ever did it.