The Barbecue! Bible [Paperback]

Having lived in Argentina for two years (serious barbecue country), and having put on tons of my own barbies since and attended loads of others, I guess I have a different perspective on the whole experience. In my mind, you don't really get points for how many hours you put in preparing your marinades, or how many different types of crushed spices you sprinkle on to your ribeye, or from how far away your recipe comes from, or how many recipes you've memorized or whatever. These are all ancillary considerations. Let's be honest: what matters most about doing a barbecue/grill is basically the admiration and glory a man receives by giving his guests a killer meal cooked over the more challenging heat source of open flame. The thrill of, and skill required for, cooking over that open fire is part of attaining this glory, but it's still about the performance's end result. It's like a rooster doing his mating dance, or a canary singing his song (I can think of a few other analogies, but I think they'd probably get edited). Anyway, barbecue is a performance by a male in which he shows off his superior talent. This is why no guy ever barbecues only for himself, and why no guy ever wants help from his wife while he's doing his barbecue (less glory). And this is why when you do a barbecue, you have to make sure the end result is better than any of the guys you invited could likely have done, and make sure all the girls are really impressed by your prowess with nature's primal elements. If you wind up giving your guests something average, or dud-like - well, that's some serious face-losing. You can laugh it off, but you'll still look weak. It's like stealing the ball, running down the court all by yourself, doing your lay up and missing.

Anyway, if I am right about this, you don't want to get this geek-festival book with 8000 recipes in it. You need a good understanding of basic barbecue/grilling techniques, and maybe at the most three super killer recipes (and believe me, there are a lot of fantastic barbecuers out there that just have one). It's like pitching - if you have two incredible pitches, you're a god, you're Greg Maddux or Nolan Ryan or Mariano Rivera. If you have 12 okay ones, you're driving a milk truck somewhere. Unfortunately, trying to find three totally killer grill recipes in this book is like trying to find three pro-life delegates at the Democratic Party's National Convention - who knows if there even are any, and even if they are, who has the time to try to figure it which ones they are? (And even if you did find them, do you have the time necessary to prepare an elaborate recipe, when a faster one may be just as good or better?) I think Mr. Raichlen's book would be far more valuable if it was pared down to maybe 70-80 discriminating pages of top quality advice, recipes, etc., rather than a dumptruck load of every last aspect of barbecue lore collected after a tour of the entire planet (which is literally what this is). Quality control, rather than just overwhelming quantity, would have been far more helpful.

My experience with barbecues is that often the finest are the simplest: Start with the best meat you can get (you can find out about the various cuts and their characteristics in any book about meat - for beef, I prefer rib steaks for all the marbling; the Certified Angus Beef brand you can get at Albertson's is usually good), salt them, don't burn them, and the bottom line is you're 80% of the way there. When you come up with a few of your own little twists, and a great sauce (the Argentine chimichurri is my fave - olive oil, oregano, garlic, some vinegar and a bit of parsley), you'll almost certainly have something as good or better than most of the over-compensating extravaganzas in this book.

I wish I knew of a more practical book on grilling/barbecue, but the truth is I don't really know of one that would set the would-be barbecue superstar on his way (not that it's that hard to get going). But, if someone is really serious, any text that takes time to explain the building blocks of how various foods work together, and what effects various cooking techniques have (in other words, culinary theory), will only help you nail down your one, two, or three superb open flame recipes (the magazine "Cook's Illustrated" is a pretty good start for this kind of thing).

Get this book if you want, but don't think you need it (or that you'll end up actually using its recipes). You'll do far better experimenting on your own, chatting with your butcher or barbecuing buddies, and getting an understanding of why great dishes work so you can then come up with your own.

I hope this has been a help to someone.

Good luck.

To answer one criticism that others have made, I grew up in Canada, and I had no idea that there was a style of cooking called "barbecue" (i.e. long slow cooking with smoke). To me, "barbecue" means you cook stuff on a grill, whether it be a gas grill or a charcoal grill. So, I had no confusion over the title - it said "barbecue" and it did exactly that -- it taught me to cook on a "barbecue".