I attended the Marietta Hawg Happening last month to visit with my friends from Dave Poe's BBQ and was extremely happy to learn that Ed Mitchell, from The Pit in Raleigh, NC, was also in attendance. Ed is one of the true heavyweights of BBQ as evidenced by his recent appearance on Bobby Flay's Throwdown. Ed is a whole hog master who cooks from the North Carolina tradition. His philosophy is to cook BBQ in the old tradition using only locally sourced ingredients. To that end, Ed has put together a network of hog farmers in NC to help him source his product. That day, I was able to sample some of Ed's BBQ as you can see in the picture. Delicious.
Here you see Ed at the Hawg Happening. If you'd like to learn more about Ed and his BBQ then I suggest you check out this fantastic article by my favorite food writer, John T. Edge. Or you can check out this shootout article in the NYT comparing Ed's ribs to Daisy Mae's ribs(famous because their chef worked under Daniel Boulud). This is a link to Ed's menu and this is a link to the photos from the recently held Big Apple BBQ Festival, in which Ed participated. Finally, I'll leave you with my impressions of Ed. He struck me as a man who is passionate about returning BBQ to its roots while embracing a lot of the ideals of the current Slow Food/Sustainable Food movement (which is just really old school cooking). His BBQ is great and he has a REALLY big 18 wheeler in which he travels (which is just cool). Everybody knows size does really matter.
Oy. Don't know how I managed to not find your blog during the three weeks I was actually in Atlanta on a BBQ bender, but glad I've found it now...
Posted by: Mark | July 07, 2009 at 01:05 AM