Blais-B-Q - Sous Vide Pork Belly served with Collard Greens, Georgia Peaches, and Coffee BBQ sauce served at Home restaurant in Atlanta, GA.
Top Chef Finalist, Richard Blais, talked with me about his thoughts on barbeque, including his favorite local spot and how he applies his unique viewpoint and techniques to this traditional food genre. He even discusses the infamous Top Chef smoking gun. Read the full interview here.
Obsession is a term with which I've grown quite comfortable. Most think of the word in the pejorative sense. Me? I see it as an compliment - an asset of character. The object of my obsession for several years now has been cooking - specifically, cooking BBQ.
Barbeque is woven into the fabric of my being. I grew up eating pulled pork sandwiches served on soft, white hamburger buns and chased with a ice-cold, hand squeezed Limeade at Bill's Barbecue on Broad street Richmond, Virginia, the capital of the Old South. 
Bill's barbecue sandwiches were served in their pristine state, without sauce, and topped with a layer of delicious cole slaw. They came wrapped in parchment paper, secured to the sandwich by a single toothpick driven into the center of the top bun like Camelot's Sword in the Stone. Their was something approaching pure magic in pulling out the toothpick and releasing the sandwich from it's crinkly cradle of white paper and taking that first, succlent mouthful of tender pork, kissed with smoke and offset by the tang of cole slaw. If you cared to, you could doctor up your sandwich with a traditional North Carolina style vinegar sauce. In my entire adult life, I've never managed to replicate that experience. But I've been chasing that high ever since, like a heroin addict trying to get back to that first prick of the needle. I've never considered it before just now, but I'm certain that is what drives my barbeque obsession today.
I no longer reside in Richmond. I'm now a proud resident of the capital of the New South - Atlanta, GA. We've got plenty of barbeque down here; some of it even approaches good. Unquestionably, it's not the same barbeque I grew up on. Barbeque is rarely served without sauce down here. The sauces that are served around these parts are inevitably tomato-based, sweet concoctions - resembling in no way the vinegar based sauces of my childhood. I've come to appreciate the Georgian way of barbeque and love it in some strange way. But I cling to the idea that truly great barbeque doesn't require sauce. It proudly stands alone - a testament to the power of Smoke.
My obsession has driven me in several seemingly disparate directions. I've taken classes and studied classical French cooking techniques. I compete with a successful local competition barbeque team. I currently apprentice at a French inspired, "creative American" restaurant - all of this in search of what I've come to think may be the Holy Grail of barbeque. Foolish as it may seem , I believe that the marraige of classical culinary technique and traditional barbeque methods could lead to the evolution of the craft of Barbeque. At their core, classical culinary dogma and barbeque share a profound respect for preserving and enhancing the essence of the product being cooked - be it pork, beef, rabbit, or fois gras. Somewhere in the middle of these two seemingly different diciplines is a virgin territory; an unexplored nouvelle cuisine I lovingly nicknamed Frou-B- Q.
Frou B- Q aims to take the perfection of a properly smoked piece of protein and enhance it with familiar, but jacked up, side dishes, sauces, or whatever. Instead of serving cole slaw that resembles mayonaise soup, imagine a slaw of green apples and fennel tossed in apple cider vinegar complementing the pulled pork. Or, continuing with the mayonaise example, instead of serving potato salad that has a yellowish pigment only found only in the most bold of Van Gogh paintings, imagine serving smoke roasted fingerling potatoes mixed with dry cured bacon, chives, and a buttermilk dressing along with your oak smoked tri-tip.
Frou Frou Q is not limited to side dishes. It is more of an ethos that allows for the exploration of the enhancement of traditional barbeque, as long as the enhancement doesn't take barbeque too far away from its roots to the point where it becomes strange, deviant, or unfamiliar. To my mind, this allows room for unconventional dry rubs, inventive cooking methods informed by science, or anything else your mind can conjure.
So, I've taken to the Internet to enlist the help of the legion of cooks, foodies, and barbeque fanatics lurking out there in the pursuit of my dream. My hope is to create a community of devoted, like-minded individuals from around the globe who share a love of barbeque and are interested in exploring the possibile elevation of the craft. It may be a fool's quest, but it's one that is close to my heart; it's my obsession and my passion. Join me if you dare.
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