BBQgeek

BBQ Pitmasters Reality Show at the 2012 Atlanta BBQ Festival

In addition to hosting both a KCBS cookoff and a backyard cookoff, this year's Atlanta BBQ Festival played host for the filming of an episode of the fourth season of Destination America reality series BBQ Pitmasters.  Over the course of Friday and Saturday night, three teams competed for a chance to appear in one of the final episodes.  The three competition teams were GA Bob's out of Macon. Lazy Bear BBQ from Gainesville and Holy Smokes BBQ from Dublin, GA.  Season 4's judges are a welcome carryover from Season 3 - Myron Mixon from Jack's Old South BBQ, Aaron Franklin of Franklin BBQ in Austin, TX, and Tuffy Stone of Cool Smoke BBQ, Richmond, VA.  All three judges are extremely well respected and well seasoned competitors and restaurant owners.  BBQ Pitmasters seemed to struggle a little in seasons 1 and 2 in finding its format and judging personalities.  But all signs are that season 4 is a reprise of the winning Season 3 formula.  It will be interesting to see how the GA teams carry on into the finals.  Most interesting to me is where Aaron Franklin had dinner while here in ATL.  The guy gets repeated features on No Reservations and has the number one BBQ restaurant in the country.  Does anyone know where the judges chowed down?

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Slideshow - ATL BBQ Festival 2012

ATL BBQ Festival - 2012 VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL

First Bite - JD's BBQ - Woodstock, GA

Location: 6557 Bells Ferry Rd, Woodstock GA 30189 - 678.445.7730 - website   

Parking: Plenty of parking out front.  Make sure to notice the parking pylons painted like pink pigs.

Menu:  link

Style:  Old school.  Buffalo chopper pork.  Traditional brisket and ribs.  Minimal spice or fuss.  Decent smoke level.

Sauces:  Two sauces - Sweet, and Spicy

Service: Seat yourself full service plus take out.

Cooking on:  Stick-burner in rear of restaurant.  3 different cookers visible this day but the smokehouse was empty.  Have a suspicion that it was empty because the main cooker was to be used on a TV segment for ATL46 the following morning.  

Backstory:  First location opened in 1999 inside a small farmers market.  Within four years, the owners decided to open a dine in restaurant. According to the website, JD's now has a second location in Acworth.  JD's has all the charm and trappings of an owner-operated BBQ joint.

Our Selection for the Day:  The "Boss Hog" 3 meat platter with chopped pork, sliced brisket, baby back ribs, brunswick stew, and baked beans.

One of three stickburners out back.  I suspect this is their catering rig, based on the photos I've seen on their website.

Continue reading First Bite - JD's BBQ - Woodstock, GA here....

 

First Bite - Bar-B-Cutie - Acworth, GA

Location: 4427 Towne Lake Drive, Woodstock, GA - 770.924.9491  - website        

Parking: Located in a Publix Shopping Center.  Plenty of parking

Menu:  Bar-B-Cutie Menu

Style:  Hard to pin down. Probably best described as corporate.  Reminded me of Shane's Rib Shack.

Sauces:  Three vaguely Kansas City style sauces - Mild, Sweet, and Spicy

Service: Counter service with meals delivered to table.  Drink station and refills are DIY.

Cooking on:  Couldn't tell.  Cooker not visible from dining room and didn't see one out back.

Backstory:  First location opened in Nashville, TN in 1950.  Over the next 40 years the location grew into a 300 seat restaurant.  Bar-B-Cutie began franchising in 2004.  The website lists a total of 17 locations in Tennesse, Ohio, Texas, Georgia and... three locations in Valencia, Spain???

Our Selection for the Day:  Chopped pork platter with cole slaw, mac-n-cheese, BBQ bread.  Sliced brisket platter with brunswick stew, potato salad, and BBQ bread.  Two kid servings of chicken fingers and fries.  The kids weren't feeling the BBQ love this day.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Continue reading First Bite : Bar-B-Cutie here....

Friday's Burnt Ends - September 7, 2012

• Local chefs, he team of Todd Mussman (Muss & Turners/Local Three), Jay Swift of 4th and Swift, Nick Melvin, and Tommy Searcy of Gum Creek Farms take first place at the Cochon555 Heritage BBQ competiton.
• Touching story of a teen who's dying wish was to create a homestyle BBQ sauce to be sold with profits benefitting the hospital where he received his treatment
• Interesting article on the possible negative health effects of grilling food.  Steven Raichlen points out that as the oldest cooking method on the planet, grilling would have killed us long ago if it was really that harmful.

 

 

Heywood Provision's Bac-O-Burger

60% grass fed beef, 40% apple wood smoked bacon, roughly 33% fat and 100% genius, Heywood Provision's Bac-O-Burger is one of the tastiest things I have eaten in quite a long time.  I've always been a sucker for a good bacon cheeseburger.  But in all my years, it never really crossed my mind to investigate grinding the bacon INTO the burger. At first glance, the Bac-O-burger seems a little gimmicky.  But after cooking and eating a couple sliders, I'm convinced this is a superior way of approaching the the bacon cheeseburger.  The Bac-O-Burger changes the equation from the moment you open the vacuum sealed bag.  The first thing I noticed is that this concoction smells different.  Instead of a beefy, iron-ish aroma, I was almost overwhelmed by an assertive apple wood smoke scent.  It was all I could do to to restrain myself from grabbing a pinchful of the raw meat to take a taste (and I'm pretty sure I will next time).

I decided to forego the grill for this experiment and go with my cast iron griddle to take advantage of enhanced fat content.  After getting the griddle hot and greasing it up with a little locally sourced lard, I threw down golf ball sized patties and smashed them with my spatula.  Within just a few seconds, I was hit with a smokey aroma that I'm typically used to smelling when I cook up breakfast.  Very shortly afterwards, I noticed a good bit more fat surrounding the patties than I am used to seeing  with my standard big box grocery supplier beef.

The amount of fat that rendered out of the sliders was a little surprising, but it did a great job of helping build up a nice crust on the patties as I flipped them. After laying down a layer of cheese, setting the sliders to rest and toasting the buns, it was time for the taste test.  The Bac-O-Burger tasted just like it smelled.  Smoke.  Fat.  Beef.  Pork.  It was a bacon cheeseburger on steroids.  I missed the sensation of biting through the bun and hitting the the crunch and salt of rendered bacon before consuming a hearty bite of beef.  But the smoky pork flavor inside the patty was an entirely new sensation.  After a few bites, I didn't really miss the bacon as much as I began to consider what could happen if I layered rendered bacon on top of the Bac-O-Burger patty.  Beyond my simple slider experiment laid untold options.  What would a Bac-O-Burger meatball taste like?  Or Bac-O-Burger meatloaf?  So many choices....  Do yourself a favor and stop by Heywood's to pick up a little bacon infused ground beef and then get creative.  And by all means, let us know if you stumble across a little slice of genius.

Friday's Burnt Ends - August 31, 2012

• Living Colour lead singer, Corey Glover, released a new solo single today called BBQ.  You can stream it free here on Corey's MySpace page.   Strangely, Corey never actually uses the work BBQ anywhere in the song, but he does make it clear that he sure is hungry.
• Modernist Cuisine author, Nathan Myhrvold, writes in depth about his research into the BBQ "stall" here on his blog.  Seasoned pitmasters know that the "stall" is a period of time in the cooking of a long meat like brisket or pork butt where the internal temperature stalls around 150-160 degrees and sometimes even drops in temperature before heading upwards towards the target internal termperature of 190 degrees.  Myhrvold presents data that suggests that the stall is due to the the imbalance between the internal humidity of the cooker and the surface humidity of the meat.  Totally geeky and worth reading.  Nathan's solution is to smoke the meat for 7-8 hours and then sous vide the cut for another 72 hours.  BBQgeek will be testing that theory very soon in a subsequent post.

Quick Bite - Grand Champion BBQ - Roswell, GA

Location: 4401 Shallowford Rd, Roswell, GA 30075 - Tel: 770-587-4227 - www.gcbbq.net

Specialty:  AJC readers voted GC BBQ best ribs, brisket, and mac & cheese in Atlanta.

Service:  Order at the counter and have it delivered to your table.  Take out service welcome.

Cooking On:  Southern Pride 500 series cooker.  For my money, nothing delivers a more consistent product once you learn how to dial it in.  GC's BBQ definitely reflects time well spent learning how to tweak their cooker for maximum smoke, flavor, and tenderness.

Backstory: Grand Champion's ties to the former Sam and Dave's BBQ empire was well documented in a glowing two star reviewin the AJC,   Having worked with owner Robert Owens several times in the Sam and Dave's years, I can tell you that Robert brings passion to his cooking and is committed to delivering a superior product day in and day out.  Grand Champion's success has allowed them to expand to a second location in Milton, GA that will be opening in the next few weeks just as soon as all the last minute details (aka permits) get ironed out.

Why visit?:  Grand Champion stands with other great restaurants like Community Q, Fox Bros, Dave Poe's, and Heirloom BBQ as examples of just how great Atlanta BBQ can be when the best quality ingredients are treated with attention and care to detail.  As an added bonus, Grand Champion offers home made pies on a semi-regular basis.  Take a look at these delicious pies.  Take the time to get out and visit Robert and crew at Grand Champion BBQ and make sure to try the brisket!

 

Using BGE platesetter with Bubba Keg/Big Steel Keg

Due to the overwhelming success of the Big Green Egg, several competitor Kamado cookers have entered the market in the past ten years.  Companies like Primo, Kamado Jo, Bubba Keg/Big Steel Keg, have all tried to penetrate the Kamado/BGE market with moderate success.  I was lucky enough to get a Bubba Keg for evaluation purposes a few years ago.  I immediately fell in love with certain aspects of their design as compared to the BGE.  The Bubba Keg was made of aluminum which made it much lighter than the BGE.  It also had removable side shelves, wheels, and a trailer hitch which made it infinitely more mobile than the very heavy and bulky BGE.  But the one thing the Bubba Keg lacked which rendered it almost unusable was a diffuser plate like the BGE's platesetter (pictured above).  During my first year with the Bubba Keg, I tried over and over to smoke long cook meats, but they always  came out overcooked and bitter because they were direct smoking as opposed to offset smoking.  Ultimately, I stopped using the Bubba Keg for smoking and repurposed it as a high temperature grill (which it does very well due to it's styrofoam insulation core).  When this year's BBQ season rolled around, I decided to try one last time to learn how to cook low and slow with the Bubba Keg.  This time I trolled a few BBQ boards and learned that many people had success using a BGE platesetter as a diffuser.  I took a few measurements of the Bubba Keg fire bowl and headed to the local BGE store.  For a mere $65 bucks, I was able to fix my problem.  Now I'm enjoying my Bubba Keg/Big Steel Keg much more....so much that I'm considering investing in a BBQguru so I can cook long meats effortlessly.  For those of you out there with a Bubba Keg/Big Steel Keg, this simple workaround will really improve the quality of your BBQ.

2012 Pigs and Peaches BBQ Competition–Kennesaw, GA

		Pigs and Peaches BBQ competition VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL