The Pitmaster

Barbecue king Steven Raichlen preaches from the gospel of global grilling.

by Will Stone

Millennia spent tending to flames have seared a hankering for fire-licked fare into the primal depths of our bellies. We're talking barbecue —actually, a planet full of it.

That's the Universalist message grill master and scholar Steven Raichlen will celebrate at his July 15 Free Library talk on his latest cookbook, Planet Barbecue! (Workman Publishing Company). With 300-plus recipes gathered from 60 countries, Planet Barbecue capstones Raichlen's 12-year passage through the world of live fire, which began with his award-winning 1998 cookbook, The Barbecue Bible. (Since then, Raichlen has published numerous companion books and began hosting two grilling shows, Primal Grill and Barbecue University.) More than a how-to guide, Raichlen's globe-trekking book charts the regional rubs and smoky eccentricities sizzling away on every gas grill or eucalyptus fire. He took some time out from his national promotional tour to talk meat with CP.

City Paper: What's a particularly appetizing or surprising grilling experience you've had recently?

Steven Raichlen: In Portland, Oregon, I found a fantastic restaurant called Pok Pok. It is a restaurant specializing in Thai street food, and they have a vertical charcoal turning rotisserie, in front of which stand vertical spits. It's the closest thing I have found to an authentic Thai roast chicken in North America. In Oakland, California, there's a restaurant called Camino ... they have a big, raised hearth and everything is cooked over an open wood fire.

CP: What about barbecue first captured your attention?

SR: What drove me to write Planet Barbecue [was the] simple but profound realization that grilling is the world's oldest cooking method and the world's most universal cooking method — but everywhere it's done differently. In a way, you can kind of use barbecue as a lens into human culture. So you start with something simple like a cookbook, and then you wind up with a deep, profound and broad view of what makes us human.

CP: In Planet Barbecue, you tour the world, collecting recipes from more than 50 countries. How did you go about choosing your culinary destinations?

SR: I started a list of every grill culture that I could think of. Within each culture, I started three lists — one of the people I should see, one of the iconic restaurants and one of the iconic dishes. For example, if someone was coming to the U.S. from Europe, I would say you gotta have Kansas City ribs, Texas brisket and North Carolina pork shoulder. Likewise, in Serbia there is a repertory of dishes, in Cambodia there's a repertory of dishes, and the same goes for Brazil. So I went looking for those. But I would also leave a couple days open for serendipitious encounters ... I would go to the central food market and look for people grilling, or sometimes I'd kind of just follow my nose to the smoke.

CP: What are some of the iconic dishes that were way up on your list to try?

SR:One really outrageous dish that I had learned about and knew I needed to experience was on the West coast of France. There, they will grill mussels on a bed of a dry pine needles and the whole thing catches on fire, creating this pine-flavored smoke. Another example — in Colombia, they will wrap a beef tenderloin in a cloth with about a pound of salt and grill it right on the embers, and I knew I wanted to see that.

CP: What are some notable differences you found between American barbecue culture and other regions of the world?

SR: Number one: we are virtually the only country in the world that has a tradition of both grilling — cooking food directly over high heat quickly —and what in the South they would call "true barbecue," meaning an indirect process of smoking and roasting the meat by cooking it next to the fire, not directly over it ... grilling time is measured in hours and days rather than minutes. Smoke is the essence of that style of American barbecue. The rest of the world, when they talk about barbecue, what they really mean is grilling.

CP: Any lessons the American griller should take away from the foreign grilling cultures you profile ?

SR: I think that most Americans grill about four or five foods: steaks, burgers, chops and hot dogs. However, if you look around the world, you see the sheer breathtaking diversity of what other peoples grill. In Southeast Asia they grill eggs in the shell. In Brazil, they'll put pineapple on a rotisserie, sprinkle it with cinnamon sugar and spit-roast it for dessert. In Baku, Azerbaijan, they actually grill ice cream. They'll put balls of ice cream, dipped in egg and shredded coconut, on a metal skewer in order to grill it.

CP: Wait ... how does that not melt?

SR: The secret is you form balls of ice cream, you dip them in the egg and coconut three times, freezing them hard and solid in between each dip. Then, they go on a skewer and you freeze them again. Finally, they go over a screaming-hot fire. Ideally, if you do it right, the egg will cook to a crust, which will keep the ice cream inside. ... Another example about Brazil — they cook ribs on vertical stake over a eucalyptus fire. In Australia, they'll cook lamb chops on the blade of a shovel over an open fire. Really, it's just that barbecue knows no limits, and we need to celebrate the differences.

CP: In your new book, you focus a lot on the history of barbecue, particularly in the first chapter where you start us off in France at the beginning of human civilization.

SR: In truth, those first 10 pages of the book are probably some of the writing of which I am the most proud, because [they] tells a story about why we have such a visceral, emotional, profound and even religion connection to barbecue. In a nutshell, it's the discovery you could use fire to cook meat that turned us from apes to humans, basically. Forget about upright walking, it's really cooking that made us human. Then there are all sorts of fascinating, weird little factoids about the history of barbecue, like Abraham Lincoln's parents were married at a barbecue, or the origin of the word barbecue.

CP: What is its origin?

SR: Barbecue came from the Taíno Indian word "barbacoa," a wooden frame that you could position over a fire and cook game and fish on. The etymological origin of the word barbecue was this piece of equipment. When your grill grate is made out of wood you have to position it several feet above the fire so it doesn't catch fire. If you do that, you wind up cooking at a lower heat with a lot of wood smoke, and so implicit in that style of cooking is our understanding of barbecue. Eventually, that word entered the English language as barbecue.

CP: Since we're in the middle of grilling season, do you have some key grilling tips?

SR: The most important thing is that you get to the point where you control the fire, the fire doesn't control you. I think for a lot of guys — because they're usually guys — they throw food on the fire and somehow it gets cooked without burning. Another common mistake is overcrowding the grill. I recommend leaving 30 percent of the grill open. That way, if you get a flare-up, you have a way to move the meat around. A third big error is to stab the meat with a fork, rather than turn it with tongs — you don't want to put holes in the meat. A fourth error is that you don't want to serve meat hot off the grill. You always want to let the meat rest for a few minutes before you serve it, so the meat relaxes and becomes jucier.

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CP: Typically in the U.S., grilling is considered a man thing. Did your experiences around the world suggest otherwise?

SR: Absolutely. In many parts of the world, women predominate at the grill. One whole region like that is Southeast Asia, where most grilling is done by the women. Another area where you find a bunch of lady grill masters is in the Balkans. In Mexico there are a lot of women grillers. It's one of the cases where things are not what they seem.

CP:We often think of grilling as a summertime activity. In your experience, can it be more than that?

SR: Yes — actually, even in North America that trend is slowly changing. According to a recent study done by the Barbevue Association, they reported that about 35 percent of Americans grill all year around, even in winter. As you travel Planet Barbecue, there are countries that absolutely revel in winter grilling. One is Korea, where restaurants have grills built right into the tables. Koreans love nothing better than to come in to such a restaurant on a cold night and huddle around the grill and warm their hands around it. It's a great comfort on a cold winter night. Another country that revels in indoor fireplace grilling in the fall and winter is Italy. They have something called a focolare, which is an indoor grill that looks like a stone table with a dome. You might find that in a private home living room or a restaurant dining room.

CP: What are some of the most surprising grilling experiences you had in writing the book?

SR: One of them would be Colombia where they had this incredible dish called lomo del papa. What they do is they take a piece of beef tenderloin and wrap it in a damp cloth. Then they lay that directly on the embers, a kind of grilling I call caveman-style grilling. Colombia was such a great surprise because I had gone there solely on the virtue and strength of that dish, but I discovered this incredibly elaborate grilling culture that includes things like chiaro, which is like a giant guinea pig cooked on sticks over a eucalyptys open fire — lots of very interesting stuff.

Another place that was a great surprise was Greece, where they have a dish that definitely challenged my commitment to sampling all kinds of barbecue. I profile it in the book when I talk about mentioning the unmentionable — it consists of sheep's lungs, hearts, brains, liver and spleen on a long spit. All those ingredients are wrapped in a sheep's small intestines and then spit-roasted. You can think of it as haggis on a stick. I make the commitment to taste everything and that actually turned out to be better than it sounds. I cleaned my plate on that.

CP: What will you be speaking about in Philly?

SR: The talk is on Planet Barbecue and the history of barbecue. What I'll do is take viewers on an around the world tour of the book — where I went, what I saw and what I ate. I will also trace the history of barbecue from its prehistoric origins nearly two million years ago to the modern day, with a little PowerPoint to go with it.

CP: But no live fire at the event?

SR: Nope — sorry, no grilling!

(editorial@citypaper.net)

Steven Raichlen, Thu., July 15, 7:30 p.m., free, Central Library, 1901 Vine St., 215-567-4341, freelibrary.org