Michigander. Barbecue is, well, barbecue (or BBQ or barbeque)… Grilling is hot dogs and hamburgers.
I stayed a year in a Residence Inn in Ontario several years ago, and that chain gives you a snack/dinner at the typical come-home-from-work time. As winter ended, their calendar indicated “Yummy Barbecue” would be featured. I was excited, as I was bored of the chicken nuggets and frozen tacos. I made it a point to get there on time and not go out, and guess what was served: hot dogs and hamburgers.
I think most of us understand the difference between outdoor barbecue grilling and the true southern sense of barbecue, but to my mind, “grilling” is anything done on a grill, which doesn’t fully define an outdoor barbecue. An outdoor barbecue, whether it’s a charcoal or a gas grill, produces both searing and smoke from the juices and creates flavors that you simply can’t get indoors.
It may not be southern barbecue, but it’s not indoor plain grilling or oven broiling, either. Especially after not using the barbecue for a while because of snow and cold, the first barbecue after a prolonged hiatus is like a breath of summer weekend, campfire, and lakeside cottage all rolled into one sensuous package of tastes and aromas. It surely deserves a word of its own to describe it.
The mass produced, gotta serve it ice cold, beer is crap. Please do not disparage the US craft beer industry. You can get every version or taste in beer in America. Any moderately sized city will have dozens of varieties to choose from. Dark/light/fruity/smokey/hoppy/whatever.
I realize you’re mocking the “beer” endlessly marketed during sport programs as being able to transform you into a svelte hunk of manhood irresistible to incredibly hot scantily clad chicks.
Generally concur, but I will point out a salient mechanical feature of BBQ: indirect heat. Both grilling and broiling uses radiant heat from the heat source. As much as practical, BBQ interdicts radiant heat and uses hot air/smoke/steam as its heating method.
Hence, rigs like this for a Weber kettle that confines charcoals off to the side, rather than directly under the food to be cooked.
My ancient barrel-type smoker/bbq has the charcoal pan under the cooking grills, but also has a pan of water between. So no infrared is being beamed directly from the fuel to the food. The hot air goes around the pan and swirls around the food under the dome lid, and the water heats up to add steam to the hot air mix. Yum. I can do a 12-pound turkey in about 3-4 hours with a nice regulated 200-225 degree cooking temperature, because a lot of heat goes into the unstuffed internal cavity directly up from the steam bath. (Open wire cone to hold the bird cavity-downward.) But it’s smoked, not grilled. (“Smoking” v. “BBQ” is a distinction of cooking temps and fuel, but pretty similar process-wise. Unless you mean old-school cold smoking.)
This makes my head hurt. When you say … do you really mean …? Stuff like that.
A. We need a new term for slow indirect cooking with smoke and/or sauce. Trying to co-opt and redefine for exclusive use a term that’s been around for centuries is a bad idea. (I’m often okay with new uses of words. But a lot of people like to erase history and common usage.)
B. Any such term would immediately start a flame* war about the details among the true believers of one form or another.
I agree, ambiguity is irritating. And if you make mention of it, then all of sudden YOU are the crazy one, when very obviously THEY were the unclear idiots to begin with. Fuckers.
One thing is for sure, though, when some one says “Let’s BBQ this weekend”, and that is there will be some sort of yummy food to eat. Hopefully dead meat food. And probably a conversation wherein I get called crazy again.
It’s a test of whether you’re an “insider”. The “correct” definition is a shibboleth, a test of whether the person you’re communicating with is in the know. A true BBQ aficionado makes the distinction (i.e., untangles the ambiguity) in one rather specialist direction – that “BBQ” means indirect cooking at lower temperature – whereas a proletarian schlub uses “BBQ” to describe slapping a chunk of meat directly over a flame.
It’s like wine snobbery.
All the more reason then, to eliminate the overlap in terminology. But I won’t become a pedantry Nazi about it. Not my style, as long as I understand what they mean.
It’s worse. Wine snobs don’t usually decry fermented grape must from a particular region as “not wine.” They don’t usually say that “steel tanks mean the product isn’t wine” either. They may be very picky about what makes a good wine, but they don’t call everything else by another name.
BBQ fanatics, OTOH, quite often do just those things (myself included on occasion).
When I see D.O.M. tags on BBQ, then we can talk. Champagne has a legal definition. BBQ doesn’t.
In fact, a lot of people call sparkling wine “champagne” when it is nothing of the sort, so I’d like the judges to consider this a turn on my opponents argument and flow this card to my side, since people do the same thing to “BBQ.”
