So claims this article. Any truth to this claim? Is Australian food often overdone?
BTW is here an archetypal “Australian” barbecue sausage or are all kinds of sausages burned?
People barbecue sausages?!
From Our Own Correspondent isn’t really any kind of a news show, it’s more like whimsical musings of bored journalists. Everything should be taken with a large grain of salt.
Oh, yesssssss! Hot links, andouille, bratwurst, hot dogs… If it was ground up and stuffed in a case, we’d throw it over the coals (along with huge slabs of deadcow or deadpig). Man, I miss Wednesday Night Barbeque.
The Burnt Snag is a standard trope about the Australian barbie. There are some elements of truth in the various features of the story, but they are (as always) exaggerated for comic effect.
Truth One - barbies are a very common informal method of cooking and socializing. And great fun. With much less washing up. There’s a bit of effort in organising the side dishes like cole slaw and the like in advance, if you are going to a picnic spot instead of your back yard, but that’s about it.
Truth Two - blokes overwhelmingly predominate in the cooking.
Truth Three - being blokes, a degree of competition enters into it (secret marinade recipes, exact process for cooking steak, mystical methods for determining done-ness, etc). All of this is, however, done in good humour. Australian males spend an inordinate proportion of their lives putting shit on each other as a rite of passage and acceptance, and as a source of humour. Barbecues are about as perfect an opportunity for that to occur as can be conceived.
Commonly, steaks and sausages are all cooked in the one session, in order that everyone gets to eat at once. Sausages are often for the kids, but some adults like them too. The problem is that steaks and sausages take different amounts of time and heat to get right, and steaks take priority, since it is a competetive point of pride with blokes to show off your steak cooking skills. Sausages are often best done with a less hot plate over a longer time. If the cook gets the timing wrong, or if sausages aren’t turned frequently enough and the plate is too hot (because of the steaks), one side can quickly become burnt. Another factor is that barbecue plates are not uniformly hot - getting to know the idiosyncracies of an individual hotplate is an important part of the black art of barbecuing.
The archetypal barbecue sausage is a thinnish pork sausage, but in modern times, much greater variety and gourmet-ishness is starting to prevail. The more gourmet the sausage, the less likely it will be to be burnt, because upscale sausages can score points in the competetive showing-off thing, and you don’t want to blow the points thus derived by stuffing up the cooking.
Damn. Now I feel like firing up the 6-burner, ringing up the usual suspects, and having them over. And I wonder - has there ever been an Oz Doper Barbie-fest? Australia Day would have been perfect.
Indeed. We’ve just finished having a BBQ dinner at which sausages (aka snags) prevailed.
Just to forestall the inevitable misunderstandings: for most people around the world, “barbequing” means throwing meat on top of a fire. For people living in Southern U.S. and parts of the Midwest, it’s a complex, arcane process involving smoke, spices and a near-religious level of obsession.
I am a whiz on the bbq, let me tell you. I can take pretty average steaks and a good barbie, and turn them into a great meal. I have impressed some pretty picky eaters with my art.
So let me just say that I, an Australian, know how to cook a bloody sausage. I’m a pro. Give me skinny sausages, and I will turn them into cripsy, crunchy tubes of delight. Even cheap, nasty, fatty ones I can transform into edible meat, quite literally rising from the grease-fulled flames. And fat fires are good entertainment. Give me fat sausages and I will butterfly them, making them even crispier… so delicious…
Yes, I am quite proud of my skills. And any bloody pom who can’t handle a touch of charcoal on their food is someone whose culinary wussiness I can ridicule for hours.
But keep your shrimp away - it is neither red meat, onions, nor a particularly manly food. They do not deserve to be barbecued.
Evidently I have the smoke and near-religious level of obsession down. But yes, bbq = meat over fire.
The Aussie Barbie is a religious event where meat is cremated whilst beer is consumed in large amounts. To facilitate incineration, the meat is made available in the form of snags (sausages), which burn nicely and leave little residue. Sausages are much cheaper than cuts of meat such as chops or steak that are usually used as food.
Speaking of gourmet - just recently we had wagu beef and mushroom sausages - yum.
The typical Aussie BBQ is a gas burner these days. There’s a promo for Packed to the Rafters where there is a discussion about whether the meat on the BBQ is done. The old bloke’s making remarks about not being able to catch the meat and “is it dead”, that sort of thing while the meat is a charcoaled, burning, mess.
Well, I knew an American that wasnt happy until his hot dog looked like the carbon rod out of an old D cell battery.
And my mothers idea of BBQing anything was to slather whatever it was with BBQ sauce then totally carbonize the coating. Not a little carmelizing, not the inadvertant crisping here or there. Totally black and crisy all over the outside. Bleeh
So, apparently the disease is no longer down under.
FTR, almost all of the above (the one exception being the remark that sausages are mostly for the kids) would apply to the Texas barbecue culture I have my own roots in. I assume it applies to other places in the US as well.
-FrL-
Ah if only. Unfortunately all the Aussie Dopers are Aussie, so nothing ever happens.
Ooooh - this sounds interesting.
Here in England, we light a fire in a barbecue grate, stick a grill on top and place meat (including sausages) on the grill.
When they’re done, you stick them in a bun and eat.
What is the Southern US method?
Barbeque in the United States.
Regional variations of barbecue.
As pointed out, there’s ‘real’ barbecue, and then ‘colloquial’ barbecue’; the former being slow-cooking in low heat, and the latter being grilling over high direct heat.
Well, you can start with a hole in the ground, or a specialty contraption. You put a pig in it.
Anybody who’s about to say something about beef can go sit in the corner and think about what he’s done.
The big war is really about sauces (and about parts of the pig - ribs is not barbeque.) South Carolina is the only place where all three sauces are native. It’s heaven.
To be precise, Deep South barbeque is very long-and-slow cooked pork, shredded or chopped, with one of three sauces - there’s a tomato based sauce, a mustard based sauce, and a spicy vinegar based sauce. You hold to your own with religious fervor.
To my knowledge, the main exceptions are Memphis, where it’s ribs, and Texas, where it I think beef brisket. If I ordered barbeque and got a COW I’d be first confused, then embarassed, and finally furious.
ETA - IMHO it’s actually quite similar to the Hawaiian luau pig, the name of which I have forgotten, except they don’t put a sauce on it.
See, this is why I want to get a kamado cooker. They’re great for long-and-slow cooking.
I have to relate this: I was JetSkiing at Lake Havasu around 1997 or so. It happened to be Spring Break. Some college kids were next to us, and they fired up the grill. They doused the charcoal with lighter fluid and there were big flames. After a couple of minutes they threw on the hot dogs. (Yes, the fluid was still burning off.) By the time they finished eating, the coals were just about ready for cooking. Aiyiyiyiyi… :rolleyes:
That’s what I was thinking too… I’m assuming, based on the Aussies I’ve known, that the grilling is accompanied by copious beer drinking like it is around here.
And as for shrimp being unmanly and undeserving of grilling… I don’t see it. Get a good 11-15 shrimp (or even U10s), oil them down lightly, sprinkle with a spice rub (I’m partial to Zatarain’s creole seasoning) and grill on high for 2 minutes on one side, and 2 on the other (keep an eye on them- you may need less time), and you have a good dish.
Plus, they’re high in cholesterol! That’s plenty manly!
There’s a cultural divide between the US and everywhere else as to what the word “barbecue” means. Here in the us, it’s slow-smoked meats, while in the UK and elsewhere it means to have a cookout with a grill, what we’d call “Grilling”.
And even in the US, as you can see by Zsofia’s post, “barbecue” means different things. And really… if your sauce is the defining characteristic of your barbecue, you need to work on your meat. Sauce should be a nice but unnecessary condiment to your barbecue, unless we’re talking about a pulled pork or chopped beef sandwich.
I agree, and I wouldn’t even make that exception for pulled pork or chopped beef. (Although I generally do put a little vinegar finishing sauce or Lexington style barbecue sauce on it.)
The Carolinas tend to be very narrow in their interpretation of barbecue. Elsewhere, it refers to the cooking process and it can be many types of meat (beef in Texas, mutton in Western Kentucky, pork and beef in Kansas city, etc. Also, chicken and turkey makes appearances throughout menus.) I guess if see “barbecue sandwich” on the menu, to me it means chopped or pulled pork (usually butt or picnic, both part of the shoulder). But if I were served spareribs, rib tips, hot links, etc., cooked low and slow with wood somewhere in the process, I’d collectively call that “barbecue.”
Wanna go the whole hog? Check out how the Cubans do it.