Project America: BBQ
Posted by Ruth on July 27th, 2010
Welcome to another instalment of Project America: my ongoing quest to finally experience first-hand all the quintessentially American pastimes I grew up watching on TV in Australia.
One of my American friends frequently criticises my use of the word “barbeque” (or “barbecue” as he would spell it). He insists that the big greasy brick thing in your backyard is a “grill”, when we chuck a snag or chop on it we’re “grilling” (what we call “grilling”, he would call “broiling”) and when we invite our friends round to eat them, it’s a “cookout”.
While he obviously just doesn’t respect the ancient cultural tradition that is the “Aussie barbie” (a ritual handed down from generation to generation in which at least five Australian males stand around a Webber grunting things like, “You need to poke holes in it!” and “Don’t turn it yet!” and fight over the tongs until everything turns black, then present their offering to the Australian females with the sacred chant, “Aw, it’s just a little charred” and the final “smothering of the blackened meat in Rosella” ceremony), it’s true that “barbeque” in America means something very different to our idea of throwing a few lamb skewers on a hot plate for ten minutes.
Barbequing in America is the process of slow-cooking meat — whole hogs, pulled pork, buffalo ribs, beef rump, beef brisket, chooks — over a wood fire. And when I say “slow”, I mean anywhere from five to 20 hours. You may reckon your Aunt Deb gets a bit heavy-handed with her chicken satay sauce, but these guys marinate the shit out of their meat. I mean they use giant syringes to inject fruit juice, molasses, herbs and spices deep into entire dead animals.
photo by BBQ Junkie
And like everything in America, it is also a highly competitive, highly lucrative “sport”. I actually became slightly addicted to watching the BBQ Championship Series show they used to show on the Lifestyle Food channel when I was in uni and watching a lot of day-time TV. Fat Southerners marinating and cooking up huge chunks of meat over hickory and mesquite for days to win a $75,000 prize is strangely compelling viewing when your other option is writing a 4000-word essay on how globalisation has affected the world coffee trade (or whatever the hell I studied at uni).
photo by cbruno
So with my friend’s lectures and my prior fascination with American barbeque in mind, this seemed like the perfect challenge for the next installment of Project America.
Just one catch: I’m a vegetarian.
Fortunately, if a food exists in Portland, it probably also exists in vegetarian or vegan form. You can get vegan corn dogs, vegan cheese plates, vegan ice-cream sundaes, vegan White Russians, vegan chicken fried steak and vegan poutine. You can sure as hell get vegan barbeque.
And if a food exists in Portland, it is probably also being sold from a food cart.
So last week, I made my way down to the Homegrown Smoker vegan BBQ cart at Portland State University to get the closest thing to real barbeque as I can stomach with my self-righteous meat-free ways.
These folks take the same principles of regular barbequing and replace the meat with vegan proteins — tempeh, tofu, “soy curls” (I’ll ‘splain inna sec), faux meatloaf and sausage — which they marinate and slow-smoke over fruit wood, then serve up with a range of veganised traditional sides like mac ‘n cheese, coleslaw, baked beans, sweet potato fries, corn bread, chilli and Frito pie.
I was served by a charming father-son duo, who were more than happy to introduce me to the world of barbeque. I ordered some tempeh ribs, soy curls (I’ll get there!), collard greens, baked beans, ‘slaw and molasses corn-bread.
That seemed like a decent amount to sample, but then something on the menu caught my eye.
“What are ‘STFU puppies’?”
“Do you know ‘hush puppies’?” asked the floppy-haired son. “Nope.” “Well, it’s basically corn meal and vegetables ground up, rolled into a ball and battered… then deep-fried!”
It sounded entirely hideous and I just had to try one.
While the dad cooked up my order, I chatted with the floppy haired son about local vegan bakeries, hardcore bands and how to travel through Asia sans-meat (he was about to go to Japan, which I’ve heard is tough for veg*ns, but entirely doable).
The people on BBQ Championship Series would probably eat their barbeque on an old deck chair on a porch somewhere, but I was in the middle of PSU, so I found a bit of concrete in the shade and opened up my bounty.
Let’s start with the “meat”. Do non-vegetarians generally know about tempeh? I forget. Tempeh is a fermented soybean thing, like tofu, but instead of the beans all being blended into mush, they retain their bean-y shape and texture in this big brick-like cake. A lot of people don’t like it, because if it’s poor quality or cooked badly, it’s bitter and gross. But tempeh done well is really delicious. And let me tell you: barqbeque tempeh is tempeh done well. The tempeh strips held the smokey flavour really well, and the dense, chewy texture is perfect for that “beefy” feel. They were slathered in a really sweet, hot and spicy home-made bourbon BBQ sauce (nothing like the cheap, artificial Masterfoods squeezy bottle stuff I’ve had in the past), but you could still taste the flavour underneath.
So: soy curls. Us veg*ns generally eat a wide variety of textured vegetable protein or textured soy protein products (actually, so do you, because they use that shit to cheaply fill out lots of commercial meat products). At home, it’s generally just sold in different sized dehydrated chunks, which you then rehydrate with boiling water or flavoured stock and use in place of chicken or beef or whatever. It’s one of many ways to make “mock meat” (you can also use wheat gluten, yuba, tofu, mushrooms and I’m sure other things), and in Australia, you most commonly see it used in fake mince products (both Las Vegan bakery and Lord of the Fries use it in their burgers, but I’m struggling to think of any other Melbourne veg places that really use it… oh wait, Lentil as Anythings do an awesome “soy nugget” curry with it sometimes. But you don’t see it so much in restaurants). Over here, they sell it in curly little shapes under the name “soy curls” and is fairly ubiquitous at vegan eateries. I don’t generally find it that exciting, and was tossing up between the curls and tofu (tofu I find very exciting), but I asked floppy haird son for his advice, which was, “Oh, soy curls, any day of the week!” So soy curls it was.
apologies for the terrible picture
Good choice, floppy haired son. The soy curls had clearly been marinated really well, and although the smoke flavour was a bit subtler, they were moist and tender and chewy, with the slight stringy-ness of chicken (without the gross dead chicken-ness of chicken).
At Aussie barbies, the sides are just as (if not more) important as the burnt crap on the grill. I don’t know about American barbeque, but I’m willing to guess they take it just as seriously. So I’ll give them an equally thorough run-down:
I was most interested to try the baked beans. I love baked beans at home. Not so much the canned SPC variety these days (though I grew up on them), but I’m a big fan of the house-made beans many Melbourne brunch places do, and I regularly make my own (admittedly I rarely actually bake them, though. Frying pan is quicker). Despite the popularity of beans here, it is not a breakfast food in this country, except in huevos rancheros, but that is a very different thing. These American baked beans looked like my baked beans, but they were not at all the same. Sweet. Oh so sweet. Like they’d been cooked in fruit juice. Turns out, American baked beans are made with molasses and ketchup (and usually bacon, though obviously not in this case), not the tomato sauce the very British baked beans we eat are. Ah.
Speaking of molasses, my meal came with a huge chunk of molasses corn bread. Now, corn bread I’ve already had a few times here, and despite not usually being a massive fan of corn or bread in their own right, I quite like it. This version was probably too sweet and molassesy for me, and I’m not the sort of person who needs a starchy carb with every meal, so I didn’t really waste valuable stomach real estate on it, but I can generally recommend corn bread as a nice side. The other times I’ve had it, it has come fresh and warm out of the oven and was served with butter (once with strawberry butter which is crazy good).
I’ve eaten plenty of greens in my time, but I watched the movie Precious on the flight over, and there’s this bit where the mum yells, “How am I supposed to eat pig’s feet with no collard greens?” so I figured I better try some real American collard greens if they’re so important. These were, thankfully (and at this point, kind of surprisingly), not sweet at all. Collard greens taste somewhere between silverbeet and cabbage. These were stewed very simply with a bit of tomato. I would guess they’re so important in Southern cuisine because they’re one of the few umami flavours to contrast all the other incredibly sweet and spicy dishes. Despite the impression you may get from all the junky food I write about, I do actually eat loads and loads of very simply cooked vegetables, so I very much enjoyed my simple collard greens.
I was interested to see if coleslaw was any different on this side of the globe. It isn’t. Even (I’m presuming) made with “vegannaise”, this was a good, simple coleslaw, the same as the one your mum makes (unless she’s one of those mums who ruin coleslaw with nasty little raisins). Actually, the few ‘slaws I’ve had here have all been a bit less heavy on the mayo than you’d find back home, and seem to have a bit more vinegar, which I prefer. Mayonnaise is definitely a less popular condiment here. Ranch sauce commands a much bigger space on grocery store shelves.
And finally, we come to the hush puppy. I was expecting to find this starchy and bland. “Tater tots” (potato gems) are a bizarrely popular bar and snack food in this town, and for some reason, I imagined something similar. Hells no. I bit into the deep-fried crust, and the filling was a soft, creamy blend of savoury flavours offset by the slight sweetness of the cornmeal. The whole thing was dunked in a wickedly rich and thick home-made Louisiana-style remoulade (bit like tartar). My intention was to just sample a bite (in the interests of journalism, you see), but I was physically incapable of stopping myself from wolfing down the entire thing. It was outrageously good.
Lest you think I’m a complete glutton, I did manage to restrain myself from ordering their dessert of coconut-fried Oreos (I’m pretty sure that isn’t a traditional barbeque food. Now if there’d been some Mississippi mud pie or fruit cobbler…)
I waddled back home and started to drift into a food coma. That is the one thing that remains a mystery about Southern food to me: why is thick, heavy, hot, greasy, creamy food so popular in such a hot and humid climate? Perhaps I should eat more hush puppies to investigate this question more thoroughly.
Verdict: American barbeque is indeed a very different beast to its Australian counterpart. Frankly, I can’t see most Australians having the patience to wait several hours for their snags and steaks — the men would have all killed each other with plastic forks by then. But if you can be bothered, the flavour is absolutely worth it. I do not recommend American baked beans — as a barbeque side-dish or otherwise. I do recommend stewed greens, corn bread and ZOMG Hush Puppies. Finally, in this crazy, culturally mixed up world, it’s nice to know that we’re all united by our love of shredded cabbage in mayo and vinegar.
