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    Virgil's Barbecue Road Trip Cookbook: The Best Barbecue From Around the Country Without Ever Leaving Your Backyard
    Virgil's Barbecue Road Trip Cookbook: The Best Barbecue From Around the Country Without Ever Leaving Your Backyard
    Virgil's Barbecue Road Trip Cookbook: The Best Barbecue From Around the Country Without Ever Leaving Your Backyard
    Ebook386 pages3 hours

    Virgil's Barbecue Road Trip Cookbook: The Best Barbecue From Around the Country Without Ever Leaving Your Backyard

    By Neal Corman and Chris Peterson

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    Open Virgil's Barbecue Road Trip Cookbook and you'll find a winning mix of barbecue and grilling recipes plus perfect summer sides for quick weekday dinners and relaxed weekend entertaining. Tapping the secrets of the best ‘cue from Texas, North Carolina, Kansas City and Memphis, Virgil's has tested and tasted it all until the ninety-eight recipes in this book are foolproof for home cooks and backyard grillmasters.
    Virgil's Barbecue Road Trip Cookbook has the instructions you need for anything you're in the mood for: get serious and do some smoking, in either a basic kettle grill or dedicated smoker, or stay casual and sample some rubs and marinades for succulent grilled meat, fish or vegetables.
    You'll make
    --Beef: from True Texas Brisket to Chicken Fried Steak with Country Gravy to a Kansas City Burnt Ends Sandwich
    --Pork: from Baby Back Ribs to Boston Butt (the Virgil's Way) to Slow-smoked Ham
    --Poultry: from Classic Pulled Chicken to Kansas City Fried Chicken to Jerk Chicken
    --Rubs, Marinades and Sauces: from Virgil's meal-making Universal Flour to Carolina Vinegar Sauce to Alabama White Barbecue Sauce

    Surrounded by unstoppable sides and sweets, such as Southern Accent Cheddar Grits, Georgia Pecan Rice and Virgil's Perfect Banana Pudding, Virgil's barbecue is about to change the way you eat and entertain: this food will make you happy!

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateApr 8, 2014
    ISBN9781466837249
    Virgil's Barbecue Road Trip Cookbook: The Best Barbecue From Around the Country Without Ever Leaving Your Backyard
    Author

    Neal Corman

    NEAL CORMAN is the Corporate Executive Chef of the Alicart Restaurant Group, where he's been since 2010. He is the author of Virgil's Barbecue Road Trip Cookbook. He is responsible for maintaining the quality of every piece of meat that comes out of Virgil’s 1,400-pound Southern Pride smokers.

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    Reviews for Virgil's Barbecue Road Trip Cookbook

    3.5/5

    3 ratings2 reviews

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    • 4/5
      This is a cookbook about a restaurant and unlike one of the restaurant cookbooks I reviewed earlier this year, this book makes me want to visit Virgil's. The food sounds great.According to the cookbook, and until I visit the restaurant I can't say otherwise, Virgil's presents every kind of barbecue found in the USA all on one menu. Beef, pork and chicken, wet or dry prep, assorted sauces, and the best sides. A visit sounds like quite an adventure.I am not so sure about the recipes in this book, though. Some of them seem too simple. But I expect they are all well-tested and that you can't go far wrong using them. This book might be a great gift for a new homeowner, perhaps, to celebrate finally having the space to grill.One negative point: the "aw shucks" tone of the text gets wearing after a while. It seemed friendly in the introductory text but once into the recipes a more professional tone would be have been welcome.I received a review copy of Virgil's Barbecue Road Trip Cookbook by Neal Corman (St. Martin's Press) through NetGalley.com.
    • 4/5
      Different parts of the country have their versions of BBQ and this book covers most of the major BBQ areas. Both home cooks and backyard grillmasters would be tantalized with the recipes from Texas, North Carolina, Kansas City and Memphis. The book also gives a lot of advice and information on how to BBQ and pick the best equipment for your needs.This was a fun and very informative cookbooks that I believe would be useful for all BBQ fans.This book was received from Net Gallery in Kindle format in return for an honest review

    Book preview

    Virgil's Barbecue Road Trip Cookbook - Neal Corman

    INTRODUCTION

    The Hunt for Mouthwatering Barbecue

    Virgil’s Real Barbecue Restaurant stands at the Crossroads of the World, better known as New York City’s Times Square. That makes a lot of sense, given that Virgil’s was founded by restaurateur Artie Cutler as a kind of crossroads of barbecue. Back in 1994, there wasn’t any authentic barbecue to be had in the Big Apple, and Artie wanted to bring the real deal right to the heart of the city he loved so much. It was a grand vision and a big challenge.

    He knew that getting it right would mean some digging. You see, authentic barbecue is like a big old tree that grows from four different regional roots: Memphis, the Carolinas, Kansas City, and Texas. Artie understood that, and he wanted his restaurant’s menu to feature signature dishes from all of those places. But developing the perfect menu and cooking everything just the way a local pitmaster would meant heading right to the source, actually visiting each region and checking out every different kind of barbecue, up close and personal.

    So Artie set out on a road trip with his chef, general manager, and business partners. The gang flew to Memphis, rented a minivan, and started driving. Their motto became follow the smoke, because if you saw a pillar of smoke from the road, there was sure as shootin' bound to be some memorable barbecue right underneath. They’d pull into a dirt parking lot off a two-lane back road, pile out of the minivan, and crowd around some scarred-up picnic table to start tasting whatever was on the menu. They quickly learned to tell good from bad barbecue with just one bite.

    That road trip took Artie’s group across the South, from hole-in-the-wall places that were more smoke than lumber, to larger, legendary barbecue establishments. They ate tons of barbecue, good and bad. They sampled melt-in-your-mouth pulled pork, spareribs dripping with flavor, barbecued beer-can chicken, traditional smoked Texas brisket, and just about everything else that’s ever found its way onto a grill. Over time, they began to really understand exactly what makes good barbecue and what makes great barbecue. They listened, and took notes, and asked for recipes and cooking tips—and, lo and behold, they got them (barbecue folk are nothing if not generous). More road trips followed. The road trips themselves set the stage for the success of Virgil’s Real Barbecue Restaurant—founded in 1994 and still going strong.

    The interior of the Times Square Virgil’s before the chaos—and the fun—begins!

    From the very start, Virgil’s has been about happy people crowding around a table and making memories over great food. It’s about enjoying the company of friends and family in a warm, welcoming atmosphere with the perfect eats on the table in front of every chair. But as happy and satisfied as our customers are, we know that there are a whole lot of people who just can’t make it to the original Virgil’s in New York City or any of our other Virgil’s locations. So we figured we’d gather our best, most popular recipes, put ’em all down in a cookbook, and bring the restaurant to all those people who can’t visit us in person!

    We’ve driven hundreds upon hundreds of miles to find the very best dishes from all four points on the barbecue compass. We’ve filled up notebook after notebook, collected countless recipes and tips, tasted all the cooking we could find, and talked to pitmasters from East Kansas to West Texas. We’ve worked to get it just right because we aren’t about to feed mediocre barbecue to the people we care about. We’ve put the sum of that hard-earned knowledge in this book, so you can cook nothing but the best for the people you care about.

    Racks of ribs waiting for their turn in the smoker, and then onto some lucky customer’s plate.

    Hot-Smoked History

    The truth is, ask three barbecue professionals what makes the best true barbecue, and you’re likely to wind up with three distinctly different answers. At Virgil’s we think it’s easier than that. The right barbecue depends on personal preferences and which regional style seems tastiest to you. Period. Of course, it doesn’t hurt to know a little bit about those different styles.

    When you’re talking authentic barbecue, you’re talking about four regions: Memphis, the Carolinas, Kansas City, and Texas. All are fairly represented in the pages that follow. Each region has its own particular character and way of doing things. That’s a consequence of history. Like America itself, the geography of barbecue has been influenced by immigrants. Early settlers from England, Czech butchers, Old West cow punchers, and Mexican farmhands have all put their stamp on the barbecue of different states. Settlers who found it easier to let their pigs roam, slaughtering and cooking them out in the open, are why pork plays such a big part in Memphis and the Carolinas’ barbecue. The presence of cattle in Texas as far back as anyone can remember is why beef is so important in that region’s ’cue.

    Memphis barbecue is all about the hog and, more often than not, all about ribs. (Matter of practicality—ribs are just easier to handle than a whole hog.) Traditionalists will tell you that Memphis ribs should be served dry and accompanied by the sound of a blues band. Ribs in this part of the country are treated only with a dry rub before cooking, and they are generally eaten without sauce. This lets the meat’s incredibly rich natural flavor shine through. The spices and smoke used in barbecuing Memphis ribs are meant only to accent the natural sweetness of the pork. If a sauce is served with the ribs, chances are it’ll be pretty understated, with ketchup used as a base. They may serve them dry in Memphis, but we don’t mind when our customers slather sauce over our ribs. Eat ’em how you like ’em.

    The Carolinas, on the other hand, tend to go whole hog. The most common Carolina barbecue is super-tender pork pulled and chopped to a fine consistency. Unlike in Memphis, sauce in the Carolinas is considered religion, and regional variations abound. Basically, though, you’ll find three types: vinegar-based sauces with strong peppery seasonings and chili powder that will make the sauce red and hot; sauces based on tomato or ketchup, creating a sweeter, tamer flavor; and mustard-based sauces with a hot body and complex flavors.

    Barbecued chicken is just about as good as a bird can get.

    Texas is all about the steer. Beef cuts dominate and, where once upon a time a whole cow would be slow cooked over a pit, modern Texas barbecue centers on the easier-to-handle and easier-to-cook brisket. Authentic Texas barbecue is usually served dry, so that dry rub spices (and sometimes, the mop used to baste the meat during cooking) add flavor to the meat while it’s barbecuing and help keep it moist. Texas is the biggest state in the union, which means that you’ll see a lot of variation on that theme. You can still find roadside meat markets that serve up barbecued sausage just like the good ol’ boys used to do—all alone on white butcher paper with crackers or white bread as a side. Any time a Texas barbecue joint serves up a sauce, it’s likely to be tomato-based and smoky (keep in mind that Texas borders the land of the ancho chili and chipotle). You’ll also find devoted grill jockeys in the Longhorn State, men who like nothing better than a nice juicy steak cooked rare over direct heat. And who

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