Grilling ain't barbecuing

If you live in the South, you had better know the difference between grilling and barbecuing. Even in my own household, I am corrected, as the Big Guy heads out to the backyard with a big slab of meat covered with a secret rub or sauce.  The meat can be a pork butt, brisket, ribs, or some other mysterious piece of meat that will cook for hours, maybe days. You need to understand I am married to a man who brakes for barbecue. Doesn't matter where we are going — if we pass anything selling barbecue, we have to stop. Few roadside barbecue restaurants meet his high standards.

Grilling is simple. You take hamburger meat, hot dogs, brats, chicken or a juicy steak and simply cook them on the backyard grill and serve with potato salad, slaw, and chips. Short, sweet, and delicious. Baby back ribs are a favorite at our house. The Big Guy continues to fine-tune his cooking of ribs. Poems, songs, and books have been written about perfect racks of ribs. Recipes are guarded like treasure. Some rubs and sauces remain forever secret.

Basically, the difference is about temperature and time. Grilling requires a fire and direct heat. Barbecuing is about low and slow. Grilling involves an intense heat of 500 degrees or more, and barbecuing means cooking over low heat of 225 or less with smoke, and for long periods of time.

But wait, it is not just temperature, the barbecue brotherhood will quickly say. You are missing the mystique, the ceremony of real barbecue. It is celebrated in highly contested competitions. Barbecuing is usually used for cuts of meat like baby back ribs, pork shoulder, beef brisket, or whole chickens or turkeys and involves charcoal, wood, rubs or sauces.

So where did the word barbecue come from? Evidently, Spanish conquistadors reported seeing Taino-Arawak and Carib natives roasting, drying, and smoking meat on wooden frames over coals. The frame was called a “babracot.” The Spaniards turned the word to barbacoa and eventually the word we use today — barbecue.

A grill is a grill, but if you are serious about barbecuing, you are probably talking about the Big Green Egg. Egg people tend to hang together or go to Facebook and tell tall tales about their triumphs. It grills, smokes and is an oven.

What is a Green Egg? It is an iconic ceramic cooker, the talk of the barbecue set. First brought to this country by Ed Fisher, it is based on the traditional Japanese charcoal-fueled cookers he first saw in the 1950s as a Navy lieutenant. In 1974 he opened a store in Atlanta selling a simple cooking device made of fire-clay. Learning as he went, he perfected the product that is now the best-selling ceramic cooker on the market.

Little did Fisher know that he would create a group of enthusiasts called Eggheads. Every October they celebrate Eggtoberfest with as many as 1,500 attendees from all 50 states.

Cavem-en may have started it all by cooking meat outside their caves, but now cooking meat outside is a fine tuned art, whether you grill or barbecue.