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ARROW-CIRCLE-RIGHT My mother taught me how to make our vinegar barbeque sauce. I can still remember the smell of the tangy sauce boiling on our stove when I was a child. In Eastern North Carolina, there are two styles of whole-hog barbeque: The first is the festive pig pickin’, where a barbequed pig that’s been slathered with sauce is set on a bar and people pick off what they want. The second is when the whole hog is chopped — the meat is pulled from the bones and skin, the skin is toasted into cracklin’, and the meat and cracklin’ are then chopped up and seasoned. The same ingredients — cider vinegar, brown sugar, salt, black pepper and red pepper flakes — are used to season both styles of whole-hog barbeque. However, for the pig pickin’, the sauce is mopped on the pig during the final hour of cooking. For the chopped barbeque, the sauce ingredients are added to the meat one at a time, just before serving. We recommend using this sauce to season whole hogs for a pig pickin’, barbequed whole turkey or baby back ribs. It makes about one gallon of sauce, enough to season one 150-pound hog, three 18- to 20-pound turkeys or eight racks of ribs. – Ed Mitchell

Hungry Like a Wolf

By David W. Brown Andrew Caskey never expected to help spark a culinary renaissance in North Louisiana. After all, he came from a family of welders, not cooks. But because of his food truck, Bad Wolf BBQ, and its award-winning brisket, the college town of Ruston has become the Louisiana outpost of a modern barbecue movement sweeping across Texas. All it took was some dedication, artistry, entrepreneurial spirit — and weekends off work. “I always had a love for it in the backyard,” Caskey told me. “Barbecue takes hours, and I would just do it whenever I had time off work — making an event out of it, basically, for myself.” He would sometimes plan out entire days based around cooking whole briskets that take 16 hours or more to cook. “I’m a very slight perfectionist,” he said with a laugh. But for him, barbecue was a passion project and a creative outlet. “Sometimes I would spend that much time on something, and then realize, ‘Oh, this didn’t turn out that great!’ It inspired me to tinker with my recipes and techniques as a hobby.” In turn, he said it slowly developed into “something that I was borderline obsessed with,” and he became passionate about devel oping this skill that would improve over time. Getting time to do it, though, was hard. Caskey worked in the oil field industry, like his brother, father, uncles, grandfather and great-uncles. At the start of his career, he did directional drilling, boring beneath roads and wetlands and such for pipeline construction. It was good work for a while, but when things slowed in Louisiana, he changed jobs so that he wouldn’t have to travel all over

ED’S EASTERN NORTH CAROLINA VINEGAR BBQ SAUCE Serves 12 • Prep Time: 15 minutes Cooking Time: 10 minutes

WHAT YOU WILL NEED: 1 gallon apple cider vinegar

1 cup red pepper flakes, plus more if needed 1 cup packed dark brown sugar, plus more if needed 1 cup hot sauce (True Made Foods Cayenne Hot Sauce), plus more if needed 1 cup smoked paprika 1 cup kosher salt, plus more if needed 2 tablespoons freshly ground black pepper 1 tablespoon minced garlic HOW TO PREP: Combine all the ingredients in a container and stir until the sugar has dissolved. Taste and add more salt, red pepper flakes, hot sauce, or brown sugar to suit you. Just before applying, strain the sauce through a fine-mesh sieve.

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