Linkdown: 5/6/20

Prime Barbecue in Knightdale officially opened its doors Tuesday, 5/5, and you can pre-order your food on its website 48 hours in advance of your desired pickup

Raleigh’s Ole Time Barbecue is doing a few new things during the pandemic including donating eggs from their personal chicken coop, preparing meals for frontline workers and running their $5 ‘pay it forward’ program that customers can donate to

Barbecue restaurateurs in Southern Illinois have come together to feed frontline medical workers

In a rare bit of good COVID-19 news, Portland’s Smokehouse Tavern back

Clark’s Barbecue in Kernersville, NC is one of likely many barbecue restaurants experiencing meat shortages

Evan LeRoy of LeRoy and Lewis Barbecue has started his own barbecue podcast, the New School BBQ Podcast

Congrats to Hanna Raskin of the Charleston Post and Courier for winning the Jonathan Gold Local Voice Award from the James Beard Foundation

If you haven’t watched the “How Do You ‘Cue” Episode of “Somewhere South”, do yourself a favor and check it out, particularly the Florida section on smoked mullet

Friday Find: Tracing Barbecue from West Africa to Chicago’s South Side on the Sporkful podcast

Food writer Michael Twitty, writer behind The Cooking Gene, explores the origins of barbecue with Sporkful host Dan Pashman.

“They call [BBQ] suya in West Africa,” Michael says. “Suya, dibi, and piri piri are all little parts of what we would consider the barbecuing system in the [American] south.”

Then, in a kind of part 2 from last week’s podcast from Gravy, Pashman heads to the south side of Chicago to explore how that barbecue tradition migrated during the Great Migration out of the American South in the mid 1900’s. There, he speaks with Gary Kennebrew of Uncle John’s BBQ, who still identifies as being southern.

In fact, Garry is originally from Alabama, and he moved to Chicago with his family, when he was nine.

“Alabama will always be my home,” Garry says. “[But] I have grown to like Chicago.”

For more on the Sporkful, check out their previous episodes here. We previously featured a podcast from them on a pitmaster from Centerville, TN who moonlights as a preacher on Sundays.

Friday Find: Smoking on the Southside

Chicago barbecue is a less heralded style of barbecue that has origins in the American South but is only found in the southside of Chicago. Primarily rib tips (a remnants of a St. Louis cut rib) and sausage links, they are smoked in a steel and glass “aquarium” smoker that allows for year-round smoking in the harsh Chicago winters. I’ll link to another podcast next week with more on this style of barbecue but for now, here’s a short podcast from the Southern Foodways Alliance’s Gravy podcast.

Barbecue purists from the Carolinas to Texas might balk at the notion that Chicago, Illinois, has a barbecue tradition all its own. But owing to the Great Migration, and to a special piece of equipment called the aquarium smoker, reporter-producer Ambriehl Crutchfield finds that Chicago barbecue has evolved into a style unto itself.

Link to episode

Linkdown: 8/8/18

– Sadly, the NC Historic Barbecue Trail joint Jack Cobb BBQ and Son in Farmville is closing on August 18

– All aboard the barbecue train!

Fans can hop on the BBQ express for less than $100 a person and travel through spectacular mountain views. Passengers onboard will get their own basket of Southern-style barbeque goodness with hand-pulled pork slider, a couple pork ribs, and chicken drumstick accompanied by baked beans and house-made coleslaw.

And, of course, no respectable Southern barbeque would forget to warm up some apple cobbler for dessert.

– Both Speedy and Monk are quoted throughout this article from Million Mile Secrets on Best BBQ in USA: 25 Joints You Can’t Miss

– James Beard-award winning writer Adrian Miller is writing a book on black-owned barbecue joints and has started his research

– You can walk in or fly in to Stanton’s Barbeque in Bennettsville, SC near the NC/SC border

– A short review of Prosser’s Bar-B-Que, a restaurant with a barbecue and seafood buffet in Murrells Inlet (near Myrtle Beach)

– Mighty Quinn’s, who has expanded to 15 locations across the world, has launched a franchising program in aims of becoming the “Chipotle of barbecue”

– Good to know if you are making this drive:

– Aka “the dream”

– Speaking of Texas barbecue, if actor Ike Barinholtz didn’t know about Barbecue Twitter before, he sure does now (click on tweet to read the literally hundreds of replies)