If you had great smoked BBQ you’d certainly know what is so special about it. If we didn’t think it was special we wouldn’t have opened Charlie and Jake’s here in Melbourne, Florida. Yep, in Huntington, Alabama, where our founders come from, they love a good BBQ. When they came here they opened our BBQ restaurant so we could share the great food and so we could all eat it ourselves whenever we want to, just like back home.
When you get meat or poultry it is uncooked. When you cook it you generally don’t just throw it in an oven or on a grill without some seasoning do you? Meats without seasoning are pretty tasteless. When you shake or rub your seasoning on the meat it imparts flavors to the meat that it doesn’t have and sometimes it releases flavors the meat does have. But if you only rub it on the skin or the fat, depending on the meat, typically the flavors from the seasoning don’t completely permeate the meat but stay on the surface.
When you rub BBQ sauce on the meat or the poultry and grill it, the flavor gets seared into the food. Sometimes, though, the outside of the food is done before the inside and the outside gets a little too crispy. That, friends, is the beauty of barbequing smoked meats.
At our restaurant, we only use slow smoked meats. We smoke our meats for hours and while they’re smoking our BBQ flavors are smoking right in. But when you smoke meat, the BBQ flavors seep deep into the meat and when you eat that meat it is so tender it just about falls apart in your mouth. The BBQ flavor is released and flows over your taste buds.
The other great thing about BBQ is that you can give your meat such different flavors, depending on the sauce. You can make your BBQ sauce a little sweet by adding honey, brown sugar or molasses. You can make it tart by using vinegar. Most BBQ sauces are tomato based but some are based with mustard. You can tell because they are a little yellow. You can make it super-hot depending on the peppers you use in your sauce.
The bottom line is that the BBQ sauce can totally change the way the meat tastes in ways that a seasoning can’t do. You get more flavor varieties because in addition to seasonings you have the ability to experiment with liquids as well. Just come on in and have a plate.
Just as you point out if you put meat on the grill sometimes the outside gets finished before the inside does. That is why I enjoy smoked meats a lot more, because everything gets cooked at the same time. When the meat finishes at the same time it just becomes so tender and falls off the bone which is my favorite kind of meat.