Page 10 - Barbecue News Magazine SEPT 2020

barbecue books
“Award-Winning BBQ Sauces and How to
Use Them” & “Sweet Savory Spicy”
Doug Mosley
Resident Book Guru
doug_mosley@hotmail.com
If you were to walk to your pantry right now, how many bottles and jars of barbecue sauce do you have on hand? Is it more than 10? More than 20? Go ahead, you go count yours and I’ll go count mine.
Got ‘em counted? I had 26, counting the open ones in the refrigerator. Among the names are Montgomery Inn, Arthur Bryant’s, Jack Stack, Big Bob Gibson’s, Head Coun- try, Rudy’s, Salt Lick, Franklin, Sweet Baby Ray’s, Gates, Stubbs and a Canadian brand made with
maple syrup that someone brought back to
me from a north of the border vacation.
There’s even an open jar of Pioneer Woman
barbecue sauce in my fridge that someone
gave me as a gift, probably meant in jest al-
though its actually not bad. At the moment,
though, there’s no squeeze bottles of home-
made sauce and that’s a bit unusual. For
while I like to try all the different sauces
available on the retail market, I really enjoy
making my own, experimenting with this
flavor or that to see what is most appealing
on various smoked meats. I owe that curios-
ity to “Paul Kirk’s Championship Barbecue Sauces”, a book released in 1997 and authored by the well-known Baron of Barbecue. Kirk’s book was like barbecue sauce zen and as I learned of his approach to sauce-making the inspiration to
make my own was planted.
There’s been dozens of books on sauces released since then, many of them reviewed positively in this space. It seems like most of them are just a collection of recipes without much more to offer. It’s rare when the author seems to speak to you through the pages the way Paul Kirk did to me so many years ago. But a new release, “Award- Winning BBQ Sauces and How to Use Them: The Secret In-
gredient to Next-Level Smoking” by Ray Sheehan ($21.99, Page Street Publishing, 176 pp.), in many ways speaks to the reader much like Kirk did. However, this book goes in an entirely different direc- tion, albeit a risky one. This is a book about barbecue sauce, yet it has recipes for only 10 sauces.
Some may say Sheehan is taking a mighty risk in a book on barbecue sauces with just 10 sauce recipes. After all, there are some encyclopedic volumes on the topic that easily top 200 recipes and more. I say
Sheehan knew exactly what the market needed: a quality book with tried-and-tested recipes that is actually useable and useful. Job well done.
Sheehan – disclaimer: he is a contributor to this publica- tion although I don’t know him and gave no weight to that in this review – knows what he’s talking about when it comes to sauce as evidenced by the “Best BBQ Sauce in the World” honor earned by his BBQ Buddha Memphis Mop BBQ Sauce, his role as pitmaster of the BBQ Buddha com- petition team and as certified KCBS judge. All that certainly supplies the necessary chops and he put his rep on display in these pages. The premise of the books is 10 chapters, each one helmed by a sauce and followed by five recipes with which to best use the sauce. As an example, in the chapter Sweet & Smoky Kansas City BBQ Sauce, he in- cludes a recipe for Brisket Burnt Ends; in Alabama White BBQ Sauce, there’s Smoked Chicken Halves; in Bold Texas BBQ Sauce, there’s Texas-Style Beef Brisket. Don’t let those
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SEPTEMBER 2020