Road trippers sample delectable barbecue

Sunday, August 26,

We've been rib riding.

Rib riding is a journey devoted to sampling true barbecue — pork ribs, mostly. Beef brisket and pulled pork. Sometimes chicken or even turkey.

On Aug. 4, we drove from Eau Claire to Alma, Alma to Nelson, Nelson to Luck, Luck to Rice Lake, and Rice Lake home to Eau Claire.

Miles: 294.7.

Riders: Four, including a Floridian and a native Texan.

Restaurants visited: Six.

Total hours: 9 1/2.

Aggregate number of barbecue stains (T-shirts only): 19.

Barbecue wannabes

There's true barbecue in all its varieties, from North Carolina to Texas. And then there's what "The Slow Food Guide to Chicago" (Chelsea Green, 2004) calls "Meat Jell-O."

Meat Jell-O is a wickedly witty name for what most restaurants not located in the South's barbecue belt call barbecue: tough cuts of meat braised or stewed until falling from the bone. The meat gets quivery-soft and often thready.

It's nearly always served coated in barbecue sauce, which accounts for most of its flavor. Any smokiness typically comes courtesy of a bottle: liquid smoke.

Such dishes can be good. But they're not barbecue.

Barbecue takes time

True barbecue is meat cooked dry and very slowly at high humidity and low temperatures — typically 200 to 240 degrees Fahrenheit — in the presence of smoldering hardwoods.

To accomplish this, restaurants need special equipment, usually a smoker dedicated to cooking barbecue.

They also need the most important barbecue ingredients: time and patience.

At such temperatures, spareribs take six to eight hours, pork shoulder eight to 12 hours, and a whole brisket up to 18 hours to become what barbecue should be.

Meats should emerge wonderfully tender and moist, but with a pleasing texture that is denser and firmer than braised or stewed meat. Barbecue experts insist that the meat have "chew."

If it's pork ribs, the meat ought to cling to the bone but be ready to separate neatly with a gentle tug.

In true barbecue, the flavors come mostly from the meat, the smoke, and the magic of cooking slow and low. Spice rubs and sauces may help impart character but shouldn't dominate.

Try true barbecue without sauce first. If it wants extra moisture or extra zing, sauce it later.

The best barbecue needs no sauce at all.

Pier 4 Cafe & Smokehouse, Alma

This is a happy place, with owners into fun battery-driven knickknacks (a flying pig!) and servers who work in pajamas and fuzzy slippers on designated Saturdays.

We love it.

Dave and Marietta Malrick recently added a Southern Pride smoker to their tiny kitchen. Their barbecue reflects the restaurant's generosity and spirit.

The pulled pork dinner was a massive jumble of hickory smoke-licked spikes and chunklets, with an excellent ratio of outside "bark" to tender inside meat.

The brisket came precision-sliced into huge a-inch-thick slabs larded with firm, flavorful, smoky fat and gorgeously edged with a blackened salty crust and a beautiful pink smoke ring.

Though very tasty, our portion was also unyielding and somewhat dry in the chew: not succulent enough to be delicious. It likely needed longer — and lower? — smoking.

The sparerib rub is spicy — not burning hot, but quite peppery, with a glow of cumin and an insistent fresh sharpness that might be turmeric or dry mustard. The rub is laid on thick and emerges from the smoker as a dryish paste. Some might like to scrape it off.

With rub or without, these ribs are well worth eating: meaty, lean, richly smoky and tender enough, though longer smoking would have helped here too.

J & J Barbecue & Catering, Nelson

J & J's makes the best baby back ribs we've had anywhere.

Owners Jim and Laura Grandy know barbecue and pork. They owned a pig farm in Minnesota in the 1970s. And Jim has been smoking pork ribs and shoulder for 30-some years.

It shows.

Jim's ribs aren't pretty. They come smoke-blackened and speckled with smoke-blackened grit from his light pepper-and-salt rub.

But sliced into individual ribs, they reveal glistening meat with lovely deep-pink smoke rings.

Jim must be a patient man. He smokes his ribs far beyond merely done to a state of tender inner moistness, a remarkable absence of fat and perfect tug and chew. He beautifully balances smoke, salt, spice and porky flavor. Rib heaven.

J & J's also serves huge smoked sandwiches of OK beef bottom round or good pulled pork in a honey-smoothed South Carolina-style mustard sauce, $4.

Major bonus: J & J's has an astonishing selection of Timm's Dairy ice cream out of Eau Claire: 16 varieties, including Salted Nut Roll, Palmer House, Licorice and Pecan Pie, $2 per huge double dip.

Hog Wild Barbecue & Grill, Luck

Dave and Sharry Swenson went into barbecue whole hog.

They got their start moonlighting in what is arguably barbecue's most difficult and demanding task: slow-smoking whole pigs.

When the local textile mill business got dicey, they quit their day jobs and decided — you guessed it — to go Hog Wild.

Not surprisingly, pork is still a strength. They lightly dust bone-in shoulder with a peppery rub, smoke it until dark and chewy outside and moist within, remove all fat, and pull meat and bark into largish shards. Excellent.

Their spareribs had satisfying smoky flavor but were drier in spots and somewhat chewier than the best.

The brisket needed work. The handful on our plate was flabby and stringy, with a greasy mouth feel. But Hog Wild's smoked-roasted chicken was terrific: subtly seasoned, mildly smoky, exceptionally moist.

Coming next month (Sept. 23): Main Street BBQ in Rice Lake and Mike's Smokehouse and Famous Dave's, both in Eau Claire.

Main Course, the Leader-Telegram's restaurant review column, runs the fourth Sunday of the month. Diners' Notebook, a sampling of favorite restaurant offerings, runs the second Tuesday of the month.