Product Description

Smoke & Spice, the best-selling and James Beard Award-winning cookbook that revolutionized backyard home cooking, has been completely revised and updated to include 400 recipes. Culinary experts Cheryl and Bill Jamison use their barbecue savvy to show that smoke-cooked barbecue-- what many believe to be "real" barbecue and the province of pitmasters and Southern barbecue joints-- can be mastered by anyone. The first cookbook solely devoted to the subject, Smoke & Spice remains the definitive guide to authentic smoke-cooked barbecue. The book also features information on equipment and techniques, as well as recipes for a variety of rubs, mops, marinades, sauces, appetizers, sides, desserts, and drinks.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #531 in Books
• Published on: 2003-04-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 528 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9781558322622
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

Amazon.com Review
Barbecue is not about grilling food fast over high heat. That's something else, delicious in its own right, but something else entirely. Barbecue is about marginal cuts of meat (for the most part), about smoke, about fires burning so low and slow you hardly ever see the flicker of a flame. Barbecue is about succulent pork ribs as dark as sin just falling off the bone and dripping with glorious sweet pork godliness. Or enjoying the effects that 12 to 18 hours of smoking has on beef brisket.

The trick is, how do you do it? How do you master a cooking technique all but ignored in favor of fast and hot? The answer lies in Smoke & Spice. Authors Jamison and Jamison provide all the information you're ever going to need to run a real barbecue. Tips and techniques abound on every page--accompanied with countless recipes that stretch the barbecue imagination. And seeing that one cannot live on barbecue alone (though that's a challenge well worth considering) there are just as many recipes included for all the good food that accompanies barbecue--from Scalloped Green Chile Potatoes to South-of-the-Border Garlic Soup to Buttermilk Onion Rings and even Bourbon Peaches. If smoke in your eyes makes your mouth water, this is the primer for you! --Schuyler Ingle

From Publishers Weekly
Nine years and a half million copies after its first edition, this handy resource for barbecue done the right way returns in an expanded volume. The Jamisons have added an extra 100 recipes as well as 20 new recipe variations. Classics like a Humble Hot Dog, which demands a bun of "squishy white bread," and Cajun County Ribs sopped in cider vinegar and Worcestershire share the pages with Jerked Salmon done Jamaican style in a sauce of tamarind, honey and ginger. Sometimes worlds collide as with Southwest Stew on a Stick, chili-powdered sirloin glazed in beer and molasses and served as a kebob. Given the proper amount of smoke and time, even the lowliest of meats find dignity, as with the Triple Play Tube Steak, wherein a two-pound chunk of bologna is draped in sauce and smoked for two hours; the sauce caramelizes, making for a sticky-sweet sandwich. An at-first-surprising inclusion is the Kentucky Burgoo, but it turns out to be merely a mix of chicken, beef and lamb, forgoing the possum and squirrel that sometimes turn up in the stew. The authors end the book with a selection of chilly desserts, such as Peach Melba Ice Cream, and cool drinks like Cold Buttered Rum.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Most "barbecue" cookbooks are actually about grilling rather than smoke cooking, which is true barbecue. The Jamisons focus on the real thing, describing in detail the techniques and equipment necessary and offering dozens of tantalizing recipes for barbecuing almost anything. They tend to lapse into the corny tone the topic of barbecuing often seems to inspire and favor recipe names like "Going Whole Hog" or "Ragin' Rabbit," but there's lots of information here, along with plenty of good recipes. Recommended.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

Great book! Some other reviewers are confused
After reading the book almost cover to cover, and then reading most of the reviews, I felt compelled to correct some misunderstandings. First. many of the complaints are from people wanting more instruction on "how to smoke". This is nonsense. There is no need for detailed instruction on how to smoke. What makes smoking a art and skill is being able to produce the right temperature in the smoker and this comes only from practice. Instructions on how much charcoal, wood, water, air, etc to use for each type of smoker, at every external temperature, etc. would look like statistics tables and be equally exciting. For this reason, the authors advise a temperature goal of about 200-220. With a five dollar thermometer and a little practice, anyone can figure it out.
Second, the smoking is a forgiving and inexact process, no matter what your experience level. Cooks used to following exact recipes so their soufle won't fall will always be frustrated by smoking. Smoking requires some monitoring and adaptation. I may have used X amount of charcoal one day, but on a colder day need more.
If you are willing to experiment, and have 5-10 hours then you are ready to smoke, and for everything else, this book is fantastic. If you are from the microwave culture, then you will probably be frustrated with the whole process and no book will save you. To reemphasize the most important point, if you have the aforementioned patience to try smoking, then this book is outstanding.

Excellent Recipes and Background. Good Technique
There seems to be something about barbecue that turns everyone who writes a book about the subject into the very best expert on the subject. On the cover of `Smoke & Spice', Cheryl and Bill Jamison are touted as `America's Outdoor Cooking Experts'. Of course, similar statements and similar broadsheets of praising blurbs appear on the books of Paul Kirk and Steve Raichlen. The authors go a long way to explaining this phenomenon when they open the first chapter with the statement that `Real Barbecue is bragging food... pitmasters develop into natural boasters'. It is important to note that this book is very serious about `real barbecue', as distinguished from grilling, which is a very different thing. Please note that this review is based on the Second Edition published in 2003 by The Harvard Common Press.

As a linguistic purist, I am extremely happy to see that both the Jamison's and Paul Kirk clearly characterize barbecue as a low, steady heat method using hot smoke from wood while grilling is a high heat method where smoke is either incidental or even something to be avoided. The Jamison's even expand the lore of barbecue for me beyond Steve Raichlen's excellent introductory essay in `BBQ USA' when they explain that southeastern (as in North Carolina and Tennessee) pork barbecue and southwestern (as in Texas) beef barbecue arose from two entirely different sources, coalescing around styles developed in Kansas City and Chicago.

As much as barbecue experts like to blow their own horn, they also seem much more willing to credit colleagues with contributions to the field. As the Jamisons are mainstream cookbook authors who happen to be experts on barbecue, they cite virtually the entire pantheon of American food writers, including James Beard, James Villas, Robb Walsh, John Thorne, Calvin Trillin, and Chris Schlesinger.
All of this babble is primarily to indicate that for barbecue fans, this book is great fun to read, even if you don't even look at the recipes. But, if you do look at the recipes, you will find great sources for barbecue excellence.

Part One of the book lays down your barbecue basics, and I strongly recommend that this be read by anyone considering any of these recipes. True barbecue technique is difficult. It may be more difficult to achieve good results as it is to make some of the more arcane creations in the French culinary repertoire. What's worse, it needs equipment that are not standard equipment in an American kitchen, and, it is equipment that MUST be used outdoors. If you do not want to deal with these things, get a book by Bobby Flay and a good grill pan. The authors do briefly discuss stovetop smoking, but assign it a minor role in the world of great barbecue technique.

Part Two contains the recipes. The first chapter covers dry rubs, pastes (wet rubs), marinades, and mops. This collection of condiment recipes is not as extensive as the one found in Paul Kirk's `Championship Barbecue' and it does not include recipes for staples like homemade catsup or homemade Worcestershire sauce, but since Kirk's book is about competition and the Jamison's book is not, you will not find too much overlap if you own both.

The second chapter of recipes covers the pig. Almost every recipes includes it's own recipe for rub, mop, and other mix. For those of you who harbor any doubts about the commitment needed for barbecue, note that almost every recipe begins with the phrase `The night before you plan to barbecue...'. These recipes require a lot of work. They are the sorts of things the average working American family will be able to manage on maybe a few summer weekends a year. A dedicated barbecue hobbyist will probably manage once or twice a week. The pig chapter owes much to the Carolina style of barbecue and includes recipes for a `Carolina Sandwich Slaw', a `Memphis Mustard Slaw', and spice mixes from New Orleans to Los Angeles. The chapter finishes with recipes for what to do with successfully barbecued shoulder. If you have a good commercial source of barbecue, these recipes alone are worth the price of admission.

The third chapter of recipes covers beef. One of the hallmarks of beef barbecue is that it specializes in especially tough cuts of beef such as the brisket, skirt steak, and flank steak as well as ribs. The chapter also covers a fair share of `aftermarket' recipes for hot dogs, hamburger, meat loaf, and hash.

If I were ever tempted to do true barbecue, it would probably be to do lamb. The next chapter covers this plus goat, veal and game meat. Mexican goat barbecue or cabrito is a subject all its own, on which Robb Welsh, for one, has written extensively.

The next chapter covers chicken and other fowl such as turkey, duck, quail, and pheasant. Chapters on fish and vegetables round out the smoking recipes. Oddly, recipes for sauces which many think are essential to barbecue are placed near the back of the book, including a recipe for a famous catsup precursor. The very last chapter includes a great selection of side dish recipes, including slaws, beans, potatoes, greens, biscuits, cornbread, and muffins.

As good as the side dish recipes are, you would probably do as well or better for them with a classic non-barbecue source such as `James Beard's American Cookery' if you were not planning to go the full nine yards with the barbecue technique.

Of the three heavyweight barbecue books I have reviewed, this is the best for true home barbecue, but it is not the very best it could be. For as detailed a technique as barbecue is, requiring very specialized equipment, the total absence of pictures is baffling. If you plan to embark on true hot smoke low and slow barbecue, please find a good survey of equipment such as you may find from Consumer Reports to supplement this book.

Absolute BEST!
This is absolutely the best barbecue book I have ever seen! Warning: This is NOT a cookbook. Of course it has recipes, lots of them. But more importantly to me, it explains *why* certain things are done the way they are, not just what to do. Any robot can add two tablespoons of brown sugar on command, I want to know why rubs do what they do, when to use a mop, how to modify a recipe for a water smoker vs. a log pit. This book does that and MORE. It's cliched to say if you only own one book, but it's true. This is the one.