Smoke & Spice: Cooking with Smoke, the Real Way to Barbecue (Non)

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.

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