Читать книгу BBQ For Dummies - Carey Bringle - Страница 25

When cooking great barbecue, start with a good cut of meat. You don’t have to be rich, and you don’t need a personal butcher. You do need to understand the basics of what you’re looking for.

With some forms of barbecue, meat selection is everything. A prime example of this is beef. When cooking great beef barbecue, top grades are extremely important. Waygu or prime produce a seriously superior barbecue to lower-grade cuts. For beef, it’s all about the marbling.

Any cut of pork generally has enough fat content to produce great barbecue. You don’t need a super-premium, super-expensive cut. Pork butt — the typical barbecue cut — is very forgiving.

With any meat, ideally you want to find fresh cuts that haven’t been frozen. If all you can find is frozen, make sure that it was flash frozen, which preserves the integrity of the meat. This is especially true for seafood — you don’t want seafood that has any fishy smell to it.

You can source meat from a variety of places. If you have a great local butcher, see what she has available. If you don’t have a butcher in your neighborhood, check your local grocery store. The big-box retailers typically have larger cuts of meat. Your local grocer typically cuts those large cuts of meat into smaller cuts that are more palatable to someone feeding a family of four.

To understand what to look for, head to Chapter 5, where I explain meat cuts complete with illustrations.