What are you most excited about this upcoming year?
Sourcing local meat. Preparing barbecue everyday means that we cook with a lot of meat at the Roadhouse and always have used really good stuff like Niman Ranch and chickens from the Amish farmers in Indiana. As time goes on, we have opportunities to develop our connections to the community, and it has become more and more important to contribute to our community in any and every way possible. We’re working hard to create change in our own small piece of the food system. Finding local meat sources means that we’re looking for producers whose passion matches our own. We look for individuals who have the ability to produce really full-flavored meat. We work with them to select the breeds–old breeds–whose flavor profile satisfies our specifications. We then look to ensure that they are fed a natural diet and raised in a sustainable and healthy manner.

In addition to Cornman Farms, what local farmers and groups are you working with?
Ally Rogers of Roger’s Corner in Chelsea is raising goats for us. Kris Hearth of Old Pine Farm out in Manchester is raising beef, and Marshall Johnson in Jackson is also raising beef. Pork and beef, that I hand-selected, and purchased at the Chelsea and the Washtenaw County 4-H fairs are pasture raised at Cornman Farms as well.

What breeds of pigs, cows and chickens are we using?
Our beef is Angus and Whiteface Hereford, our pork is a Duroc-Hampshire cross, as well as Yorkshire. And finally, our chickens, which come from Homer, MI, are Barred Rock.

Where can I find local meat on the menu at the Roadhouse?
Mostly on the specials at this time, but as more becomes available, we will transition to other menu items to use more of these really good meats. Because we work with local farmers in a relatively small network, dramatically increasing a supply takes time and building long-term relationships. Starting with the work of Cornman Farms (our very own farm, supplying Roadhouse tables with fresh heirloom produce through the growing season and into the winter, and pasture raising heritage sheep, pork and beef), the Roadhouse is slowly building our local supply of heirloom produce and pasture raised meat through relationships with area farmers.

The Roadhouse menu seems like it changes a lot during the year, how do you decide what to put on it, and why?
We typically create 5-8 new specials a week and we find inspiration in many places, including historic cookbooks, in-depth looks at regional American foods, full-flavored ingredients, and the various harvest seasons across the country. In addition, some of our changes occur in the main area of our menu. For example, on our salads, we’re using our connection to local growers and our work at Cornman Farms to adjust recipes to reflect the changing seasons. During the summer, at the height of the tomato harvest, we’re serving hours-old tomatoes on the Roadhouse garden salad. But, in the cold months, we use oven-roasted tomatoes preserved from the harvest at Cornman Farms. What’s available and in season plays a starring role in what we’re serving, because our goal is always to use full-flavored ingredients and serve really delicious, full-flavored food.

What makes the Roadhouse’s work with local farmers and growers so important to the vision of the Roadhouse?
One of our guiding principles at Zingerman’s states, “We are an active part of our community.” Not only is giving back and donating to our community a part of this, but also building bonds within our community and supporting local growers. By finding ways to develop flavorful, heirloom breeds, we’re able to meet two goals at once: impacting our community, and advancing the Roadhouse’s vision of serving really good American food.

It’s a new thing for me, this interest in imperfection. It just sort of happened. It’s strange how stuff can come together like that sometimes; fate finds funny ways of furnishing the material I need to make mental moves forward: things that unexpectedly open intellectual and emotional doors, stuff that helps me stay away from the stagnation of sitting with the status quo for too long. In this case it was a funny bit of nonfiction; burgers inserted themselves, unexpectedly, into the writing of a business book. One of the best things for me about writing as I get to do it here is that I move very freely from food to business and back again. Usually I have at least one essay on each in the works at the same time. I like that a lot—I live the food and the business work every day. And not that many people get to go from mission statements to wild mushrooms the way I do.

Burgers first came to mind last month, not because we were working on new menu items, but as part of the writing work I was doing. One of the eighteen or so essays in the forthcoming Zingerman’s Guide to Good Leading, Part One: A Lapsed Anarchist’s Approach to Building a Great Business is on our “12 Natural Laws of Business” (an essay from which is on page four of this newsletter). Although we’ve been using these “laws” for many years now, I wanted to reground myself in business basics, so I took a few hours out and reread one of my favorite books: Paul Hawken’s Growing a Business. It’s a great resource—down to earth, easy to read, right on, and, not shockingly (I already told you how much I like it), very much aligned with what we do here at Zingerman’s.

Anyways, I was reading it with our 12 Natural Laws (many of which he hits on in his own Hawken-esque way) when I come across his ode to the hamburger. While I remembered the book, and how I felt reading it, very vividly, I’d completely forgotten about this little bit he’d put in on burgers. It’s only a paragraph, but there it is: burgers getting big billing in a business book. “Take a prosaic, everyday, kick-around sort of product,” Hawken wrote, “and make it real again. Hamburgers, for example. There are so many bad hamburgers in this world I venture to say that anyone with a hot grill who makes an honest one with generous portions and fresh fried onions will never lack for customers. In other words, take a product and reduce it to its essence.” I’m sure someone somewhere will argue with Hawken’s hypothesis, but not me. What he described in the book is a huge piece of what we’ve been doing here for nearly thirty years: burgers, bagels, rye bread or brownies, it’s all about taking stuff people know well in mediocre, mass market form and making it into something really special by using ingredients eight steps up from the ordinary.

And that Hawken anecdote is a good lead in to the second of my hamburger happenstances. While I was working on the Natural Laws essay I got a call from Alex Young, chef and managing partner at the Roadhouse. He wanted to share his excitement about all the work he was doing at our farm to take the restaurant’s food quality up a notch. Mind you this wasn’t about developing some new sauce for a special (though that’s good to hear about too), but rather about going back to the basics—actually raising beef: live animals, real feed, and all that fun farming stuff. Alex had bought some steers and was hard at work doing the same sort of stuff with them that he’s done so amazingly well with vegetables over the last four or five years. All that homework to learn about feed, care and animal husbandry . . . it’s work that most of us who cook for a living have heard of but are anything but experts in. We know a wee bit about what to do with good beef once it’s been brought into the kitchen, but raising the animals isn’t something they teach in very many restaurant kitchens. To Alex’s great credit, he’s taken the idea of going back to the roots far deeper than most any other chef around.

Of course everyone reading this—food professional or caring consumer (they do actually overlap of course)—will know, as I do, that the better the beef you use, the better the burger you make with it is going to be. And what Alex is doing is essentially the older style of ranching. He’s headed back to 100 percent grass feeding and the meat is truly tasting fantastic. Interestingly though, it’s not like the beef we’ve been using all along is bad. Fresh Niman chuck we’ve been getting for nearly seven years now is certainly no slouch. It comes from old breeds of English beef cattle, raised mostly on grass and without the now-standard-in-the-commercial-world use of added growth hormone and/or antibiotics, finished on corn, and handled humanely (certified by the Animal Welfare Society out of NYC according to codes crafted by the appropriately well-respected Temple Grandin, who’s been all over HBO of late).

Alex and I have tasted the grass-fed beef from Cornman and the grass-raised, corn-finished stuff from Niman Ranch that we’ve been buying for the Roadhouse since we opened in ‘03. Surprisingly (in a good way), both of them were delicious. Excellent, actually. Not that I need to, but I couldn’t really even say that one was my favorite. The corn-finished is more the flavor that I—and really most of us who didn’t grow up in Argentina, where grass-fed is the norm—were raised on: a touch sweeter, a bit more buttery on the tongue. The grass-fed beef, by contrast, tastes a tad leaner, the finish a bit cleaner. Honestly, they’re both really good. It’s like farmhouse cheddar from England and a comparable one from Wisconsin. Same basic approach, both are good cheeses; some of us like it one way, others another, but either can be excellent.

In both cases we start with fresh whole pieces of chuck, which are ground daily in the Roadhouse kitchen. We like it a bit coarser than most, the better to actually chew, the better to taste the full flavor of the beef. It’s then formed into patties by hand. Too much pressure packs the meat too tightly: most commercial burger meat is almost extruded into a sausage-like paste. When you come in and ask for one, we cook it to order on the grill, over heat generated by real oak logs. The finished burger goes quickly onto one of those really nice little “New Jersey” (soft, square onion rolls) from the Bakehouse and gets served with those double-blanched, freshly made every day fries (which, by the way, you get free refills on).

The third part of the mental trilogy of burger events, the one that pushed me into deciding to actually write this piece and to openly identify as an imperfectionist, was something that came to my mind while I was working on another essay for the business book. This time it was a piece on systems that got me thinking. Burger cooking, in the context of my systems work, is what we call a “craft system.” One in which, no matter how closely you follow it, there’s still a strong element of craft, in essence a bit of art, in the final piece of the work. Where, no matter how hard a mass-market machine-tooler might work at it, there’s just no way to get every product to be 100 percent perfect. You can systematize up to a certain point but there’s still the skill of the artisan, the nuances of nature in the raw material, etc. that bring a bit of variation into play. This, I have to admit, is where my new angle on imperfection comes in. The craft, the beauty of the imperfection . . . . it’s the poetry of the product. Burger preparation and the consummate cooking, the way we do it, is an art to appreciate. We do have a drive up window at the Roadshow for carryout, but the burgers people pick up aren’t in the least industrial.

One way they get the art and imperfection out of the mix in the middle and low end of the food world is often to simply avoid asking how you want your burger cooked—you get it well done, or you don’t get it. I doubt that too many people ever send anything back at a chain restaurant because the burger was “overcooked.” Most of us seem to just accept it as the norm. In any case it’s actually far easier to deliver accurately because restaurants purchase machine-pattied meat, (often frozen), and then cook it on an easier to manage gas-fired (not wood-burning, open flame) surface. Sadly though, you don’t get that nice subtle smoky flavor we like from the oak. Add to that the reality that pre-formed burgers don’t taste as good, the texture is too tight, and at the cost of flavor and transparency, no one (at our end at least) knows where the meat comes from without running something akin to global DNA testing (according to the NY Times, Fast Food Nation, etc..).

Here at the Roadhouse, we’ve opted for a more difficult culinary course, which is to ask the customer how they’d like their burger cooked, and then attempt to deliver it. The challenge is that there’s just no way, perfectionist though I am, to have 100 percent, perfectly cooked-to-order, hand-pattied burgers from the oak-fired grill the way we would handle systemizing the proper packing of a box on our Mail Order production line. The reality is that the hand-pattying, the temperature variation from the wood, the number of other items on the grill, etc. all impact the outcome: the grill cook really has to be skilled at what they do to get the burger properly cooked. In fact, the burger can easily be cooked properly on one side but be a bit under or overcooked on the other, perfect on the left side, slightly too rare on the right. This, I’ve come to realize is the beauty of the beast—the art of the artisan hamburger.

The funny thing is that while in general I’ll probably always strive for perfection, I really pretty perfectly made peace with the reality that traditionally made food is full of what the industrial world would call “faults.” Brown spots on antique apples, slight variations in crust color on artisan bread, the subtle shifts up and down in the flavor of farmhouse cheese from one day’s production to the next. Industry rid us of this problem by producing strictly middle of the road product—everything is the same, every box identical, every apple almost alike. Our work here has been to go back to what the food was like—often imperfect in one way or another but actually far more flavorful; I’ve actually long since come to love the subtle nuances, to bear with and actually appreciate the slight shifts in texture, color, and character that are always there. I know, and we appropriately teach, that every single day’s production and every year’s harvest is actually different. While I still want every loaf at the Bakehouse to be a 10 out of 10, I know that they’re made by hand, baked on the stone hearth, and that the loaves are always more or less special, subject to the vagaries of the weather, whim, and the slightest swings in the hand-speed of the bakers. Same is, for sure, true for cheese, cured ham, artisan salami and smoked fish.

But, somehow, having lived, breathed, cooked, taught and led this artisan activity for nearly thirty years now, even I had failed to realize just how much I’d fallen prey to the mindset of perfectionism when it comes to burgers. I can admit now, in hindsight, that in the inner-workings of my mind, I was still stuck on what is really a mid-20th-century, all-out industrial, fast food mindset about burgers. It’s an image that we’ve long since left behind in other areas; in the bread world we smile and say it was a “Wonder;” in cheese we chuckle and know it’s called “Kraft—with a ‘K’—singles.” The R & D folks get the product just right, then send the formula over to the factory where they make it exactly the same exact way every single day. But with burgers I’d failed to really appreciate the daily variations in texture, a touch of difference in the heat from the wood-burning grill, the slight difference in density that one person prepping might deliver in hand-pattying the freshly ground chuck from the woman who did it the day before.

Honestly, I’m not sure what I was thinking! Truly, this was sort of one those moments where something really “obvious” clicked on with exceptional clarity. What struck me straight upside my very active, if often odd, or maybe inaccurate, intellect is that although most of us, me included, have clearly long since left behind that mass market image of industrially consistent culinary consumption, somehow I was still sort of thinking of burgers as something that should come out with near total—almost unnatural now that I think about it—consistency. But now, thanks to the fates and the three burger appearances in my life last month, I actually see the light. Handmade hamburgers, I now realize, can hardly be expected to turn out identically any more than one ear of heirloom corn is going to come off the stalk exactly like the one opposite. Seriously, it’s actually inhuman—or maybe “impossible” is the right way to write it. (It was in the interest of that identicality that seed companies came up with all those varieties we’re now working very hard to get away from.)

Mind you, this acceptance of imperfection is not an endorsement for inconsistency, nor a back-handed way to say that bad burgers are actually OK. Having a hamburger my way still means that well over- or well under-cooked isn’t alright, and neither are burgers made from mediocre meat or less than great toppings. What we need to do is get the best possible ingredients together, teach the best possible techniques for prepping and cooking, and then follow them as fully as we can. And then, finally, eat each burger with relish (I mean the emotional kind, though you’re welcome to stick a spoonful of the green stuff on there too) and an appreciation for all its little wonderful imperfections. While you obviously want to have consistency—artisan doesn’t mean “anything goes”—that variation is part of what makes it so special. Every time I take a taste of say, Jamie Montgomery’s English farmhouse cheddar, I look forward to finding out what flavors will unfold as I eat. Each day’s cheese is a bit different, most are very good, every once in a while we hit one that knocks my scoring socks off and I give it a ten. The latter mind you, are few and far between. Randolph Hodgson, the man behind Neal’s Yard Dairy scores cheese all day. They do it there on a scale of 1-5 (we use 0-10). In all the years I’ve gone to taste with him I don’t know if I’ve ever seen him score a full-on five. A fair few four and a halfs, a lot of fours, a mess of threes (they don’t make the cut). But fives (or in our case, tens). . . they just don’t happen very often. And when they do, damn, I want to remember them for a long time to come.

With my attitude adjustment has come a deeper sense of appreciation and gratitude. This is my new mindset. The burger cook, like a master baker, at work every day on the grill, putting to work his or her skill, a talent to be cared for, a craft to be appreciated for all its small subtle nuances. To appreciate fully the way the cheese melts off the side or stays slightly firmer, for the feel of the also handmade bun from the Bakehouse as you smush it down around the just off the grill burger. I now look forward to the nuances, appreciate the little things, the subtle changes in color, texture and flavor from each burger the way I do with artisan cheese. Life is richer and more rewarding for it.

I’ve always liked a good burger, far more than, say, filet mignon. I have high respect for foie gras and other fancy foods, but the reality is that I just don’t eat them all that often. What I like to focus on most are the dishes that I could eat daily, or almost daily, stuff I can enjoy with equal relish on a Monday night as I would on a Friday night, with family and out of town guests four days before Christmas. For me, burgers come in near the top of that list. Like a good grilled cheese, a great corned beef sandwich, a perfectly sauced bowl of very al dente pasta, a good fried fish sandwich or hot crispy oysters on the soft, well-dressed, bun of a po’boy… I like to take the foods that people take for granted and get them to a level of goodness that causes people to pause when they experience them; you open your eyes wide, shake your head slowly side to side, smile a bit and then go back, with gusto, for another bite. All the while appreciating the complexity, the interesting flavors, the aroma, the texture. The whole thing sounds like a glass of good wine or a carafe of aged cognac. But in this case, I’m thinking about cheeseburgers.

To check my own reality, as I like to do regularly, I ordered one the other day—Pimento Cheeseburger with Arkansas Peppered Bacon, medium rare (that’s how I like ‘em but you can of course get whatever cheese you want and have it cooked any way you like). You would certainly have grounds to say I’m biased for our burgers, but that said, I’ll tell you that I’m actually consistently one of our harshest critics. This really was a great burger. Mind you I don’t personally feel any need to say it’s “better” than any others—I’m not that competitive. I just want to know that when I (or you or your cousin from Kansas) eat one, it tastes pretty terrifically excellent. I took the first bite, hoping for something really good, and . . . I got it. Warm, clean, fresh tasting beef, a touch of smoke from the oak wood over which it’d been cooked, the creamy spiciness of the pimento cheese (not really melted—just softened a bit from the heat of the burger), and the lightly toasted New Jersey roll from the Bakehouse (it’s nice to have a bun that on the one hand, actually has flavor, but on the other hand, never dominates or intrudes on the flavor of the burger).

The thing with the burgers at the Roadhouse is that people who are eating them for the first time can’t believe that we don’t put something in the meat to make it taste so good. But we don’t—all we add is a touch of salt and pepper but no other spicing or seasonings whatsoever. Which is why their shock at how flavorful the burgers are usually just causes me to smile—it’s a testament to our long standing belief that if you start with really good ingredients your food is going to taste really good. Long time Roadhouse burger eaters are at the other end of the spectrum. Most tell me that they rarely eat burgers anywhere else. (I don’t begrudge if they do and I certainly don’t ask them—it’s just information that they seem to offer up, but I certainly don’t think we’re the only place in the world one can get a good burger.) What I do know is that these really do taste pretty darned good, and that once you get used to eating them, it’s very hard to go back to less flavorful beef.

So write this one down for your next business book. Really good burgers taste really fantastically good, and people really like them! Made by hand, cooked to order, inspiring in their delicious imperfection; the heat of the meat, the softness of the bun, the creaminess of the cheese, or whatever else you put on there, all coming together to make for one really good meal. You can linger over these. Take two bites and stop—eat nothing else for half an hour and I’ll forecast that you’ll still be tasting good things on your tongue. It’s what my friend Randolph Hodgson calls “a thirty miler”—something that still tastes good thirty miles down the road (he spends a lot of time driving, from one cheese farm to another). It’s a good thing. A really good thing.

To quote from one of my favorite food writers, John T. Edge, “We are at this very moment, in the midst of a burger renaissance. Here’s to a healthy appreciation of artisan imperfection, craft foods, a constant drive to improve (thank you Alex!), good grass grazing, and building a great business.

I think the already really good American brunch at the Roadhouse got one step better when this one went on the menu. Of course it’s gonna take two years before people are tuned into this dish, but by then it’s going to be a signature item—unless you’re one of the few folks in Ann Arbor who grew up in Appalachia it’s going to sound strange but it’s a very tasty way to start your day. It’s “gravy” made with bacon and cocoa and milk, generously ladled over homemade buttermilk biscuits. You really did read that right—bacon and cocoa combined into one seriously good sauce ladled over those very nice homemade biscuits. I know this is one of the strangest sounding but, for me, most exciting things on our new food front.

I say “new” but it’s actually only new to us here—down in the Appalachians this is old hat. While it’s hardly universal I’ve come across a whole lot of people for whom chocolate gravy is the norm—they grew up with it. I stumbled on the dish while working on Zingerman’s Guide to Better Bacon; Stories of Pork Bellies, Hush Puppies, Rock ‘N Roll Music And Bacon Fat Mayonnaise. It was one of those culinary footnotes that, when I first heard about it, I thought people were probably playing with me. After all, if you were going to pick two “hot” trendy foods, bacon and chocolate would likely be at the top of the list. And of course when I hear that things are getting ‘trendy’ I tend to go in completely the other direction; as you likely already know, I’m pretty much always driven by tradition not by trends.

Turns out though that chocolate gravy made with bacon fat has been around in Appalachia for a long time. While it’s new to me and 99.7 percent of the other people around here, it’s very familiar comfort food of high order to the small minority of Southerners who grew up with. The quick story of its origin is that it likely dates back about hundred years. Since bacon fat is basically akin to “the olive oil of the South” (see the bacon book for more on that theory), it was used as the base for people’s everyday “gravy” making. (The term “gravy” is generally used down there for any sauce), including the standard milk gravy made for ladling over biscuits. So, back in the beginning of the 20th century when cocoa powder first started to work its way into the American interior it made the otherwise little experienced taste of chocolate accessible in the Appalachians. (If you’re curious, Hershey’s first rolled out its cocoa powder in 1894). Seems likely that looking for a way to add a touch of “luxury” to a rather bare bones life, Appalachian cooks would have added the cocoa to their bacon-based milk gravies. And in the process, chocolate gravy was born.

I’ve got much more written on this dish and its background for the bacon book—email me at ari@zingermans.com and I’ll be glad to send you the recipe. In the mean time you can head out to the Roadhouse on the weekend and we’ll whip you up a plateful of biscuits and chocolate gravy (with the bacon!)—it’s rich, it’s good, and it’s bacon and chocolate combined in one traditional dish! Hard to ask for more!

While the latter is fairly common with stuff like catfish, best I can tell, this makes it completely unique in the bacon world. From what I’ve learned over the years, the rolling wasn’t any big brilliant culinary thing, but really just a practical solution to a practical issue. “In the ‘olden’ days, you would go to the grocery store, ask the meat counter for your “Peameal Bacon,” I learned from Canadian born, now living in the U.S bacon importer, Ken Haviland. “They would grab a hook,” he told me, “pull a loin out of the brine solution, roll it in cornmeal, package it up, weigh it, sticker it and hand it to you.”

With that in mind though, I’ve always wondered about the origin of the “peameal” name; the question came up because when I really thought about I realized that it was a bit odd since all the Canadian bacon I’ve ever come across was rolled, as I said above, in cornmeal I’ve never understood why the stuff isn’t called “cornmeal bacon.” The answer, apparently, is that Canadian bacon was originally rolled in ground dried yellow peas, but later that was changed to the more readily available cornmeal.

Folks from Canada, and in some case from areas up near the border, are pretty darned passionate about this bacon. As is true for grits in the South, peameal bacon can carry big emotional attachments up north. Just asking about peameal evoked a whole lot of info, emotion and some good culinary story telling. Seriously, all you have to do is talk to a couple Canadians (or close-to-Canada Americans like Ms. Stevens) and you start to realize that peameal bacon sandwiches, while pretty much unknown down here, are about the equivalent up there of pastrami in Manhattan or cheese steaks in Philadelphia. Iconic is starting to sound like understatement. I’d ask all my Canadian relatives about it but of course they all keep kosher so Canadian bacon is just something they’d seen signs for in the market when they went shopping.

Molly Stevens, author of the award-winning book Braising is one of the latter. She grew up in Buffalo, close enough to Canada that Canadian bacon and hockey were both a big deal for her family. “In my family,” she started out, “for some reason, it’s long been one of those ritual foods.” For me, Canadian bacon is just one more option on a long list cured pork options, and, in honesty, not in my top two or three. But for Molly (and I’m sure many others like her), is as much about emotion and memorable family meals as it is about the pork.

“Peameal for us symbolizes summer at the beach in Canada, and all that goes with it; long days, no school, and so on,” she said. “I remember one year when an in-law sliced it too thinly, and we were all silently horrified. Of course, we were polite enough but each made a mental note to watch the next time that THAT brother-in-law went anywhere near the peameal. Then there was the other time when someone bought the pre-sliced stuff. Again, horror.” This is a much mellower way of staking claim to the way cured pork (or any food really that has this sort of sub surface significance to it) is handled, but it reminds me of the Jamon Serrano producer in Spain who once told with a semi-serious smile that he’d have to kill me if I cut off the fat on the ham. (Here in the US we fear the fat, there they know it as the best part!)

So, assuming that incompetent in-laws have been kept safely out of the way, how’s Canadian bacon slicing supposed to work? “The deal is, you get a big hunk—anywhere from 2 to 3 pounds, slice it not too thin, not too thick. Grill it over medium heat so it stays just ever so pink in the center and the cornmeal coating and external fat grills up crispy. Then you serve it on a soft sort of Kaiser roll—the best of them have a thin crispy crust and soft absorbent interior. You slather on Hellman’s mayonnaise, add lettuce and slices of summer ripe tomato. Depending on the size of the roll, who sliced the peameal, your pigginess, etc. you may stack two slices, or maybe one. Oh, and a few thin slices of orange Canadian cheddar is acceptable too.”

As with so many foods that we grew up on, the importance of this one goes way beyond the actual sandwich itself, which is in essence “just” (I’m wary of even putting that word in here) a Canadian bacon BLT. “Even the thought of this sandwich,” she explained, “brings a rush of familial memories and ties me to my childhood in a deep way. And the first taste always thrills me. Even to this day, when my family calls from the beach, where they all still gather, and tell me that they’re having peameal, I feel a pang of nostalgia. Now the funny thing is that I’m sure there are other ways to prepare peameal, and I know I could figure out a recipe using really high grade pork and brining it myself, and I could get a quality roll to serve it on, and use only really good cheese, and homemade mayo, but you know what, I don’t really want to. For the one or two peameal sandwiches I eat a year, I love that they are just what they’ve always been.”

I’m not the world’s expert on this stuff but word is that there are still some very good versions available from various local butchers. (Happy to hear your suggestions if you have them.). To my experience, the best Canadian bacon in the States is the stuff that’s imported by the appropriately named Real Canadian Bacon Company, which is based not far from Ann Arbor, in the town of Troy, Michigan. It was started by the above-mentioned Ken Haviland, originally from an Ontario, but who went on to work for General Motors here in Michigan. While working here he grew increasingly frustrated that he couldn’t find the real Canadian bacon he’d grown up with—most of what’s available here in the U.S. is already cooked and sometimes smoked and not all what folks who love this stuff are seeking. I guess we really should refer to that as “American Canadian bacon;” by contrast what you get up north of the border is indeed, real Canadian bacon—needless to say, the taste and texture of the two are totally different.

With that in mind, Ken came to the entrepreneurial conclusion that he’d have to import his own. The RCBC offers the peameal both as a big chunk and pre-sliced. As per Molly’s memories, I’d recommend going with the chunk and cutting your own. Like her, I prefer it cut a bit thicker—you get a nicer mouth feel and the eating experience is, I think, more interesting. The flavor is mellow—a light refreshing summer local wine compared to the earthy, smoky well-aged intensity of say, the dry cured bacon from Allan Benton—the wine analogy, which now that I think about it, fits perfectly with Molly’s memories of beach eating. I’ve made up a fair few of the sandwiches just as she described them and they are, really, some very nice, refreshing, fun, summer eating. I’ve been cooking the bacon in a skillet but of course doing it on the grill as Molly mentioned above would be a good way to go. It’s best, I think, to have the bacon warm so it softens up the bread and all the accoutrements.

To state what most of you, and certainly, most everyone in the South, already knows, barbecue isn’t just something to eat—it’s tied to region, to family, to tradition, to politics, to people. Just the other morning I met a customer at the Deli who hails originally from Chapel Hill (North Carolina). She lives now in Birmingham (Michigan, not Alabama) and had only been up to the Deli once before. She was lamenting how she can’t find real eastern Carolina barbecue. To say what you already know she hadn’t been to the RH yet so I steered her that way and I’m hoping that we were able to make her day by serving up the real thing. For the people who grew up with it, barbecue is a big deal!

Our conversation reminded me how far we’ve come here in bringing the at first “where’s-the-sauce?” strangeness of Eastern North Carolina barbecue to Ann Arbor. Thinking back to how when we first got going there in the fall of ’03 almost NOONE here really knew what it was. But now that we’ve spent five years working at it, a whole lot of folks are on board, whether they actually come from the Carolinas or not. I guess this is not much different from all the work to familiarize folks with better bread, real bagels, artisan cheese and all the other good stuff we produce and sell. It’s rarely a short-term project but when the food tastes good and we help guests to understand it . . .

All of which leads me to the South Carolina mustard barbecue that’s on the specials list at the RH this week. I actually don’t have humungous amounts of great info to give you about the history of the mustard sauce. In part I write this stuff to see what others will tell me so if you have someone you know who’s got some good info by all means send ‘em my way. While most everyone in the Carolinas will have heard of, and probably tasted, the mustard sauce, it isn’t even really served all over the state. It’s primarily in the center of the state that they seem to swear by mustard sauce. For people there it’s the norm. Heather Showman, who just started serving at the RH and who grew up in Columbia, SC, was very happy to see it on the specials list. For her mustard sauce was just the way it was. “I think I was fifteen before I realized barbecue could come in any other color,” she told me the other night.

South Carolina is seemingly the most diverse of barbecue states (though I’m sure someone out there’s going to argue this one so . . .). If you go to http://carolinaqcup.com/ at the bottom of the page you’ll find a nice little colored map showing where the various styles are still found in the state. Mustard, like I said, is mainly in the middle. In the northeastern part of the state they seem to eat mostly vinegar sauce akin to the Eastern North Carolina style we already do. In the northwest it’s tomato vinegar akin to the way it’s done in western North Carolina. In the south down by the Georgia border they opt for a thicker tomato-ketchup type sauce.

No one seems very sure of the mustard sauce’s actual origins—one theory I saw said that it could have been tied to the settlement of a fair few Germans in the area and their love of good mustard. Germans were actually actively recruited to the South Carolina colony in the first part of the 18th century and there’s a relatively strong number today. Some of the biggest names in South Carolina mustard barbecue are of German origin—Bessinger, Sweatman, etc. John T. Edge pointed out that there are also pockets of mustard sauce served in Georgia and Alabama as well.

The main thing here is that the mustard sauce is really good. Really good. Nothin’ fancy—a lot of yellow mustard, a good dose of the Quebec, oak-barrel aged cider vinegar, a touch of sugar, and a bunch of spices (ground coriander, celery seed, fresh garlic, chili pequin, and fresh ground Telicherry black pepper). As you can tell, I like it, and I like being able to teach people about the little ins and outs of food and food history (in case you didn’t notice that about me J So with that in mind, come on out and give it a try. If you’re up for a little bbq adventure check it out.

The S.C. mustard sauce is on the specials list at lunch as a sandwich and on the dinner specials as part of a really nice pork sampler platter. But you can basically order it up anyway you want – South Carolina bbq sandwiches, South Carolina bbq platter for a main meal, South Carolina bbq on some sort of sampler you create for yourself. Plus I have to say that it looks really great on the plate because of the mustard. One way or another give it a try this week and see what you think.

Anyways, to get to the heart of it, guanciale is an interesting alternative to bacon in cooking, and, folks in the know will tell you, the most authentic meat to be using when you’re making pasta all’ amatriciana. If you’re not familiar with guanciale—and most Americans aren’t—it’s unsmoked cured pig jowl. (The name, ‘guanciale,” is pronounced something along the lines of a Boston native saying, “Go on, Charley,”—sort of like, “G’won chaalie!”) “Cured jowl” probably sounds scary to some who’ve not had it, but if you like bacon which most everyone seems to these days, you’ll want to get to know guanciale. Why? Because it’s porky, rich, velvety good and just as easy to use as bacon or any other cured meat. If you need any more convincing, it’s a centuries old tradition in Italy and Mario Batali loves it. Plus it’s been called, “the magical Roman bacon” and that’s a pretty tough to turn down tag line in this crowd.

Personally, I was won over to it by Elizabeth Minchilli, friend and food writer, originally from St. Louis but who’s been living tastefully (in all senses of the word) in Rome with her Italian architect husband, children and dog for a long time now. I was actually asking her about pancetta not long ago, but she wrote me back in a kitchen confidential sort of way. “I have become a guanciale girl,” she confessed. “I am so much happier cooking with guanciale instead of pancetta.” Which got my attention. Forget the Prozac—just switching porks can increase life satisfaction.

Who wouldn’t want to try it after that? Plus I take Elizabeth’s comments seriously—she cooks regularly and definitely knows her food. “What makes you so high on it?” I inquired. “The fat is a different texture, and so takes longer to get to that crunchy stage. And when it does,” she went on,” it still remains chewy and has a richer, meatier flavour.”

The name ‘guanciale’ means ‘pillow’ in Italian, a reference to the chewy, meatiness that Elizabeth mentioned above and also the shape of the whole piece of off-white colored, cured pork. There are a handful of very good guanciale on the American market—we’ve got the one from Herb Eckhouse, at La Quercia in Iowa, who’s doing wonderful work with all sorts of cured pork product, and has been making it for the last few years. Like Elizabeth, he’s a big fan. “We started making guanciale because we like eating it. Next thing we know, we can’t keep it in stock.” Herb and his crew rub the pork with salt and spices (most prominently rosemary and black pepper)—and then dry cure to finish it off. They use no nitrites, nitrates, vegetable juice, or extracts. “The challenge,” Herb told me, “is getting the moisture out without making it overly dry.” He’s settled on about a six-week curing time, which he feels finds the right balance to intensify the flavor but not end up with something resembling shoe leather.

Thinking back to where this started, with Elizabeth in Rome . . . “What,” you might wonder, “does the original Guanciale Girl do with it?” “I use it for pasta—carbonara, amatriciana—but I also put it in with beans,” she went on. “I sometimes use it in spinach salad, as if it were bacon. Last summer I was using it on all sorts of pizza. My favorite was goat cheese, sage and fried guanciale!”

Pasta all’amatriciana is definitely the most prestigious place to put it. As with so many classic recipes, there is of course no straight story as to the origin of the dish, nor on exactly the “right” ingredients to use. The most commonly known version is basically a tomato sauce, with, or without, a good bit of sliced onion (in Rome they use it, in the town of Amatrice, after which the dish is named, they don’t). Generally the sauce is served on thick spaghetti or bucatini (depending on who you talk to). And it’s generally finished with a good bit of grated aged pecorino.

There is also a pre-Columbian Exchange version of the dish, known as pasta alla Gricia, made without the tomatoes. It’s often served over shorter, squat pasta shapes such as rigatoni. Being the traditionalist I tried making it as soon as I heard about it and I’m happy to report that it’s very, very good. It’s actually particularly appropriate this time of year since the good tomatoes are still a few months away. It’s very rich from the guanciale, which is generally cooked so it’s still softish in texture as Elizabeth described.

The last few weeks I’ve also been cooking a slight variation on the Gricia—guanciale cooked in the pan with the new season’s asparagus from the Farmer’s Market. I like to let the asparagus spears get browned off nicely in the pork fat. I’ve been doing it with Martelli spaghetti which has been one of my favorite pastas for forever and a half now but you can use the shape of your choice of course Anyways, to make the dish, drain the pasta when it’s a bit before being al dente and then toss it into the pan in which you’ve cooked the guanciale and asparagus with the heat still up pretty high. The guanciale fat coats the pasta beautifully. Put it into warm bowls. Then top with a ton of grated Pecorino Romano and good lot of ground black pepper and red pepper flakes. I like the pasta very al dente for it but you can do it up as you like, since, of course, you’re the one eating it. Visually you kind of lose the guanciale in the mix of green asparagus and off white pasta and cheese. But you’ll experience it when you eat. As Elizabeth said, the pieces cook up in a way that keeps the fat intact on the inside so that when you bite into their golden crust they sort of explode in your mouth like little porky Pop Rocks. Just to get across how good this, I’ve made it three times in the last two weeks.

So there you go. I’ll start working on the Guanciale Girl logo wear but in the mean time eat a little and let the guanciale good times roll.

Maize ‘n’ Blue Hush Puppies with Bacon Fat at the Roadhouse

“Dig daddy, its a natural fact,
It’s sweepin’ the South, that thing they call the Bacon Fat!”

Andre Williams

I hate to admit it, but you know how certain really stupid commercials sometimes stick in your head to the point where, like ten years later, you still have them embedded in your brain and there’s just no getting them out? Maybe it’s just me but . . . there was that commercial for some dog thing ages ago that had the dog going crazy over bacon. The slogan was something like “Dogs loooove bacon!!!!” . . . . Anyways having had that stuck in my head for a decade (or more probably) I feel like I can finally use what’s in there. So here you go—dogs—in this case it’s actually puppies—LOOOOVE bacon!

Which is my weird way of getting at the fact that as of this week we’re now able to take a step up on the flavor scale at the Roadhouse by offering up the Maize ‘n’ Blue Hush Puppies with a little bit of warm bacon fat on the side to pour over top. After all, as the good Mr. Latimer likes to regularly remind us, “everything is better with bacon.” And hush puppies are no exception.

Backing up slightly, the fact that we make hush puppies is hardly new. They’ve been on the menu I think since day one. That they’ve been particularly good of late is a tribute to the quality of the cornmeal coming in from Anson Mills and to the ever-improving skills of the fry cooks at the RH. One woman stopped me at the chef’s counter not long ago to tell me that she grew up in the South and these were the best hush puppies she’d ever had. “I wish my mother were here to try ‘em. “ ((It sounds almost too corny to share but she really did say it so . . . . .)

Having just been back down South I’m reminded of how . . .well, how the average hush puppy in the world, while conceptually loveable, really isn’t all that tasty. I mean, like all fried food, there’s probably something people like about any hush puppy just because it’s fried and kind of crunchy on the outside, soft on the inside. But the truth is that, like most grits you get served, the average hush puppies are made from not pretty poor (ok, almost flavorless) cornmeal, and all too often they’re overloaded with other stuff (like sugar) to masks the lack of flavor in the corn.

By contrast, hush puppies around here start out with exceptionally good cornmeal from Anson Mills in South Carolina (the same folks from whom we get our amazing stone ground organic grits and organic Carolina Gold rice as well). As you might probably know, they raise the old varieties of corn (low yield, high flavor), field dry it (as opposed to the far faster machine drying) to protect its natural flavors, then stone grind at low temperatures. They leave the germ in (the oil is where much of the flavor is). You know the story—the yields are radically lower; the flavor is radically better.

The story of hush puppies of course is that people used to pull bits of dough off the cornbread they were making and toss ‘em to the dogs to keep ‘em quiet, hence the name. Either way they’re a southern tradition of great proportion. More in the moment, one friend of mine who spent a lot of time in the South told me, “I love hush puppies. They’re comforty, they’re fried and they taste good and they taste like what you make in big old Southern kitchens.” Even more to the point I just heard Southern food writer Brooks Hamaker say that, “hush puppies are really just fried corn bread,” which makes perfect sense but I never thought of it.

As you also probably know we have the hush puppies here in two “flavors”—yellow and blue. Aside from the fact that both are very old and very traditional colors of corn, how could we pass up the maize and blue reference here in Ann Arbor? For more on the amazing yellow cornmeal we’re getting from Anson see 5 Foods from August 28, 2007, and read the piece on cornmeal mush. Same corn, same great flavor. (And mush is also very good with bacon fat.)

You probably know less about the blue corn. It’s an old variety Glenn has grown that’s known as Cherokee Native Blue. It’s got a really nutty, and slightly sweet, slightly floral quality to it. (No, it’s not as one customer asked me, “flavored with blueberries.”) I haven’t seen it for myself but Glenn from Anson Mills, who knows more obscure historically-rooted food trivia than even I do, said that, “buffalo will still walk over any other corn to get to blue.”

The Cherokee Native Blue is a very late harvest corn (about two to three weeks later than any other corn), which adds to cost, reduces yield, and increases flavor. Glenn notes: “The plants are very slow growing and this particular blue does not row up like most corns in its class, but rather has a more random kernel pattern. It also is very late, meaning it is still drying down when other maize is dry and harvested. This is due to its high flint characteristics matched with its high protein and nutrition.”

All technical and historical elements aside, the key points here are that the cornmeal itself tastes great. And that blended into batter, deep-fried ‘til golden brown and then served with homemade hot sauce and a spicy mayonnaise they’re a pretty tasty way to start your meal. And since blue corn is as old—or even older—than yellow, it was too hard to pass up the possibility of serving a basket of Maize ‘n’ Blue hush puppies here in Ann Arbor.

So . . . that’s all the background and it’s all good and it’s all historically of interest. BUT all that aside, what’s really got me thinking about hush puppies is BACON FAT. The kind you eat. The story here is that a couple from South Carolina were in to eat with their son and his girlfriend, both of whom go to U of M. The whole family loved their meal, which included a number of southern and other(‘n?) things off the menu. The father in particular was very complimentary, a very nice, very down to earth guy with a really, really good, strong, South Carolina accent. Really the whole group was very nice. The son was a vegetarian.

Anyways, at the end of the evening, the father asked if I wanted one piece of advice. “Of course!” I answered without hesitation (I’d have said it anyways but he was a nice guy so . . .) “Your hush puppies are really good,” he said in South Carolinian. “But you’re missing one thing in ‘em that would really put ‘em over the top.” OK, I like that kind of advice. “Pray tell?” I inquired. He smiled sort of mischievously and said, “You need to put a little bacon fat in ‘em.” Made sense—everything’s better with bacon. I thanked him, thought about it for a minute. ”Good idea but . . ., “ looking at his son, I said, “the vegetarians’ll kill us!” The son didn’t say anything but the father just looked at me, rolled his eyes, smiled, shook his head and said as if were one of the most obvious things in the world, “Just don’t tell ‘em!!”

Good story, bad advice. But . . . what Alex and I quickly realized we could do was just offer hot bacon fat on the side. Coffee can come with cream, French fries with ketchup, and oysters with cocktail sauce, so why not hush puppies with bacon fat. It really is good. So next time you’re in order up a little bit of bacon fat with your hushpuppies. Or if you’re working be sure to ask your customers if they’d like some on the side.

OK, so that alone was good. But the bacon fat thing went over the top when I discovered Bacon Fat the song. Darin, you probably already knew this, but I didn’t. There is a song—not just any song, but actually a big hit from 1956 called, . . . you got it, “Bacon Fat.” It was recorded by Andre Williams, of whom Lux Interior once wrote, “. . . [he] makes Little Richard look like Pat Boone”

I’ve got the CD and it really is a great song. Starts with a low sax solo. Drums come up with back up singers doing a little “wop, wop” thing. Andre Williams starts out in what I suppose at the time was a pretty innovative, talk-over-the-music “singing” that most people at the time probably said would “never work.” Anyways, pardon my less than perfect transcription of the lyrics (which of course sound way better if you get em paired up with the music . . . ), but it goes kind of like this . . . .

• “While I was down in Tennessee,
• All my friends was glad to see me,
• Seein’ some down by the railroad tracks,
• Seein’ some cotton pickers with their sacks on their backs,
• They say ‘Hey man, glad to see you back
• We got a new dance it’s called the Bacon Fat.’
•
• Ohhh . . that’s what they say,
•
• Ohh . . but the chicken was never like this . . .
• I feel like I wanna holler,
• But the town’s too small.
• Have mercy!
•
• But then I went down to see my local DJ
• His name is King,
• He lived down Tennessee way,
•
• I said, ‘Hey man what’s this new kind of jump,
• Where you wind up twice and then you end up with the bump?’
•
• He said, ‘Dig daddy, its a natural fact,
• It’s sweepin’ the South,
• that thing they call the Bacon Fat!’”

If you go to http://www.intheredrecords.com/pages/andre.html
You can get a good look at André in a rather regal pose . . .

So baby . . . let’s go. Order some hush puppies and do the Bacon Fat.

Ah The Joys of Pork, circumcision notwithstanding;
Our inheritance of dread from Adam notwithstanding;
I sit alone in post-prandial bliss in Zingerman’s Roadhouse.
(Whoever is not guilty—complicit in his or her comfort
Of daily immoral acts in these end times—cast the first stone.
Even Nestle’s (“. . . the very best chaw-clate”) beans
Are harvested by child slaves in Ivory Coast.) But,
Postmodern in its social responsibility toward fine eating (accept killing)
12-dollar-mac-and-cheese-Zingerman’s Roadhouse with their philosophy
Of excellence at any cost has won me over—
At some expense. Oy! They roast the whole pig slowly, slowly,
Slowly on a spit, on site in a big roaster. Then, do they soak it (no one knows)
In special juices of papaya, peppers, cardamom and clove
Such as to make the un-embodied angels weep from jealousy?
The west wind’s aroma wafts among the strip malls
Up and down Stadium, past the Yoga Center and
The Castle beer, wine, and cigar store and Nicola’s bookstore
Pulled muscle, I say, stripped from the bone
Of some smart oinker raised to die for our (double) chins.
And in full awareness of my sins I confess
(With two Coont Ales having passed through the splanchnics
Now soaking my frontal brain with froth)
This is the best foinkin’ pulled pork sandwich
In the best big-assed pork soaked sesame seed Kaiser roll
With the best ministered-with-mayo-anointed-in-apple-cider-vinegar-
&-shrived-in-yellow-mustard coleslaw
Exactly matched to the savory tang of pulled pork such that
If the Buddha ate meat he’d eat Zingerman’s pulled pork sandwich.

How much of our day is spent in longing
Expecting, anticipating, measuring, waiting for
Our desire to match our expectations? Better even than
the first drag on a Camel after months of failed abstinence
This sandwich fit sire in sow. More than just a met desire,
This alchemy was like some Gnostic recipe for seeing G-d and
I dwelled in Thy House as I savored and sucked swine
With my eyes closed meditating; and chewed it to an essence
And pouched it in my cheek like the strike of a slow curve ball
In the catcher’s mitt that ends the World Series
Played over and over again and again in slow motion
And recorded at home on DVD for posterity forever and ever.

By R. Solomon, loyal Roadhouse guest

The bacon came up because we had the special bake of Peppered Bacon Farm bread this weekend. Since the special bake is over with, I apologize for even bringing it up. If you haven’t had the bread, it’s worth the wait. Pretty much everyone I’ve talked to seems to love it. I’ve used it for toast, heating it up to eat with dinner . . . hard to go wrong on any count really. I’ve done it toasted for a fried egg sandwich, which was great. And I’m thinking it’d be great for an egg salad sandwich. And if you happen to have any bits and pieces of the bread lying around, it makes great croutons too.

With the bacon bread already in mind I went by Radio Free Bacon on the patio at the Roadhouse Sunday afternoon and since Nueske’s is a sponsor the bacon was there too. They were demoing and sampling the bacon, winning more fans for something that everyone seems to love. And then Kevin came out from the bar with his first draft of a BLT cocktail—Tito’s vodka, our homemade bloody Mary mix and a bit of pureed lettuce with of course, a slice of bacon. More work to be done but stay tuned . . . it’s gonna be good!

About half an hour later I had a woman stop me to tell me that she’d been in the RH a year or so ago and that I’d given her a taste of the Nueske’s bacon. I’m not sure exactly where she lives but that’s ok—it’s her comments that are of note. Apparently she’s been thinking of it ever since. Last night she came in with her dad (retired but moved back from Florida because he just didn’t like it down there) and wanted to get something with the Nueske’s on it. They went for a 24/7 burger (Nueske’s bacon—smoked for 24 hours—and Hook’s 7-year old Wisconsin cheddar) and loved it.

All of which was followed up this morning by about five different people eating breakfast at the Deli and seeing the applewood bacon appearing in every one of their meals—breakfast BLTs, bacon and eggs, etc. And in the spirit of “everything’s better with bacon” they all looked very happy.

Anyways, if you somehow aren’t particularly familiar with Nueske’s bacon . . . the late political and food writer R.W. “Johnny” Apple wrote in the NY Times, that Nueske’s was, “the beluga of bacon, the Rolls-Royce of rashers.” As he usually was, Johnny Apple was right on. Pretty much everyone loves this bacon, from kids to connoisseurs.

In terms of the family a fair few of you have met Tanya Nueske, but if you haven’t had the pleasure I’ll just say here that she’s about as passionate about her product as you’re going to get. In buying from them for over two decades they’ve consistently been a great supplier—they’re generous with samples and support, they’ve supported all the promotional work we do, their product has been consistently excellent. And I appreciate that!

Anyways, Tanya’s grandfather started up selling the bacon in 1933. He started out smoking over applewood, using techniques that he’d learned from his grandparents. Not surprisingly, the family starts out with higher quality hogs—primarily a cross of Yorkshire, Hampshire, Landrace and Berkshire. The hogs are fed a much bigger percentage of barley and corn by comparison to most. They still hand trim everything. The Nueske’s cure the fresh slabs of bacon in brine for at least 24 hours, then hang the pork for another day to dry, then finally send them into the smoker them for another 24 hours.

The finished bacon is sweet, smoky, rich without being overwhelming. It’s kind of candy for bacon lovers I guess. Good stuff, the sort of thing you could eat a whole lot of if you let yourself get going. Its flavor is meaty, subtly sweet, big without being obtrusive, compelling in the way that makes you want to eat another slice not long after you’ve finished the first one.

Fortunately we have about fifty ways to do that, from sandwiches at the Deli, Bakeshop and Roadhouse to salads (check it on the Deli’s ZCobb salad along with hard cooked eggs (organic ones from Grazing Fields), blue cheese from Great Hill in Massachusetts, Amish chicken, avocado and more on a bed of chopped local lettuces. And of course, as Darin is wont to remind us so appropriately, everything is better with bacon so feel free to put it on most anything you’re cooking.

Anyways at the same age that I was eating like a poster child for American industrial food, Alex was already cooking, and cooking really well. While he’s a bit younger than I am, he’s not that much younger that this is a generational issue. It’s pretty clear that Alex has been into food and cooking from a very young age. For which I’m very thankful because I get to eat so many things that he’s been working on for so many years. At the top of that list is what we now know as Alex’s Red Rage Barbecue Sauce, which he started making back when he was all of thirteen years old. If I have the story straight he was living in Bolinas. When his mother and stepfather went out of town he invited about 100 people over for a barbecue. And this is basically the sauce that he made. He’s spent the last 30 years or so continuing to tweak it but if my math is right, the core recipe began back in 1979.

Given Alex’s skills I’m guessing it was pretty darned good then, exceptionally so given that he was barely old enough to have had a bar mitzvah (if he was Jewish of course). With a few changes over the years it’s seemingly just gotten better. If you haven’t tasted it lately ask for a sample next time you’re in the Roadhouse.

The sauce really is pretty special – tomato-based with plenty of beer (Bell’s Pilsner), Urfa pepper from Turkey, piquin chile pepper from New Mexico, Telicherry black pepper, coffee (Roadhouse Joe, of course), Muscovado brown sugar, really good molasses, raw honey, and some chipotle to spice it up a bit. It’s really, I think, a perfect example (there are certainly others across the ZCoB, too) of the way we define “full flavor” here – complexity, balance and finish are there in force. The coffee, the dark brown sugar and the beer give it a lot of depth; its well balanced – slightly sweet, hot but not too hot, much more than just tomato with chiles and sugar. The Turkish peppers add flavor, not just heat. The sauce is rich and full bodied in a way that reminds me of a good Porter, yet it has no thickening agents added to it. And it’s got a really nice, long finish with a nice heat that creeps up on you, settles softly on top of your tongue and then wanders its way down the back of your throat. Not enough to clear the sinuses (for me at least, but of course, heat is really relative) but enough to make me want another sip of beer.

You can taste the sauce on any number of Roadhouse menu items – the ribs, the brisket, the Memphis pork barbecue, and the barbecue chicken sandwich. Not on the menu but I happen to think worth ordering anyways, it’s excellent on one of those ground daily from fresh Niman Ranch chuck burgers. Same goes for Kathleen Craig’s favorite – what the Roadhouse crew calls “Memphis Mac” but is actually known in Memphis as BBQ Spaghetti. Very good stuff and the famous dish for many decades of a place called BBQ Joint in Memphis. We do it with Martelli pasta that uses the Red Rage as the sauce and is topped with pulled pork and a bit of parmesan). Lately I had the belated glimpse of the obvious that it’s really excellent with the hand cut, double-cooked fries. You can of course, also take the sauce home by the pound/pint and use it any way you like. Thanks to Alex for working on this special sauce for so many years now so that the rest of us can enjoy it.