In Pitt Cue Co’s cookbook, low-and-slow US barbecue gets a ‘very British’ makeover
- The authors travelled throughout the southern United States researching the technique, then developed their own take
- ‘We are guilty of that very British tendency for mixing styles,’ Tom Adams, Simon Anderson, Jamie Berger and Richard Turner confess
Barbecue pitmasters in the southern United States are quick to point out the differences between the low-and-slow cooking technique in which they specialise and what almost everyone else calls “barbecue”. To a pitmaster, quickly cooking a steak or a chop over coals or gas isn’t barbecue, it’s grilling.
Barbecue as done by pitmasters involves cooking a large hunk of beef, pork or lamb – or often the whole animal – over indirect heat at a relatively low temperature. If the meat were cooked over direct heat, the outside would burn before the interior was safe to eat. With the low-and-slow method, the intramuscular fat melts and the connective tissue and collagen break down, making the meat wonderfully moist and tender.
Founded by Tom Adams and Jamie Berger, the Pitt Cue Co restaurant in London started as a food truck in 2011. It moved into a more permanent site after the two teamed up with more established chefs – Richard Turner, of Hawksmoor, and Simon Anderson, of The Albion.
The Pitt Cue Co restaurant closed last year (its website says it hopes to reopen), but in its eight years of operation, it brought southern barbecue to Britain.
In Pitt Cue Co – The Cookbook (2013), the authors write, “Every part of the Southern United States has its own particular variety of barbecue, particularly concerning the sauces, but also extending to the cuts, spice rubs, wood and types of meat used. But of course, barbecue is not solely a culture and cuisine of the US, it is a technique used all over the world, the very first technique to be mastered in fact!