Brandywine Table: Peak Grilling Window for Barbecue
Extend this tasty season
As Brandywine Table goes to press, the world has just spent the past month visiting North America for the FIFA World Cup. Social media has been filled with soccer fans (or football fans) sharing their favorite discoveries. From yellow school buses to free refills, our humidity to our hospitality — there was one food visitors couldn’t stop talking about: American barbecue.
Grown men wept as meat melted in their mouths. Bottles of ranch dressing and barbecue sauce were confiscated as liquid contraband at airports so often the TSA had to issue a statement about packing them in checked luggage. But who can blame these would-be smugglers — it really is that good.
Throughout the summer for residents here, one grill gets fired up in the neighborhood on a Saturday and the next day every family in smelling distance is cooking out themselves. Barbecue is a full-immersion sensory experience of taste and smell plus fire and smoke and a little magic.
And lucky us, the barbecue season is far from over. Given our soggy springs, August isn’t the end of grilling — it’s the halfway point. The cooler days of late summer and early fall are perfect for lingering over the grill, and the deeper flavors of smoked paprika, apple cider vinegar, garlic, brown sugar and slow-cooked meats feel even more at home when the leaves start to turn than they did when the daffodils were blooming.
To help us celebrate this peak grilling window, our friends over at Hood’s BBQ — the legendary local pitmasters holding down the smoke in Unionville — graciously shared recipes for their iconic baked beans, cheese potatoes and Brunswick stew. As Larry Hood puts it, “Barbecue is more than just good food and taste. It’s a state of mind. It’s summer, family and good times.”
Because great barbecue is a community effort, these soulful side dishes from the Hood family kitchen simply require a good main dish to gather around. Since their secret smokehouse entrees remain a well-guarded local treasure, we share, instead, a few reliable ideas for firing up your own backyard adventures.
In our sidebar, you’ll find a simple homemade barbecue sauce recipe made from pantry staples to get you started. From there, explore two straightforward techniques to test your own pitmaster skills. First, try Brandywine Table Spatchcock Barbecue Chicken, a whole bird that’s brine-injected and then cold-air dried for two days before hitting the hot grill grate. Alongside it, you can tackle our Hybrid-Cooked Barbecue Baby Back Ribs, which are dry-rubbed and cooked the foolproof way by starting low in the kitchen oven before moving over a live flame to catch that final kiss of smoke and char.
Fire up the grill!