163 of 174 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Barbecue For Yuppies, July 11, 2001
This review is from: Barbecue! Bible : Sauces, Rubs, and Marinades, Bastes, Butters, and Glazes (Paperback)
Mr. Raichlen has become an industry onto himself, complete with retail website. This book will sell a ton of copies no matter what I say, but I have some serious reservations about this cookbook.
The author has the gift of gab, which is a very good thing in this case. He has spent considerable time with the best of the barbecue pros, and it shows. Just reading through this one picks up a wealth of information, and you can't help but learn.
One problem is the recipes. A dirty trick is to present a fantastic recipe that relies on an obscure or hard to get ingredient, and this book is full of them. Most of these recipes will not become a part of your cooking repetoire. Another problem is that the majority of the recipes cover a wide range of international recipes. Traditional, american barbecue gets a scant 50 pages of the nearly 300 pages of this book. Even here, he favors the upscale and chic.
There is a tendency to favor the trendy, like flavor injectors and chutneys. He also goes through topics such as compound butters and flavored oils. Also, if you believe his side comments, all of his recipes go with all types of meats, seafoods and vegetables. In one of the more interesting sections, he has some rare recipes for mustards, ketchup, and hot sauces.
I also have one beef with the graphics of this book: many pages have a sidebar that is colored brown. As a result, it is hard to read the text in them.
This book seems to have been aimed at people who will probably never get within a country mile of a smoker. It covers a lot of ancillary subjects, and the topics covered range all over the place. This makes for very good reading, but little hard information. This book is closer to a personal diary than a cookbook. I can recommend this book because it is so interesting. However, if you are serious about barbecue, you will need a few other books beside this one in your collection. It certainly is not a "bible".
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43 of 44 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Good for grillers looking to step up, January 18, 2004
By A Customer
This review is from: Barbecue! Bible : Sauces, Rubs, and Marinades, Bastes, Butters, and Glazes (Paperback)
If you are have a metal charcoal or gas grill, and are looking to expand your horizons beyond basic grilling, this is a good book. If you own an offset firebox or ceramic kamado type smoker, but are still buying your rub and sauces, `Smoke & Spice' is a better investment. If you already own 'Smoke & Spice' you have better versions of all of the traditional recipes already.
The author includes Liquid Smoke in many of his sauce recipes, something that would make most experienced pitmasters cringe. Why put artificial tasting smoke flavor in a sauce when the food is being smoked already? There are indeed some interesting recipes from other cultures, and there is a useful though somewhat out of date listing for shopping sources for some of the more exotic ingredients. The chart of the effects of various common ingredients is very good, and would be very useful to any newcomer I should think. It is also a nice reference to have even for experienced pitmasters when thinking over new recipes.
In general however, I found that the recipes make use of too many ingredients, and yet when prepared tasted no better than traditional recipes I've been using for years and that are considerably less complicated. The reason is simple. Good barbecue gets it's flavor from being slow cooked at low temperatures with just the right amount of smoke, not because the cook used a dozen ingredients in the rub and another two dozen in the sauce. Everything from the cover layout to the number of ingredients called for and the sheer number of recipes makes me feel the author went for quantity rather than balance or quality.
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27 of 27 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Try out the BBQ sauces, February 4, 2003
This review is from: Barbecue! Bible : Sauces, Rubs, and Marinades, Bastes, Butters, and Glazes (Paperback)
I previously purchased the BBQ Bible. This is a great companion book to that. I never made my own BBQ sauce before but now I make it as much as I can. Everyone goes crazy over the sauces in this book. It was a pretty funny scene when I was trying to make two of the sauces at the same time. One was the Jack Daniel's one that hot and the other was the smokey one. Well don't try making two at once because I getting shot from two sides with bubbling sauce and you have to stir it for the whole 20 minutes. I have made some of the butters and some of the rubs. The best rub I have used was the one for the BBQ ribs that is part of a feature page in the book. I can't say enough about this book. You will enjoy it.
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