The ULTIMATE barbecue guide! From how to make a proper Texan dry rub to Britain’s best BBQ restaurants, here’s everything you need to know

The ULTIMATE barbecue guide! From how to make a proper Texan dry rub to Britain’s best BBQ restaurants, here’s everything you need to know

Marks & Spencer visited over 30 barbecue Texan barbecues researching their new 'low and slow' Smokehouse range
Marks & Spencer visited over 30 barbecue Texan barbecues researching their new 'low and slow' Smokehouse range

Bin those unappealing pink hamburger patties. Leave anaemic little frankfurters at the door. This is 2016, and British barbecues are getting seriously…hot.

Gone are the days of flash-grilling chicken kebabs in a Weber drum. This year is about cooking low and cooking slow. Arrive at a summer barbie party with anything other than half a pound of slow-cooked brisket, shortribs slow-smoked for 12 hours, sticky pulled pork, bone marrow mash, dill pickles and tangy cabbage slaw, and your name won't be on the door list.

And to whom do we owe this exciting new 'low and slow' barbecue movement? Our log-loving compadres in America's deepest, darkest, cleaver-wielding South, that's who.

When it comes to meat, Americans don't muck about. Particularly not the ones south of Nashville. Heck, these are folk for whom Thanksgiving dinner means plunging an entire turkey into a bubbling cauldron of oil hotter than Satan's whiskers.

But visit Texas, that southernmost US state, and vats of hot oil and sizzling grills are swapped for enormous pits of hot smoke, used for the wood-smoking of hulking great chunks of beef brisket, ribs the size of dinosaur bones, slabs of pork shoulder that could feed a family of five for a month, gargantuan hot sausage links and beef clod tipped with bark. (See glossary if by 'bark' you think we mean anything to do with a tree…)

'At a Texas barbecue you don't get seated by a waitress, you queue,' says Nicola Swift, product developer for Marks & Spencer, who visited over 30 barbecue Texan barbecues researching M&S's new 'low and slow' Smokehouse range. 'You enter the barbecues, queue up by the searing hot pit, order your meat by weight, and watch as it's taken out of the smoker, cut up onto butcher's paper and handed to you. No cutlery – you eat with your hands.

'The places are vast and the atmosphere amazing. We went on 4 July and had to queue for over an hour. At 9.30am.'

elcome to the Texas barbecue, which has about as much in common with a British barbecue as a cute tabby kitten does with a wild African lion. Chucking a bit of steak on a grill is not, according to the Texans, a barbecue.

In Lockhart, Texas, the birthplace of barbecue, pitmaster James McEachern of Kreuz Market, explains: 'On a grill you're cooking very quickly over direct heat. With barbecue you're cooking for 7-9 hours, maybe longer, over indirect heat. The central Texas approach to barbecue is purist: we don't typically cook with sauce and we use a dry rub with three ingredients – salt, black pepper and cayenne pepper. It's all about the meat. We send smoke through a pit, cooking brisket for about eight hours.'

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-3669705/From-12-hour-smoked-brisket-beef-ribs-big-dinosaur-bones-NO-cutlery-ready-Deep-South-barbecue-s-coming-Britain.html