Hog Heaven
Hog Heaven by Renee Wright originally appeared in NC Magazine. The article is reprinted here by permission, courtesy of NC Magazine and the North Carolina Chamber.
Hog Heaven
by Renee Wright
When you set out to talk about the“best barbecue” in North Carolina, you’d better be ready for a fight. But Jim Early, a Winston-Salem trial lawyer and gourmet cooking professor at Salem College, is a brave man.
First he wrote a book, “The Best Tar Heel Barbecue: Manteo to Murphy,” detailing 140 spots to get authentic pig across the state. Now he’s dared to narrow down the field to 25 worthy establishments that make up the N.C. Barbecue Society’s Historic Barbecue Trail.
“I had on my asbestos suit,” Early said. “But, surprisingly enough, we haven’t had a lot of flak.”
Early says the criteria he established for the “trail,” with the help of the society’s board of directors, eliminated most of the restaurants he visited on his 22,000-mile trek around North Carolina in search of ’cue.
Since this is a historic tour, the restaurants have to have been in operation for a minimum of 15 years. “We didn’t include any places that are fresh out of the box,” he said. “We looked for places with staying power.” In addition, the restaurants have to make their own sauce, offer sit-down dining and cook real North Carolina-style pork barbecue on site.
Many barbecue houses were eliminated thanks to another one of the criteria: The pig must be cooked in a pit over wood or charcoal. “There aren’t that many left that cook in pits,” Early said. “Most are moving to electric or gas.”
Early admits that he can’t blame those who make the switch to more modern methods. The challenges of maintaining a pit are numerous. “They pay higher insurance. They have to deal with the environmental folks. They have to buy wood. Plus there’s the human factor. They have to hire a pit master to watch the fire all night. If he nods off or doesn’t show up, the day’s barbecue is ruined,” Early said.
“With an electric cooker, you just flip the switch and go home. Next morning you have a nice, consistent product. And no cleanup.”
Barbecue slow-cooked in an electric or gas cooker is not necessarily inferior, Early said. “Cooking in a pit isn’t the end-all if you don’t know what you’re doing. Probably 99 percent of the ’cue people are eating now is cooked with electricity, and they like it. If it’s cooked right, and the place has a good sauce and chops the meat right, most people probably couldn’t tell the difference between wood and electric cooking in a blind taste test.”
Early says the trail laid out by the Barbecue Society isn’t trying to identify the best barbecue in the state. “We were looking for the best representatives of a historic type of cooking to honor them for going the extra mile to preserve this tradition. A lot of these places have been around for decades and are being operated by the grandchildren of the original owners. This is a part of North Carolina history.”
Originally, Early says, pigs were cooked in pits dug in the ground. “When I was a boy, we used to have some humongous parties,” he recalled. “At one cotton mill’s annual celebration, they would dig pits with a frontend loader and cook 70 hogs at a time.”
Later, permanent pits were built above ground from cinderblock or brick to make it easier to tend the fires. Gradually, regional differences grew into regional disputes: oak vs. hickory, red slaw vs. white, whole hog vs. shoulder, eastern vinegar sauce vs. Lexington’s red-tinged dip, cornfed hogs vs. peanut-fed. The war rages on.
The society’s trail doesn’t get involved in debates about the relative merits of eastern and western North Carolina barbecue. “We tried to capture the two major styles and the nuances that make each distinctive,” Early said. “Eastern North Carolina disciples have said that the trail is weighted toward the Lexington style, but the reason is that only about eight restaurants in the east still qualify.”
The pit-cooked requirement knocked several well-loved spots out of the running, including Scott’s Famous Barbecue in Goldsboro, King’s in Kinston, Bullock’s in Durham and Clyde Cooper’s in Raleigh. All have abandoned wood for more convenient methods.
Many barbecue houses today use the Nunnery-Freeman Kook Rite Kooker, invented by O.H. Freeman and J.E. Nunnery, who started selling ’cue in Henderson back in 1957 and continue to do so today. Their electric Kookers with hickory wood inserts are shipped all over the world.
According to Early, the largest collection of barbecue joints still using the traditional pit-cooking method is centered in Lexington, self-proclaimed “Barbecue Capital of the World” and home of the annual Lexington Barbecue Festival, one of the largest of its kind. With 20 or so spots specializing in barbecue inside Davidson County, something had to be done to thin out the Lexington contingent to keep it from dominating the trail.
“There’s more barbecue per capita in Lexington than anyplace else in the country,” Early said. “Something like one restaurant per 500 people.”
The Barbecue Society board made a controversial decision to limit the number of restaurants on the trail to just two in each town. In Lexington, a couple of the oldest surviving spots received the most votes: the Barbecue Center on Main Street, established in 1955, and Lexington Barbecue, opened in 1962 and known to locals as the Honey Monk.
The final version of the trail, available on the society’s Web site (www.ncbbqsociety.com), snakes across the state from Ayden’s legendary Skylight Inn, just south of Greenville, to Herb’s BBQ Pit in Murphy, on the Tennessee border. If you travel it end to end, you motor more than 500 miles and eat a lot of chopped pig.
No article on Tar Heel barbecue would be complete without the opinion of Bob Garner, the state’s guru of ’cue. Garner covered barbecue on PBS for many years and has written several books on the subject, including “A Guide to North Carolina Barbecue,” giving his own 100 locations for the state’s best barbecue.
NC Magazine asked Garner what he thought of the N.C. Barbecue Society’s trail of historic pits.
“This seems to be a pretty comprehensive and solid list, and I’ve enjoyed eating at all of them,” he said. “I might have added Alston Bridges Barbecue in Shelby; it’s one of the few places in the state that does real pit-cooked ribs over live coals, although ribs aren’t in the real barbecue mainstream in North Carolina. I might also have added Tar Heel Q on Highway 64 west of Lexington, and Moore’s Old Tyme Barbecue in New Bern.”
In fact, while Early and Garner include many unique entries in their respective books, with a couple of exceptions they agree on the 25 establishments chosen for the historic trail. Here you’ll find the famous names of North Carolina barbecue: Wilber’s in Goldsboro, Bill Ellis and Parker’s in Wilson, Stephenson’s in Willow Springs, Allen & Son in Chapel Hill, Hursey’s in Burlington, Stamey’s in Greensboro, Hill’s in Winston-Salem, Wink’s in Salisbury plus a host of other savory destinations.
If following the trail doesn’t satisfy your hunger for barbecue, pick up a copy of either expert’s book. You can order Garner’s from John F. Blair at www.blairpub.com. Early’s “Tar Heel Barbecue” is available through his Web site, www.jimearly.com. Proceeds from the book benefit the Special Olympics of North Carolina.
And wherever you order your barbecue, remember to ask for a little of that outside brown, the crispy crust that makes our barbecue better than any other.
