subject: Is It In The Cooking Or The Barbecue Sauce? [print this page] For a long time now the battle rages on over what is more important in the grilling world, the techniques of cooking, or the quality of the barbecue sauce or seasonings you use on the meat. In the Kansas City and Chicago circles, they are all about their sauces, and what they bring to the food. In Memphis and Texas, the common school of thought is in the rub of seasonings and the slow cooking techniques over the sauce. While this is probably a simplified viewpoint, it is not to stake claims to regions as much as show that the two differing viewpoints exist. I'm sure there are people in Tennessee, who use a tomato-based sauce more common in Kansas City, and there is most assuredly a guy in Chicago who uses slow cooking techniques without any sauce, but region is not the focus here.
Many of the masters of the dry rub and slow cooking will tell you that any idiot can throw meat on a grill and then just slap a bunch of sugary sauce on the meat before serving it, while a real artist has to learn the methods and perfect the cooking techniques to truly be great. On the contrary, the people who love their barbecue sauce will tell you it is a waste of time to spend years trying to perfect a cooking technique if you can make the food taste better by adding a phenomenal sauce to a piece of meat mere minutes before serving it. Maybe both sides are right, or wrong, depending on your viewpoint.
If you truly want to be a master at something, it does take work, trail and error, and patience. But both sides use these things, just in different arenas. The cooking masters spend their time testing techniques, temperatures, length of time, and cuts of meats to determine their winning formula. The barbecue sauce group spends time experimenting with ingredients, tasting, and determining which sauce goes best with which meats. Both are experts at what they do, making them equally the artist.
Ultimately, if you like dry rubs on your meats and less sauce, go with it, and if you love tons of barbecue sauce dripping off your ribs and running down your arm, go with that. Maybe you can change up and sometimes enjoy both techniques and expand your horizons because all in all, it is truly just about enjoying your food and not some crazy grilling feud anyway.
