BBQ Grail Recommended Books

I love cookbooks! Below are a few of my favorite cookbooks. Not all of them are BBQ/Grilling related, but each one has helped me to become a better cook. Click on the cover image to purchase from Amazon.

Charcuterie: The Craft of Salting, Smoking, and Curing

Charcuterie—a culinary specialty that originally referred to the creation of pork products such as salami, sausages, and prosciutto—is true food craftsmanship, the art of turning preserved food into items of beauty and taste. Today the term encompasses a vast range of preparations, most of which involve salting, cooking, smoking, and drying. In addition to providing classic recipes for sausages, terrines, and pâtés, Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn expand the definition to include anything preserved or prepared ahead such as Mediterranean olive and vegetable rillettes, duck confit, and pickles and sauerkraut.

Ruhlman, coauthor of The French Laundry Cookbook, and Polcyn, an expert charcuterie instructor at Schoolcraft College in Livonia, Michigan, present 125 recipes that are both intriguing to professionals and accessible to home cooks, including salted, airdried ham; Maryland crab, scallop, and saffron terrine; Da Bomb breakfast sausage; mortadella and soppressata; and even spicy smoked almonds. 50 line drawings

Pig: King of the Southern Table

A nose-to-tail guide to the very best Southern pork recipes, from award-winning food writer James Villas

Though beef, poultry, and fish all have their place in Southern cuisine, one animal stands snout and shoulders above the rest—the mighty pig. From bacon to barbecue, from pork loin to pork belly, James Villas’s Pig: King of the Southern Table presents the pride of the South in all its glory. 300 mouth-watering recipes range from the basics like sausages, ribs, and ham to creative ideas involving hashes, burgers, gumbos, and casseroles.

A North Carolina native, Villas doesn’t just provide great pork recipes but also brings the spirit of Southern cooking alive with tasty cultural and historical tidbits and favorite recipes from beloved restaurants like Louis Osteen’s on Pawley’s Island and Crook’s Corner in Chapel Hill. With gorgeous full-color photography and recipes from Maryland to Louisiana and everywhere in between, Pig is the definitive take on the South’s favorite animal.

Serious Barbecue: Smoke, Char, Baste, and Brush Your Way to Great Outdoor Cooking

Adam Perry Lang trained with the world’s best chefs before giving up four-star kitchens for the thrill of cooking with just meat and fire. Now he’s on a mission to turn everyone into an expert. In “Serious Barbecue”, Adam Perry Lang has translated his intimate understanding of culinary technique into easy-to-follow advice to help a nation of backyard cooks unleash the raw power of one of the most flavour-packed cuisines around: barbecue.

Perry Lang begins by breaking down the fundamentals – what tools you’ll need to begin, how to master cooking with charcoal and wood, how to choose the perfect grill, and more. Then he takes readers on a trip through the butcher’s case, describing exactly what makes each kind of meat special, explaining how to select with the skill of a master, and providing his favourite recipes for almost every available cut of pork, beef, veal, lamb, chicken, and turkey. .

Starting with Ingredients

Each chapter focuses on a single ingredient. The accompanying recipes in Chef Aliza Green’s culinary tour de force demonstrate the broad range of possibilities for each ingredient, utilizing a variety of cooking methods, flavors, and ethnic inspirations. This innovative work is the product of Green’s ceaseless culinary curiosity and in-depth knowledge of ingredients.

With these tools, she has created hundreds of clear and imaginative recipes that will enable experienced and fledgling home chefs to recognize how foods should look and behave, their fragrance and feel, their seasonal changes, how they are transformed by different cooking methods, and their flavor affinities. Extensive sidebars satisfy the most curious epicure.

A one-of-a-kind collection of recipes, photographs, and behind-the-scenes stories from legendary pitmaster Mike Mills.

In this unique combination of cookbook, memoir, and travelogue, Mike Mills, the unrivalled king of barbecue, shares his passion for America’s favorite cuisine–its intense smoky flavors, its lore and traditions, and its wild cast of characters.

Through conversational anecdotes and black-and-white photographs, readers meet a diverse circle of colleagues and friends and join Mills in a behind-the-scenes tour of the barbecue contest circuit, with stops at some of the best “shrines, shacks, joints, and right-respectable restaurants.”

Also included are prizewinning recipes that have earned Mills his fame and fortune as a barbecue maestro. These 100 recipes will enable anyone with a grill to achieve champion barbecue flavor right in their own backyard. The selection features Mills’ own secret concoctions and treasured family recipes as well as choice contributions from his pitmaster friends.

The Big Ranch, Big City Cookbook is a proudly Texan collection of more than 100 recipes from chef Louis Lambert’s popular restaurants. The signature cooking style is unapologetically refined but not fussy, impeccable but with a hearty, rustic flair—what he calls “elevated ranch cuisine.” Each dish showcases Lou’s classical French training and sure-handed facility for combining crowd-pleasing, soul-satisfying flavors.

If you’re serving up a down-home feast fit for a cattle rancher’s table, you’ll want to try the Achiote-Seared Chickpeas, Spicy Oak-Smoked Chorizo, Wood-Roasted Chicken with Mexican Chocolate Chile Rub, Hot Smoked Pecan-Cured Salmon, Crispy Wild Boar Ribs with Fresh Plum Barbecue Sauce, and Fried Green Tomatoes with Crab Rémoulade.

If urban bistro classics are more your style, you won’t want to miss the Brandied Chicken Liver Terrine with Caramelized Onions, Foie Gras Mousseline, Coriander Roasted Leg of Lamb, Panfried Pork Cutlet with Parsley-Caper Butter Sauce, Sabine Braised Duck with Wild Mushrooms and Port, and Roasted Beet Salad with Shaved Fennel and Candied Shallot Vinaigrette.