Check out the July issue of NJ Monthly. We’re featured in the Smokin’ BBQ Guide!

In June of every year, we honor fathers. The first Mother's Day was celebrated in 1914, but a holiday honoring fathers did not become official until 1966, when President Lyndon Johnson declared that the third Sunday in June would be Father's Day. President Richard Nixon made this proclamation permanent in 1972. But this doesn't mean that the holiday was not celebrated before this time.

The idea for Father's Day is attributed to Sonora Dodd, who was raised by her father after her mother's death during childbirth. While listening to a sermon at church on Mother's Day, she thought about all her father had done for her and her siblings and decided fathers should have a day, too. Because Dodd's father was born in June, she encouraged churches in her area, Spokane, Wash., to honor fathers that month. The first Father's Day was celebrated in Spokane in 1910.

Over the years, the idea spread, and people lobbied Congress to establish the holiday. In 1916, President Woodrow Wilson, who had signed a proclamation establishing Mother's Day, approved the idea, but never signed a proclamation for it. In 1924, President Calvin Coolidge made it a national event to "establish more intimate relations between fathers and their children and to impress upon fathers the full measure of their obligations."

Who says you can’t drink wine with barbecue?

Nick Passmore, contributor at Forbe’s Magazine suggests to keep is simple. You want a wine with enough heft to work with a chicken leg slathered in a sweet and spicy BBQ sauce or a well-charred steak. Something big and beefy, not too dry, certainly not too austere, and above all easy to drink.

19 Crimes 2012 $12, South Eastern Australia

The name refers to Australia’s convict settlement history, but there’s nothing criminal about this upstanding citizen at a bargain price. Just a gnat’s whisker north of dry, so it’s ideal with chicken or ribs in a sweet BBQ sauce especially when you serve it chilled.

Alamos Selection Malbec 2012 $20, Mendoza, Argentina

Smooth, jammy, rich, succulent and ideal for ribs with a charred red sauce, especially for guys whose tastes run to big, robust reds. Another wine that works well when lightly chilled.

Campo Viejo Tempranillo 2012 $12, Rioja, Spain

Juicy and packed with bright cherry and vanilla flavors along with a real Rioja earthiness.

This spring semester, Harvard Engineering Professor Kit Parker, a teaching assistant, and 16 engineering students went on a quest to build a scientifically optimized smoker.

It was in Memphis, Tennessee, that Kit Parker first began to think about teaching a class on American barbecue at Harvard. The engineering professor was wandering through a barbecue competition, studying the smokers where entrants had marinated their meat in smoke for hours on end. And he noticed something distinctly odd. “They were the most godawful contraptions you've ever seen.” The junkyard of cobbled-together smoking chambers, of all shapes and sizes and materials, told Parker something important. No one really knew how to build a perfect one yet.

Barbecue, of course, is a word that has two uses in our modern vernacular: a verb meaning to slap some meat on the grill and slather it with sauce, and a noun referring to slow-smoked meat, a staple of southern US states including Tennessee and Texas, where Parker grew up. Aficionados of the latter develop a practical knowledge of the complicated series of chemical reactions that produce the melt-in-your-mouth texture, the crusty exterior, or bark, and the particular flavors of barbecue. 

To begin their research, the team purchased one of the most popular smokers on the market, called the Big Green Egg, and smoked brisket through the brutal Boston winter, gathering data that allowed them to build computer models of the movement of air and heat in the smoker and of the brisket itself as it cooked. Then they drew up plans for a device that would provide consistent heating regardless of the user's skill in loading fuel, and do it in rain, snow, or shine. It would need to have an hourglass waist, where they would mount fans to spread the heat out evenly around the meat. And it would need to be ceramic, to retain enough heat. Of course, none of them had built such a thing before. “We had 45 days left in the class,” Parker recalls, “and we had to learn how to do ceramics engineering.” The students shaped the smoker out of 300lbs (120kg) of clay, a kind of black Dalek (see below), built an app that controls the fans and temperature remotely, and began testing again.

Their device has a few interesting features, in addition to its hourglass figure. It generates turbulence around the meat, so smoke is constantly bombarding it, a process that may impart more flavor. It can be controlled at a distance with the phone app, which will also send updates throughout the smoking process to salivating friends. And it has attracted interest from companies looking to get into the smoker business. The class was sponsored by Williams Sonoma. At a recent test on the sunny quad with a media audience, representatives from the firm that sells Cuisinart grills were there.

Did they produce a smoker that's better than the Big Green Egg? That can fool-proof and standardize the smoking process? Parker says their data so far suggest that it heats more consistently than the Egg, showing about the same temperature curve each time they run it. The answer will be clearer with more trials – so far, they have run their smoker only four times. 

People around the world have discovered incredible and diverse ways to cook pig.

Karen tells her story on Globetrotter Diaries, on learning to roast a pig with her friends, Mike and Ofelia.

From choosing the method:

To cooking:

To eating:

Read all about it here:

http://globetrotterdiaries.com/recipes/a-beginners-guide-to-roasting-a-whole-pig

BBQ Speech about “Elusive Meat” by 4th grader

Think you know barbeque?  Let this fourth grader teach you a thing or two.

Sloan Finger made this remarkable speech recently after entering the 4-H Tropicana Public Speaking Contest in Tallahassee, Fla.

Brisket may dominate barbecue menus in Texas today, but nearly a century ago, a Dallas institution built its mighty restaurant empire on a simple Tennessee-style barbecued-pork sandwich: the “Pig Sandwich.”

According to an advertisement from 1924— when the Pig Stands Co. was only 30 months old—50,000 sandwiches were sold each week from just the ten Dallas locations (there were Pig Stands in six other states by then too).

The Pig Stand’s history captured Daniel Vaughn's attention, mostly because of its much-ballyhooed legacy as the first drive-in. This sounded like a big claim to stake, and he wanted to know what happened to the restaurant chain that could not only sell 50,000 sandwiches a week in Dallas when the city only had about 250,000 residents but also invented the concept of the drive-in. He found that there was no significant event that led to the eventual shuttering of the last Pig Stands in 2006. In fact, he discovered, despite rapid expansion and the public’s cultish obsession with the place, the franchise went quietly into the night.