Why The Best Southern Barbecue Takes Weeks To Make — Southern Foodways Alliance

I was standing out front one night, around 3:00 AM. m., a guy came up and said, hey man, what's going on? I didn't say anything, how are you, he said, do you have anything?, I said, yes, he said what do you have, I said, I have on you. you know 4 500 lb and he said well um I have to have some I said well how much do you want he said I want about an ounce I said an ounce he said like you can't get anything less than at least a pound he said a pound Then he looked at the sign and saw that was saying Scott's Barbecue when he said, "Oh, man, forget it.

I said what you think I was trying to sell you and he just ended up with a big misunderstanding. I guess I'm Rodney Scott." Pit Master Scott's Barbecue and we're in Hemingway, South Carolina, when he was younger. I was pretty interested in what was going on with

barbecue

and I was always looking and looking and looking and looking until one day my dad was like, Listen, I need you to cook this pig and I was 11 at the time, so I had to store my own firewood in the barrel. I had to go pick it up with the shovel and I had to warm up under the pig and My first pig at age 11 came out perfect at first, it was a garage and my dad decided he wanted to cook a pig one day and some of the customers were happy. step and they tried it, it was like wow!

It's really good and the demand started getting higher and higher so he added another pig and he added another and eventually we had to turn the garage into a pit where we cooked maybe five pigs out of 10 a night, nothing like a pig, uh, pig

barbecue

, that's what I came up with and that's all I know, the barbecue is doing all the registering for me. I think about it, that's barbecue when you say barbecue, around here we're talking about Real Pit cook barbecue when I say Real Pit Cook BBQ I'm talking about real wood. I'm sure we only used wood because we went out and cut it ourselves.

My name is Jim Woods. You're in Stucky, South Carolina, for the weekend. We had a big storm. who came through the area and took down my 70 year old pecan tree. I contacted Rodney yesterday, they are here today and cutting it down and the only thing Rodney will leave behind is probably the stump itself. When it was over it was a loss for me, but it was a benefit, hopefully, for the people who eat the barbecue at Scott's Barbecue, there are no middlemen, there is no delivery man, it's just me, the chainsaw, we prefer to go get it ourselves, like this I know what we work with, so every week we go out to start the old truck, we gather the chainsaws, we go look for what we need to add flavor to what we do, kind of like a chef picking his tomatoes in a garden.

I pick my own trees. Fresh out of the woods Yes, there is no other way after cutting down the tree. We do everything manually, so you have to pick the wood by hand, load it on the truck and this continues until the truck is full and then we bring it. We dropped it here in the yard. The next thing we have to do is start the log splitter. Divide all the pieces we have. We have a little. We have a small 14 horsepower engine, 14 and 1 12 horsepower with the hydraulic cylinder connected to a hydraulic system. The pump, this hydraulic cylinder comes down and slowly splits the wood W to this point where it is small enough to handle and burn, making it burn easier and faster.

Here is the main source of heat. This is what we call a burn barrel which is made from an old drum that was used at some point for fuel or whatever, maybe in the past and we set it on fire made an entrance, you see, and took old truck axles that were no longer fit for a truck and we criss-crossed them in there to hold the wood until the EMB falls to the bottom after lighting the fire while the fire is preparing, place the pig in the hole and after putting the pig when the charcoal is ready, then place the charcoal under the hole. take a shovel, take it out there, collect what we need, take it out inside and we have an open door in each hole where we put the fish and distribute the heat both in the ham and in the shoulders, in no other place and in all the the heat is in the middle, you hear people all over say they use wood but then they say they use wood chips or they can use some chunks of wood that could smoke a little.

This here is all wood, nothing more, 100% wood. nothing more than cutting wood for cooking, everything is fine here in the wood, when we pick up the coals and scoop them up with the shovel, we actually just slow roast the meat and slow cook it for 8 to 12 hours to prepare it. I'm sure all you know is that the smoke is simmering, the true flavor of the wood is trapped, and the meat is fully cooked, it's around 4:00 AM. m. Now these pigs have been on since 4:15 yesterday afternoon, we're about to turn them, season them, crisp the skin, get them ready to eat.

Flipping is a process where the pig is face down on the grill and there is like a rack underneath them, we take another rack and put it on top. at the other end and one at this end and we hold it tight and then we lift it up and twist it and put it back down so it looks simple but it's actually a little harder than it looks and once you do it you keep going go ahead and shake out your seasonings, whatever they are and you add a little bit, we add a little bit of heat,

make

sure everything is nice and warm while we crisp up the skins at the same time and then mop it up and the mopping process is like putting the sauce in a gigantic way where most people use a small brush on a grill, we use as a mop our sauce SAU H is a sauce based on vinegar and pepper, many people think it is mustard here, but mustard is really upstate here and where we're from Colombia in the PD region, we rely mostly on vinegar and pepper because a lot of places you get meat where they serve you the pork and give you the sauce to add. here we try to divide it so that when you turn the meat it still has color, flavor, texture, everything is already there when I carry the flashlight and I'm putting that extra heat under there, I'm actually crisping the skin when we

make

the masks, we try to keep an eye on it, we're waiting for that perfect pucker like you see here, this is the skin starting to get crispy right here and we're trying to get it to get an even tone of this across the entire pig.

We will take the crispiest part and sell it to customers upon request. The rest we'll take and fry it a little bit, bag it and have what we call the big skins that are like our homemade skins, like a processed pork skin that would look like in bags, but better that sign says barbecue 9:30 A.M. respect that and the reason I put up that sign is because we are here. all night and we have people who wake up at 3:30 4:00 and they want to barbecue so badly that they knock on the door, pull the door, try to open the door, knock, scream, shout, get angry, You know, try to get it before 9:30, once we put it on the rack, we put it on the table and once it's on the table, my mom

takes

it, removes all the bones and separates the fat from the lean the bone The bones of the skin all those good things and once separated, she arranges them whether it's a pound or 2 pounds 3 pounds whatever the customer wants.

I'm doing the pork now. I'm taking the AP part and taking the part. removing the bones by separating the bones from the meat is quite tender I don't need to have a knife they just separate it it's like visiting a national monument you know they're not going to bring it to you you just have to do it go and see what it's like and in our case you just have You have to go out, take that path towards him and see what we are like. I came all the way about 45 miles from here and said well, I better go.

Ask my wife today I told her do you want some barbecue she said yes, I'm saying the same thing too so I said well okay let's go to him and then thank you dear, well I was here on a business, but every time I'm here I always stop by if it's Thursday, Friday or Saturday when they are open and I try to prepare a good barbecue. I'm getting ready to go to Tampa, so my son, in Miami, wanted a barbecue at U, so he told me. I had him come pick it up and then I bought some for my daughter Liv in Tampa.

I'm from Mullin, South Carolina, I was coming back to Charon and I'd been coming here for years and I thought about it and then I first stopped by and bought a pound for my two kids, a pound each. I ordered four pounds of barbecue. What is that for? Because it's Friday night and you're taking it home on the F. No, I asked for that because that's what he wanted because he got the skin from him few SK. I get some skin $2 skin and I loved eating my grits yeah a lot of them come you know they love that skin now M that's good we actually serve it with just the meat and a lot of people have to request one skin and we will put a layer of skin on top of the actual pound or two pounds of whatever the customer receives and if it is a sandwich, we prepare the sandwich on smaller sandwich-sized Styrofoam trays and add a piece of skin to the sandwiches at customer request well right now I am a gentleman who needs a good barbecue sandwich and I don't want to say too much about my name but I am a gospel recording artist for singer Solomon here in the South Carolina area but also I'm frequenting Scottish BBQ right now getting this good grill that I love very much I tell you I wouldn't get it anywhere else but here the ingredients of a barbecue sandwich a lot of work chopping your own wood having the right amount of heat for the right amount of hours drinking that sauce based on vinegar and pepper with a touch of love and that is simply the perfect sandwich for me, the perfect barbecue, it is, it is, it is, it is a very hard-working business, the work is very physical, very intense and It

takes

all week just to achieve it. that little taste not only wakes up oh, today I'm going to be a Pit Master and cook no, it's days of work here just for this result days and days of work for me this is a real barbecue this is a real barbecue right here cutting divide load shoveling flipping this is having a barbecue at least in these parts this is a barbecue