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Pig Beach BBQ Cookbook: Smoked, Grilled, Roasted, and Sauced

Mariner: Houghton Harcourt. May 2022. 304p. ISBN 9780358651888. $30. COOKING
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This barbecue cookbook, from Abdoo and McBride’s NYC restaurant Pig Beach, is like no other. Covering a range of recipes from a standard brine to smoked-duck lasagna to cheddar cheese gougères, the authors take barbecue far past its traditional roots and add international flavors and haute-cuisine flair. Abdoo and McBride acknowledge enslaved people’s historical contributions to barbecue cuisine, but the contemporary pitmasters mentioned in the book are almost exclusively white. There’s certainly no shortage of name-dropping. A section on the history of barbecue reads more like a travelogue of BBQ joints across the South, particularly Memphis and Charleston. The most useful section to home pitmasters will be “A Word About Smokers,” which covers techniques, terms, and popular brands.
VERDICT Libraries near a Pig Beach restaurant or with an extensive barbecue collection may want to purchase. It’s too fussy to be of much use to novice barbecuers, but experienced pitmasters might be interested.
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