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Barbecue pilgrim

Natasha Rudra heads into the Southern smoke

Natasha Rudra

The Shack by the Track in Georgia.
The Shack by the Track in Georgia.Tristan Kane.

Somewhere in Georgia, buried in the deep, green south where ''Jesus Hates Obama'' signs sit alongside rusty pick-up trucks in people's frontyards, there is a shack where you can get barbecue and ice cream. It's an old thing on a gravel strip, festooned with crude hand-lettered signs and a 1.8-metre tall American flag. There's no one else around and it's lunchtime.

Tables are set up under the trees but inside is folksy and safe from flies. A small television plays daytime chat shows. To order, you have to bend down to the counter, where a middle-aged woman sits like a bank teller behind a window. There's barbecued ribs, coleslaw, and smoky baked beans. She says you can have sweet iced tea but if you share with your friends you have to pay $1 to get a refill. Then she gives you a one-litre polystyrene cup.

The food is served in a takeaway container. The ribs are coated in sauce the colour and gloss of molten dark chocolate. They are thank-you-Jesus perfect. Smoky and slightly crisp on the outside and tender, so tender the meat yields from the bone at the slightest prod. The barbecue sauce is sharp vinegar over caramelised brown sugar and ketchup. There are potato salad with eggs; and crisp, fresh coleslaw if you want vegetables. Her sole customer served, the woman moves to a small patio out the back, where she starts reading aloud from a Bible-size book to her husband.

Texan-style ribs at the legendary Black's Barbeque in Lockhart, Texas.
Texan-style ribs at the legendary Black's Barbeque in Lockhart, Texas.Tristan Kane.
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Welcome to the barbecue nation.

Barbecue is an analogy for the American experience. It's been influenced by every major immigrant group. It is a food of mass consumption and production, huge servings made cheap by agricultural subsidies, industrial smoking machines and supermarket ingredients such as ketchup.

Served fast, and at its best in small towns and roadside diners, this is food for people with big cars and big appetites but small attention spans and no time.

Wilber's Barbecue in North Carolina.
Wilber's Barbecue in North Carolina.Tristan Kane.

And on face value, the modern foodie should love it. It's slow food, with local variations rich in history, produced by people who are masters of their craft. Pitmasters inherit their credentials from ''pa'' or ''grandpaw's'' barbecue shack, or establish their own on the barbecue circuit - more than 500 annual tests of grill and skill around the US. In this world, the gods have names such as Dr Barbecue and the Baron of Barbecue.

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Until recently, American-style barbecue was virtually unheard of in Australia. This could be because Aussies already knew what to do with our barbies, thanks very much. And it's easy to dismiss anything from the American south - the land of rednecks, religious fundamentalists and racism.

But something has changed. In the past year, Smoque and the Ox Eatery have opened in Canberra, selling ribs, pulled pork and sliders. The Snag Stand kiosks, with their "high-end hot dogs", have expanded into the capital. A soulfood restaurant has opened in Canberra's own deep south (Erindale). There's hardly a trendy restaurant in Melbourne, Sydney or the capital that doesn't feature a bit of brisket, an upscale chilli dog, or smoky pork ribs.

The Shack by the Track in Georgia.
The Shack by the Track in Georgia.Tristan Kane.

Why is this? One reason could be the inevitable reaction to wannabe Hestons blasting everything in sight with liquid nitrogen. If you're looking for a new bandwagon it's easy to proclaim yourself in love with unreconstructed, unpretentious food. Barbecue, like chicken and waffles, is so uncool it's cool.

The trend is probably fuelled by the American economy, which has sunk so low Australians are jetting across the Pacific in droves.

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And the tax breaks. To boost their economies, some southern states offer big tax incentives to film and television companies, probably intending to attract big-budget films such as Tom Cruise's Oblivion (Louisiana) or hit shows such as The Walking Dead (Georgia). But in practice they've resulted in an explosion of cheap, redneck reality TV - Duck Dynasty, Swamp People, Here Comes Honey Boo Boo. Mix that with food shows that aim straight for the trailer-trash jugular, such as Man v. Food and Diners, Drive-ins and Dives and you've got a pop-culture brew that has Australians hooked and horrified in equal measure.

Our path here was not so different. A late-night broadcast of an American barbecue competition planted a seed in my partner's heart that led to the purchase of a Big Green Egg - a ceramic, charcoal burning object much favoured on the barbecue circuit. The Egg begat many weekends of cooking, much time spent on web forums discussing how to slow-smoke meat, and a number of cookbooks on everything from sauces to competition-level time management. But there's only that much you can learn from a book. So we packed our bags, gathered some old friends, and headed stateside to discover barbecue for ourselves.

We started at the barbecue crossroads - Kansas City. The twin cities, straddling the states of Kansas Missouri, are famous for a sticky sweet tomato, molasses and celery seed sauce known as KC Masterpiece, but are also home to the Kansas City Barbeque Society, which is the FIFA of the barbecue circuit.

We head to the 18th and Vine district, the home of jazz in the 1920s - a buzzing inner-city neighbourhood whose nightclubs produced superstars such as Count Basie and Charlie Parker. Nowadays the streets are quieter, the city worn out. Tourists take pictures outside the cartoony American Jazz Museum, where Duke Ellington's trumpet and Ella Fitzgerald's evening gowns are on display. Walk a block or two off the strip and there are only rundown houses behind chain-link fences and empty lots filled with weeds.

But there are people inside Arthur Bryant's restaurant with its cheerful red-and-white striped awning. Bryant made his name cooking brisket over a very slow flame, creating a festival of contrasts. The meat is simultaneously fibrous but juicy, the signature sauce is liberally applied and packs the familiar triple punch of sweet (molasses), sour (vinegar) and umami (tomato and paprika). The ribs are plain and melting, like caramel made from meat.

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Kansas City might be a fading town but its people retain their love of good food. Ask a taxi driver what that futuristic silver building is and he's stumped. "Well, I've lived here my whole life and I don't rightly know what that is," he confesses, sheepishly. (It's the Kansas City

performing arts centre.) But when he finds out we're here to eat barbecue, he's a fountain of information. ''Everybody got their own favourite, some say this one is better and some say that one is the best,'' he says. ''But, for myself, I like Gates barbecue.''

Gates is a casual diner with vinyl booths and red plastic trays. When a customer walks in, all the staff are obliged to scream out, ''Hi, may I help you?'' This is a point of pride. It seems few Australians have passed through lately. ''I have never been to Australia!'' enthuses the woman behind the counter, after shrieking a greeting at us. ''Tell me, do y'all just live, like, in the desert?'' This response, which catches everyone off-guard, is still better than our Somali taxi driver at Kansas City airport, who was convinced Australia was teeming with wild camels that people could export for meat.

The brisket at Gates comes out like a good traditional beef roast. The pork ribs are soft, so buttery they have a texture like a custard tart. They're covered in the Gates version of Kansas City sauce, which has no molasses and tastes strongly of vinegar and celery salt. It appears that in Kansas City, barbecue relies on its cooked meat for texture and on sauces for most of the flavour. These sauces could be the biggest barrier for American-style barbecue in Australia. They sit at the extremes of sweet, spicy and sour, which doesn't seem to agree with the conservative Australian palate.

Which brings us to our next destination, for in Texas the meat is the main game and sauce is strictly ''on the side''.

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In a tank-sized sports utility vehicle, we drive to the little town of Lockhart, Texas. It's about the size of Cootamundra, an hour south of Austin, and has been declared the official capital of Texas barbecue - a big call in a big state. Four of Lockhart's many, many barbecue restaurants are considered the finest in the nation, including Black's Barbecue, which sports a sign telling passersby that it's the longest, continuously run family barbecue restaurant in Texas. It's been open eight days a week for 80 years, and is home to ''giant beef ribs''. Most of these things are true.

Black's exudes Texan ambience. The smell of beef hits us as we open the door and the brisket sits like a basketball-sized, scorched meteorite behind the counter. Six portly policemen in flannel shirts and Stetsons are tucking into a meal in the corner. The wood-panelled walls are covered in longhorns, deer heads, jackalopes and photos of local football teams.

The brisket meat has a full centimetre of rich red smoke-ring and the meat is interestingly chewy closer to the edges. The beef ribs, which comply literally with the Texan cliche, are charred black on the outside and the meat inside has an extremely strong flavour. They're accompanied by a slow-cooked beef and jalapeno sausage with a rich and slightly grainy consistency, like a perfect black pudding.

So perhaps Texan barbecue would be the most natural to export to Australia. It's built around beef, and while cooked differently, has flavours very similar to the traditional Aussie steakhouse. There is a purity to the approach: the pit masters let the meat speak for itself, seasoning it with little more than salt, pepper and smoke. But the new trend, espoused particularly by Smoque, is for the barbecue of pulled pork and vinegary sauces.

Victor Kimble, who owns Canberra's Soulfood Kitchen, points out that ''pulled pork'' is a new-fangled term. He's right. In its traditional home among the white-painted plantation mansions and Civil War battlefields, it is simply known as ''barbecue''. It is to the Carolinas what brisket is to Texas.

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At the Pit restaurant in Raleigh, North Carolina, large men throw huge, halved pigs into a smoker, then ''pull'' the meat to shreds with cleavers. Don't expect small-town charm. It's a huge, bustling inner-city bar with valet parking and a long queue. The cocktails come in the same recycled moonshine jars that wouldn't be out of place in Manuka and the tables are filled with groups of shiny-haired girls and polo-shirted boys from the local university. It's all about the barbecue, which is stringy in a really good way. Some bits are drier, sweeter and meatier and we fight over them like the brownest chip in the packet.

Some say there's a deep rivalry between east and western Carolina, one which essentially boils down to whether you add tomato to your vinegar before calling it a sauce. But the Pit puts eastern sauce on their barbecue and western sauce on their equally excellent pork ribs. These are lightly seasoned with just salt and pepper, with an aromatic touch of deeply bitter smoke, like smoked salmon.

Our pilgrimage concludes at Wilber's Barbecue, in North Carolina, often mentioned as potentially the greatest barbecue place in the world. This joint complies with every possible cliche. Tacky-looking diner on the side of a rural freeway? Tick. Hokey waitress costumes? Tick. People who find your accent exotic and unintelligible? Tick. Southern charm and hospitality? Tick, tick, tick.

The waitress tries her best to give us the full range of Wilber's dishes, rearranging our orders so we ''won't have to pay too much to taste everything''. When she's finished, the table is so full of dishes there's no room for plates. It costs a ridiculous $65 for five people. ''We've left the sleeping pills in,'' she warns with a motherly smile.

The pulled pork is like tangy meaty vermicelli, without much smoke. A perfectly roasted chicken comes covered in the house specialty sauce, which tastes like good gravy with vinegar and pickle. There's Brunswick stew, similar to gumbo but served here with potatoes and, of course, barbecue. Vegetable sides such as collard greens are braised with pork hock, lending a rather German flavour to proceedings, until you come to the steaming bowl of hush-puppies, golden crisp half-moons of corn bread.

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This is southern culture at its best and it's had a resurgence, perhaps partly out of pride and a wave of sympathy following disasters such as hurricane Katrina. And partly through the US embracing regional differences after years of exporting a homogenous, cosmopolitan image to the outside world. Barbecue can and should be at the centre of this new found regionalism. This is what a food culture should be - much loved, much debated, with local legends, secret spice combinations and centuries-old battlelines drawn over issues like sauce ingredients.

Back at our shack in Georgia we are joined by a fellow barbecue lover - a pleasant young man in crisp chinos. He's from Texas and carries out the obligatory check of whether we've visited Lockhart on our barbecue tour. It turns out he's a location scout for a TV production company on a quest to find a picturesque, tax-deductible corner of the nearby Okefenokee Swamp to film a new show. ''It's called Swamp Murders,'' he volunteers. And then he asks, ''Say, would you guys like a couple of my ribs? They're really good - but I didn't realise you got six in a serve and I can't finish all of 'em on my own.'' Thank you, barbecue nation.

Natasha Rudra is a staff writer.

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