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I finally changed my rub recipe after talking to an old pitmaster in Kansas City
Met a guy named Earl at a barbecue joint off Highway 40. He told me to ditch the sugar and let the meat speak for itself after I complained about my crust burning. Tried his advice on a pork shoulder last weekend, now I'm wondering if I been overthinking barbecue this whole time.
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cole_baker1mo agoMost Upvoted
Let the meat speak for itself" hits different because that's true for way more than just barbecue. We're all so used to piling on extra stuff to make things feel complete when the simple version might actually be better. Seems like every time I strip something back to basics it turns out more solid than the complicated version I was running before.
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cole_baker1mo agoMost Upvoted
That "strip it back to basics" thing really hit me. I've been thinking about how we do that with food but not with how we spend our time. Like, I used to cram my days with podcasts and playlists and background noise everywhere I went. Then my phone died on a delivery run and I was just... quiet. It was weird at first but after a while I started noticing things I'd been tuning out for years. Birds, wind through trees, the sound my truck makes when it's running right. Maybe the basics are always there waiting for us to shut up and notice them.
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robins831mo ago
@cole_baker keep stripping things back and you'll end up naked in the produce aisle.
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jamie9401mo ago
Whoa, hold up. I get what you're saying but I gotta push back a little. That quiet time you had was a fluke, not a lifestyle. I've tried the whole "let the meat speak" approach with my cooking and ended up with bland ribs three times in a row before I gave up and went back to my rub. People act like stripping everything away is some kind of wisdom but sometimes the complexity is what makes it good. Like, my morning commute is better with a podcast because traffic is garbage and silence just lets me stew about it. You can't just force a basic life on everything and expect it to work the same way.
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