Bill Sittig: Good morning everyone.
I'm glad to see such a nice sized crowd
and I especially welcome the people who have come here
from outside the Library.
Welcome. You are all welcome to today's program
which is featuring Steven Raichlen who has been called
"the barbeque professor," "the gladiator of grilling,"
and the "Michael Jordan of barbeque."
[Laughter] I'm Bill Sittig, the Sammy Sosa of SciTech and Business.
[Laughter] And the Genghis Khan Chief
of the Science Technology and Business Division.
[Laughter] This event is one in our series in which we learn
from important writers and practitioners in the various fields
of science, technology and business.
Before I introduce today's speaker I'd just
like to mention our upcoming programs in the month of July
that cover a wide range of fields like our division does.
On July13th in this same room, Dr. Marie Savard will speak
on her recently acclaimed book Apples and Pears.
It's not about cooking, The Body Shape Solution
for Weight Loss and Wellness.
We will be con-sponsoring this program
with the Health Services Office.   On July 18th, Robert O'Harrow,
a writer for The Washington Post will discuss government surveillance
and privacy, the subject of his book, No Place to Hide
and on July 27th, Dr. Eric Grissell, an entomologist at the Smithsonian
in the Department of Agriculture will speak
on his book Insects and Gardens.
I think you will find each of these programs fascinating and informative
and I hope you'll be able to come.
I'd also like to take this opportunity to thank Alison Kelly
and Connie Carter, Science Reference Librarians in my division
for their terrific efforts in putting together today's program
and preparing the display of a selection of books
from the Library's collections on barbeque and grilling as well
as most of Steven's many books.
We are also grateful to the chef's of the Stratford University School
of Culinary Arts in Falls Church for preparing the wonderful samples
of barbeque using Steve's recipes,
which you can help yourself to after the program.
[Laughter] It is now my great pleasure
to introduce today's speaker Steven Raichlen,
award winning cookbook author, cooking teacher,
syndicated columnist and television personality.
He was born in Japan, raised in Baltimore
and received his Bachelor's Degree in French Literature
from Reed College in Portland,
Oregon where he graduated Phi Beta Kappa.
Let's see, what else did he do?
[Laughter] It's a blank sheet of paper -- no.
In 1975, Steve received a Thomas J. Watson Foundation Fellowship
to study medieval cooking in Europe and then was trained
at the Cordon Bleu and La Varenne cooking Schools in Paris.
We at the library wish to take some small credit
for Steve's great success.
Early in his career he researched Culinary History at the Library,
primarily in our Rare Book and Special Collections Division
with the help of staff member Leonard Beck,
who at the time was Curator of the Katherine Golden Bitting
and Elizabeth Robins Pennell Collections of European
and American Culinary books, fabulous collections
in our Rare Book Division.
Raichlen went on to become a high successful
and widely read author of 26 cookbooks.
His The Barbeque Bible published in 1998 is an encyclopedic study
of grilling and barbecuing around the world.
It features over 500 recipes plus a crash course on grilling
and barbecuing techniques based on research that took him
to 25 countries all over the world.
This book won the International Association
of Culinary Professionals/Julia Child Award and was a main selection
of the Book of the Month Club and is now in its seventh printing.
Copies of this book as well as BBQ USA and How to Grill are available
for purchase outside this room.   And Steve has graciously agreed
to sign your copies following his lecture.
He will be signing them up here, but you can purchase the books outside.
Steve is most likely known to many of you as the host
of Barbeque University, a television show now in its third year on PBS.
This show is taped on location at the Greenbrier Resort
in White Sulfur Springs,
West Virginia where he teaches barbeque and grilling classes.
When he is not giving lessons, appearing on television
or receiving James Beard Awards, Steve lives with his wife,
Barbara Seldon [spelled phonetically]
who we're very happy to have with us today.
They live in Coconut Grove, Florida and spend time
in their vacation home
at Chappaquiddick and Martha's Vineyard.
Today Steven is going to tell us about the fascinating history
of barbeque, the world's oldest and now very popular culinary art.
In his book Barbeque USA, Steven tells us that, "Thanks to the advent
of the Weber Kettle Grill and to the introduction of easy
to use gas grills, barbeque has become a national pastime."
The boom was helped by America's massive migration to the suburbs
where for the first time in our history everyone had a back yard.
Today, 85 percent of American families own some sort of grill
and more than 40 percent own two or more.
Some like Steven, own more than 20.   [Laughter] In much of the country,
grilling has become a year-round activity according
to the Barbeque Hearth and Patio Association,
which is the Barbeque National Trade Organization.
Fifty-four percent of American's use grills 12 months of the year.
And now to hear from the master himself,
it's my honor to introduce Steven Raichlen.
[Applause] Steven Raichlen: Thank you all very much for coming
and this is a great honor for me to have been invited and also one
of those wonderful full circles that happens,
I guess if you live long enough and write about barbeque long enough.
When I graduated from college in 1975 I won a Watson Fellowship.
I proposed to study medieval cooking in Europe, that was a wacky proposal
and they were even wackier to give me a grant.
And my first stop on this amazing journey was the Rare Books Room
at the Library of Congress where Leonard Beck,
who was truly a wonderful and generous, sharing,
bright and wise man, guided me through the Bitting Collection.
I got to hold and touch my first medieval cookbook, which is probably
as much of a thrill just touching it as reading it.
So to be back here now 30 years later is really quite remarkable.
I'd like to accomplish five things today.
First of all I'd like to give you a brief overview
of the history of American barbeque.
I'd like to take you on a brief tour of the world's barbeque trail,
which is really how I got into this business.
I'd like to show you how to prepare a few traditional
and not so traditional dishes.
I'd like to tell you how a former French Lit.
major wound up doing a private barbeque class for Howard Stern
at his house and meeting the Iron Chef in Tokyo,
but that's another story.
And finally I'd like to take some of your questions if any
of you have questions about barbecuing and grilling.
So no such thing as a stupid question,
by the way, especially here I bet.
Let's see, April 11th, 1514 was no red-letter date in history.
No major wars were started or lost.
No major coronations or assassinations,
but it's a very important date for all of us gathered here today,
because on that day a Spanish gentleman named Gonzalo Fernandez de
Oviedo y Valdez left Spain aboard a ship, part of a 20 ship armada bound
for the New World, bound for Columbia as a matter of fact.
Now, Fernando is a kind of an interesting guy.
He was a courtier, he was a novelist, he wrote a couple
of popular novels in the period, he knew something about metallurgy,
political administration and he was sent to take over a gold, I guess,
foundry, where gold would be melted into ingots for the Spanish Crown.
He was also, and the reason we remember him today,
what we would call a "foodie."
And along this journey, the armada stopped on the island of Hispaniola,
today the Dominican Republic and Haiti to take on fresh supplies.
And Fernando was very curious about the local food ways
so he gives us some of the earliest European descriptions of yuca
and boniato, starchy, Hispanic tubers, which in fact were roasted
in the embers, one of the first descriptions of the avocado
which he described as better than butter.
The pineapple about which he thought
that was the most sensational fruit he had ever tasted.
The first description of corn bread which was made actually
by wrapping ground corn meal and water and fat in banana leaves
and roasting it in the embers.
But most importantly he wrote the following description.
He had seen a group of Taino Indians on the beach doing,
what we would call a cookout today.   And here's what he wrote.
"They roast the flesh on sticks which they place on the ground
like a grating or trivet over a pit and they call this barbacoa."
Okay, they call this barbacoa,
so that is the origin of our word barbeque.
And often I would have begun this lecture
by asking you what is barbeque?
I'll tell you what, just real quickly, what is barbeque?
And there are many right answers so I'd
like five definitions of barbeque.   Male Speaker: Slow heat cooking.
Steven Raichlen: Okay, so a method, slow heat cooking.
This is like the Harvard B School by the way.
You've got to participate to graduate.
[Laughter] Male Speaker: To a New Yorker, it's just a cookout.
Steven Raichlen: A cookout, an event and takes place out doors.
Good. Do we have any Texans in the audience?
North Carolinians?
Okay, what's barbeque: Male Speaker: It's always a marinade or a sauce.
Steven Raichlen: Okay, sauce and marinade plays a part of it.
What is barbeque?   Male Speaker: Shredded meat, cooked.
Steven Raichlen: Okay, where are you from?
Male Speaker: [Inaudible] Washington D.C. Steven Raichlen: Okay,
so you referred -- for you barbeque is a dish, shredded meat.
My bet it's probably shredded pork, okay?
What is barbeque?   One more definition.
Yes ma'am?   Female Speaker: [Inaudible].
Steven Raichlen: Okay, the use of live fire cooking.
So we've got a gismo, which I'm going to show you in a minute,
the so-called barbeque grill.
We have a technique, which is low and slow cooking.
We have, let's see, we have kinds of food.
Had we had a Texan, he might have named Brisket.
Had we had someone from Santa Maria, California,
they might have named tri-tip.   Had we had somebody from Decatur,
Alabama they might have said chicken barbequed with white barbeque sauce.
We have the notion of barbeque sauces and rubs.
We have the notion of a meal eaten outdoors.
And I might add, and you'll see here in the next couple shots,
a meal that is communally partaken.   It's a communal meal.
So all of these are barbeque
and under my tent include all these definitions and then some.
For me what triggers barbeque, the identity of barbeque is the use
of live fire cooking and any food you produce with it,
any device you use for producing that kind of food
and any meal you cook and/or eat outdoors.
Okay, so that's barbeque.
The first three shots here, these are engravings
from sixteenth century books
and this one shows very likely what Fernando might have seen
when he landed in Hispaniola.
So we have wild game, this is a roaring fire.
Now a little of this may have been in European embroidery
and you will see why in a second.
Hunting scene, the grand chief on the top of the mountain.
And this is a closer view of a barbeque
and the barbacoa is this wooden frame.
And a barbacoa could be used for cooking and it could also be used
for sleeping, it was a bed frame.
So when you make a grill out of wood, what happens?
If you're in Europe and you're making a grill
out of metal it can get very close to the embers,
right cause you're working over a very low heat.
When you're using wood as a grate, you have to raise it up high.
So you can see that this grill is waist high.
Now I suspect the roaring fire
that you see here is a bit of artistic license.
But what's very important is this wood smoke, because what happens
when you take food high up above a fire?
Well, first of all the temperature is generally lower and second
of all your cooking in the presence of wood smoke, okay.
So two essences of traditional American barbeque found right here
in this picture.
Now the Taino Indians actually gave us a lot of things that we associate
with the good life of today and one is the canoe,
that's a Taino Indian word, barbacoa is a Taino India word.
Here you see the barbacoa back here with fish.
The hammock was a Taino Indian invention
and also tobacco was a Taino Indian invention.
By the way has anybody here ever been to Boston Beach in Jamaica?
That's the epicenter of Jamaican Jerk and they still cook over --
their grate is still made over wood.
It's allspice wood so when it starts to singe in the cooking process,
and it will burn through and need to be replaced.
So here 500 years later
in the Caribbean people are still using a wooden grate.
Okay, now, that was the birth place of at least the word barbeque,
barbaco, but in the fact the act of cooking
over live fire has been going on for about a million years
and I like to imagine it happening this way;
maybe there was a forest fire that swept through the woods,
cooked a bison on the hoof or perhaps one
of our primordial ancestors had a gobbet of raw meat which fell
into a pool of lava or a natural brush fire.
And somebody was either hungry enough or perversely curious enough
to have tasted it, uttered one of the great ahah's
of culinary history, and not only barbeque but really cooking,
and really for me humanity was born.
Because of you think about it, we're the only animal that cooks
and cooking lead to all sorts of activities, like you need language
to organize the hunt and ask somebody to pass the salt.
Perhaps somebody grabs a flaming or smoking brand of wood
and starts tracing images on the roof
of the cave, thereby inventing art.
So you could really say that barbeque begat civilization.
[Laughter] Anyhow, this idea of live fire
and pit cooking was taking place all over the New World.
This is a scene from Tillicum Village in the Puget Sound
and this shows the traditional Northwest Indian way of grilling.
A giant bonfire, the salmon are gutted through the belly,
filleted out over these stakes, cedar stakes, in front of the fire
and cooked with nothing more than the presence
of fresh air and wood smoke.   The flavor is absolutely fantastic!
Here's another view and you can see this and it's really a fun place
to visit if you're out in Seattle.   This is the South American version.
This was taken at a restaurant in Buenos Aries,
it's called La Estancia and you can see here whole lamb right there
and whole sides of beef put on these cruciform stakes in front
of a bonfire, again, very simple.
One of my theories is that every culture invents the barbeque
that best suits its natural resources, its tastes,
religious beliefs and other cultural identity.
So keep that in mind as we take our tour of the world's barbeque trail.
Here you can see lambs on these cruciform stakes
in front of a fire pit.
Now this is remarkable to see anywhere,
but what's even more remarkable is that this is
in downtown Buenos Aries.
The notion of a pit, we saw in Fernando's definition
that a pit was mentioned.
And today the big smokers that you see
at barbeque festivals are called pits.
If any of you own smokers, does anybody here own a smoker?
Okay, so your smoker, you know, it's made of metal and it sits
above the ground, it's called a pit and this will give you an idea
of how the pit came to be called the pit in American barbeque parlors.
It was actually a trough dug in the ground, filled with embers
and then meats were roasted on sticks over that fire.
And here you can see a modern day version.
This was at a multi million dollar house on Miami Beach
where a Cuban American friend of ours did a lechon asado,
a roast pig for Christmas Eve.
And you can see the little hooves of the pig there covered
with banana leaves to help keep in some
of the heat and some of the fire.
And the pit was actually raised with cinder blocks on the guy's driveway.
This was sort of an interesting, interesting shot.
Now baked beans are an integral part of the American barbeque experience
and they were actually initially developed by the Indians
who would dig pits in the ground, line them with stones
and then cook the beans with bear fat and maple sap,
they'd have a sweet and fat and salty idea in these pits.
This was from a logging camp
and what the loggers would do is they would dig a pit,
line it with coals, put the beans in a giant cast iron bean pot,
bury the whole mess in the ground, go out and cut logs for three days,
then come back and by then the beans would have cooked
to perfection underground and you'd open the pit
and the baked beans would be ready.
This is an early scene of a rotisserie
because there are five methods of live fire cooking.
And real quickly let's review what they are.
Five methods of live fire cooking.
Number one, direct grilling okay, which is what most
of the world means by barbeque.
Number two, indirect grilling, where you put the heat on the side,
cook the food in the center in a covered environment.
That is good for large pieces of meat that would burn on the outside
and stay raw on the inside otherwise.
Number three, indirect grilling, smoking, if you lower the heat down
and introduce the presence of wood smoke you get smoking.
Number four, rotisserie, like you see here,
a whole steer on the rotisserie.
And number five, pit, grilling foods right in the embers.
Great. I don't know if you guys have this in the collection or not,
but one of the earliest recipes for barbeque --
you know, one question I always ask is, well what was early barbeque?
What did it taste like?
And one early recipe was found in this English cookbook,
but clearly it was describing an American procedure.
And grosomodo, what it called for was a six month old hog
that was gutted and split open through the belly, filleted out,
cooked over burning embers, belly side down for three or four hours
and then turned back side down so that it's cavity was facing upwards.
And then you were advised to, let's see, fill that cavity with,
there was nutmeg, there was sage leaves, dry white wine and salt
and pepper of course, lemon and cloves.
So we had the kind of sweet spices, remarkably and that mixture was sort
of allowed to simmer in the cavity then it was poured off
and that became the barbeque sauce.
What was missing from that early barbeque sauce?
Male Speaker: Ketchup.
Steven Raichlen: Okay, ketchup wouldn't enter barbeque sauce
until the late 19th century.
Ketchups were present in these early days
but they would be walnut ketchups or anchovy ketchups, fruit ketchups,
tomato ketchup a pretty late addition to the world of barbeque.
Barbeque is intimately involved with the American political process
and has been since the 1600s
where early Virginia laws forbade the discharging
of firearms at public barbeques.
George Washington was a great fan of barbeque.
In fact in his diaries you find lots of mentions of barbeque,
one in Alexandria, Virginia lasted three days.
And the only elected office that he ever ran for and lost,
it was his first attempt, it was for a seat in the House of Burgess,
and one contemporary wryly observed that he neglected
to provide the customary refreshment,
i.e. he didn't stage a barbeque.
So that may have been why his career almost never got off to a start.
When the capital, the ground stone of the capital, the cornerstone
of the capital just around the corner from here was laid,
it was celebrated by a barbeque.
When Abraham Lincoln's parents were married,
their wedding feast was a barbeque.
So barbeque really is, and even to this day, barbeque is part
and parcel of the American political experience.
We're going to fast-forward a little bit to the age of Henry Ford
and the birth of modern barbeque.
And what the heck does a Model T have to do with barbeque?
Well when Henry Ford made the Model T he used to trim the inside
with wood and he had a lot of wood scraps left over.
And being a good industrialist he hated to see anything go to waste.
So he had read about a process
that was developed wherein you could take wood scraps and mix them
with coal dust and borax and petroleum binders and stamp them
into a pillow shaped briquette.
And he put a relative of his in charge of that operation;
the man's name was Kingsford, in 1921.
[Laughter] By 1921 the charcoal briquette was in business.
Interestingly it was not really used for cooking, at first it was used
for blacksmithing and for heating the stoves in big hotel restaurants.
But eventually, and actually pretty soon
after in 1952 backyard barbeque was to get another tremendous boost
and that was from a man named George Stephens and he's pictured there.
George Stephens worked for a nautical buoy company outside
of Chicago and the buoy company was called the Weber Marine Nautical
Buoy Company or something like that and he had the idea to take one
of those metal bowls and put legs on it and put vent holes at the bottom
and take the other, put vent holes in it and put a cover on top
with the grate in the center.   It was the Weber Kettle Grill.
And in this day and age of Blackberry's and computers
and palm pilots, the Weber Grill is about the last thing I use
on a daily basis that I still understand how it works.
[Laughter] This picture, this picture was taken
at the Weber Grill Restaurant in Chicago.
So that's kind of a brief history of American barbeque.
You have the briquettes from the '20s; you have the grill.
There were grills, they were kind of flat, brazier style grills,
which actually the grills that we had when I was growing up.
But the genius of the Weber Kettle is it enabled you to indirect grill.
You raked the coals out on the sides, get me back here.
Everybody know what I mean by indirect grilling?
How many charcoal grillers do we have in the audience by the way?
That's fantastic, my God, what a selected crowd.
So what you do, your coals would be in a mound here and a mound here
and a drip pan in the center and when you cover the grill you turn it
into sort of outdoor oven or smoker.   So part two of the lecture now.
My adventures on the world's barbeque trail.
In 1994 I had an epiphany that I likened to hearing a voice
from Heaven and that voice said, "Follow the fire."
[Laughter] And the idea was that I was
to travel the world's barbeque trail and investigate how people
in different countries used live fire for cooking.
Now at the time, I didn't know whether there was such a thing
as a barbeque trail, but I did know that Japanese had Yakitori,
that the Turks had shish kabob, that there was Tandoori in India,
there was Jerk in Jamaica so I kind of knew that barbeque
in a way was a universal.
So I dashed off a book proposal, sent it to my publisher
and normally that's an activity that takes a couple months
and this one was written in a morning.
And then the following week I got a contract back and that's an activity
that usually takes a couple months.
But I guess he saw the kind of value of the idea and in the contract --
and this is where I should have gotten really frightened --
they had a clause, it said, "the author agrees
to visit the following 15 countries."
I actually had no idea what would be involved in writing this book.
It was going to take me a year and be about a hundred recipes.
It wound up taking four years and growing to 500 recipes.
I spent the advance the first nine months, so many of the books
that you see out there in my low fat series were actually written
to keep the fires burning under this book Barbeque Bible.
This scene, this was taken on Scilly Cay in Anguilla and it shows,
we use it for the Texas style pit would be made
out of a 50 gallon oil barrel and here's the island version.
It's made out of a little propane tank with spindly legs on it.
And what they're barbecuing there is spiny lobster cooked
over charcoal, pretty fantastic.
The Caribbean was my first stop on this odyssey because, you know,
the birth of barbeque and barbacoa.   This is a scene from South America
and it shows pretty relentlessly carnivorian diet.
I was told by some of my informants
that Argentineans eat meat 13 times a week, that lunch on Friday is fish
but everything else is meat.
This is a scene in a restaurant called La Cabana,
which is very famous barbeque grill restaurant in Buenos Aries
that closed and than has been reopened.
I want you to note the activity here.
For those of you who watch the show you know I have a little mantra
about the way to do successful direct grilling and it goes --
can any body help me here?
It starts with "Keep, keep it - - Male Speaker: Hot.
Steven Raichlen: Keep it - - Male Speaker: Clean.
Steven Raichlen: Keep it - - Male Speaker: Lubricated.
Steven Raichlen: Right on!
So here you see the guy cleaning the grill brush
with a long handled stiff wire brush.
Incidentally here's a great little trick, he has a bucket of salt water
on the floor and when he goes to clean the grill he dips the brush
in the salt water to get a little coating of salt on the grill grate.
Are you really doing this all as fast as I'm talking?
That's unbelievable!
[Laughter] This is a, this is a grill
in the Americano del Puerto in Montevideo.
And it's kind of an interesting set up.
There's a central firebox where oak logs are burned into embers
and then the embers are actually raked under the grill
and notice also how the grill slopes up and down.
Now every culture has had to address the issue
of how do you control the heat
with such an unpredictable medium as live fire?
And the way they do it is by distance.
Getting the cooler part of the grill is actually way up above the coals.
Another scene of that from the side, and they have actually broken one
of my cardinal rules about successful grilling.
One of the big mistakes is don't over crowd your grill.
I will never fill a grill grate more than half way with food
so you always have room to maneuver.
However because they have this vertical system they've got
the control.
Here's a rib of a different sort from Argentina and Paraguay.
It's called a tierra de asado and most ribs
of course are cut this way.
But what you do for tierra de asado is you slice the rib this way
on a band saw.
Now the meat next to the bone is always the most flavorful
so this gives you the kind of pleasure of eating a steak
but with the flavor of meat next to the bone.
This is a scene in Japan at a little Yakitori parlor.
Actually the young man sitting there is my son Jake who's the chef
of the restaurant Pulse in New York City, and when we went
over to battle the Iron Chef, Jake was my second in command.
And what we did, we had a week to get ready for it so we hit all
of the yakitori parlors and grill joints we could find to sort of see
if we could find the Achilles Heel of the chef.
[Laughter] In Japan grilling is very pristine and pure.
In fact I had chef after chef tell me we use bincho charcoal,
we prize it because it imparts no flavor.
Now to an American that would be absolutely absurd, we want flavor
from charcoal and wood but they like the purity of the flavor.
And we've gone from the relentless carnivorianism of South America
to -- look at the vegetables here.
These are tiny bell peppers and these are leeks, white part of leek,
ginkgo nuts, asparagus, shiitake mushrooms.
So Japan is really a vegetarian's paradise.
Do we have any vegetarians in the audience here?
All right, you were a brave gal to come today!
[Laughter] Talked about every society inventing the grill
and pit that we need.
This is a traditional Japanese Yakitori grill.
It's very slender, very heat efficient.
Right here at the bottom you see this is called Binchotan charcoal,
it's the world's most expensive charcoal.
I have a piece that's about four inches long, it cost me four bucks
for one piece of charcoal.
And you can see different yakitori's these are Tsukune, the meatballs,
those will be gizzards, probably got liver's back there, some fine meat.
American's are about the only people in the world
that use chicken breasts for grilling.
Everybody else prizes the dark meat, which is richer
and more generously marbled.
And as I traveled the world's barbeque trail in general,
it was pretty merciful to my budget.
This was the place that served me the most expensive meal
on the grill, it was $340 for two of us.
It's called a Robata Yaki Parlor.
Robata means hearth, Yaki means grilled or roasted.
Very theatrical restaurant and you see here these are
about six foot long paddles.
The food is grilled and then it is served
on those paddles amidst tremendous shouting.
Every time you sit down, you move, you order, you drink Sake,
you eat some barbeque, they shout out what you're doing and it's
from the bus boy to the waiter all the way up to the chef.
Now there's a great debate in American barbeque as to
which is superior, charcoal or gas.   And I will answer that very quickly.
Neither. Grilling over wood is the best thing.
But guys in my field often are charcoal snobs and I was too
until I visit this in Akaia [spelled phonetically].
But you see here, they're working over a super high temp gas grill
and this was an absolutely spectacular meal.
So there is a place for gas and there is a place for charcoal.
In fact my new policy is that everybody should own,
even if you have a -- how many people only own gas grills?
Don't be embarrassed, it's okay, it's okay.
[Laughter] All right, well even if you do I recommend that you invest
in an inexpensive kettle grill so that you can smoke
because it's very hard to smoke on a gas grill.
This is a scene at a market in Kyoto,
kind of an interesting dish talk about the variety of barbeque.
This is burdock root wrapped with eel and cooked over charcoal.
You'll see the finished dish in a little bit.
And this is a barbequed cuttlefish with the slits made
so that the fish cooks evenly and the seasoning,
the sweet salty glaze, is well absorbed.
And here I am hard at work on the barbeque trail.
This is called mochi, it's a grilled dessert.
These are gummy rice balls made with pounded rice and sugar
and they're grilled and brushed with a sweet miso
or soy glaze for dessert.   This was taken in Indonesia.
I'm sorry, in Malaysia, Malaysia and Indonesia.
Asia is fantastic for grilling and this was a sate parlor
and you can see they serve the traditional chicken,
but then they also had venison and rabbit and beef and goat.
And you can see some of the sate's
on the skewers hung up ready for grilling.
This was Mr. Ipo [spelled phonetically].
Gurney Drive.
Every great barbeque culture in a urban area will have one street
that is barbeque central, okay, one street that's barbeque central.
So he had a fantastic rotisserie set up going here and you can see
if you're an intrepid barbeque researcher some
of the things that you need to eat.
These are grilled chicken feet and they actually taste a heck
of a lot better than they look.   Okay, another scene from Malaysia.
This is the island of Penang, grilled squid.
And the squid is actually dried first and then they roll it
through rollers that look like an old fashioned washing machine
to soften it up, quickly toast it on the grill.
This is a scene in Indonesia
and it's remarkable for a couple of reasons.
One is, for me, barbecuing and grilling is all about flavor and one
of the best and most interesting ways
to add flavor is to use flavorful skewer.
[Unintelligible] I did a TV show this morning that's going to air
on FOX in a couple of weeks where I took peach quarters
and skewered them on cinnamon sticks.
It's a recipe from BBQ USA and the ends of the cinnamon sticks burn
and you release all these cinnamon oils.
Well here in Indonesia they make a sate called sate [unintelligible]
and these shafts are actually lemon grass stalks
and around them a shrimp mousse
or a duck mousse is molded and it's grilled.
You bite into them and you get this little burst of sweetness.
The other remarkable thing is that a lot of people thing
that barbeque is a guy thing and in much
of the world it is a guy thing -- [low audio] --
but here's a lady grill jockey.
And there are four countries in the world I found
that have a lot of lady grill jockeys.
Can anybody tell me what those four countries are?
Any guesses?   Male Speaker: Korea.
Steven Raichlen: Okay, Korea, I actually,
possibly, but I didn't see any.   Male Speaker: Thailand.
Steven Raichlen: Thailand is one.   Male Speaker: Indonesia.
Steven Raichlen: Indonesia's number two.
Male Speaker: Malaysia.
Steven Raichlen: Malaysia, somewhat, Vietnam number three
and on this continent, Mexico, Mexico.
And it's really interesting, and my theory about that is it has less
to do with sort of a sexual pre disposition to liking fire or not
and more to do with socioeconomics because when you're starting
out in the business of street food grilling is a very inexpensive way
to get started.
I had some fantastic grilled bananas from a lady whose grill
in Vietnam was a tire rim, that was the grill filled with charcoal
and that was all she had, so you know.
And then once you move up, then you can afford a gas burner
and a propane tank and a wok and you can start stir-frying.
But barbeque is an entry-level position.
Male Speaker: If it's [unintelligible] in these countries,
is it safe to eat the food?
Steven Raichlen: Well that's a very good question.
I ate everything!
I used to call it gastronomic roulette and I would eat it --
[Laughter] -- and then wonder
if a few hours later I would get sick or not.
And I did get sick, but not as much as you would think.
However if I'd been writing a book
about salads I surely would not be here talking to you today.
The fact is that meat comes off the grill very hot
and in most countries meat is cooked all the way through.
A couple interesting things here, it's a lady grill jockey for one
and the use of the fan to oxygenate the grill also,
look how tiny this grill is,
this grill is not much bigger than a shoe box.
Now in Asia people tend to cook very small pieces of food and they do it
for one, I think because fuel is relatively scarce and for two,
you don't have a tradition of knives and forks
so you tend to eat bite size food.
In American our food tends to be smoked and why is that?
We had these vast virgin forests so a lot of wood to smoke.
In Argentina they tend to have very simple barbeque,
but it's done on a giant scale, whole sides of beef.
Why? They're on the Pampas, they are cowboys, didn't have a lot
of sophisticated spicing but had big space and big fires.
Indian barbeque is really not barbeque unless it contains a dozen
spices at least.
Why? India is of course, the spice capital of the world
and on the center of the spice route.
That's that flattened grilled squid that I was talking to you about.
And I can't say it's actually one of my favorite dishes
but you know I did try it.
Some guy showing off at Sunda Kelapa,
a restaurant outside of Jakarta in Indonesia.
There's a very interesting marinade they call it a Bumboo,
and it's actually a brine made with salt
and water basically, some limes in it.
You can see slashing the fish to allow the heat
to penetrate more evenly and this,
I'm sorry that you can't see the guy better,
but this was a restaurant actually in Indonesia
where a duck had been rubbed with a spice paste
and wrapped in palm fronds.
Okay, you know the big thing when your palm tree falls off,
it was wrapped and it was roasted in the palm fronds.
This is a site in India
and the barbeque pit you can't actually even see,
but it's the open mouth of a tondoor.
The tondoor is probably the oldest continuously used barbeque pit
in the world.
It looks like an urn shaped pit, charcoal fire at the bottom,
burns very, very hot and it was originally designed to bake bread.
And the bread would be slapped on the sides of the tondoor here,
pulled out with this metal rod.
About 50 years ago people started making kabobs
on these long metal skewers, roasting lamb, roasting chicken
and using the tondoor as a barbeque pit.
This brings us to what the single most expensive recipe
in Barbeque Bible.
We were on the barbeque trail in the South of France and we were actually
after two weeks of research we had a vacation planned for the weekend.
And a vacation when you're on the barbeque trail means that you go
to a nice restaurant and a nice hotel
with 300 count Egyptian linen sheets and you eat something braised
or stewed or roasted but not grilled.
And I made the mistake of calling a buddy in Paris and asking
if she had any leads for French grilling and she said, "Oh yeah,
there's this restaurant that serves grilled snails."
Now the only problem is that we were in Provence
and this restaurant was on the Spanish border.
A 400-mile trip away, so I called the restaurant,
"Yeah we do have grilled snails
but unfortunately we're closing tomorrow for the season."
So my poor wife!
I said, "I've got good news and bad news,
and the good news is we're going to go on a little trip
and the bad news is you have
to leave this [unintelligible] Chateau property."
We drove 400 miles in four hours, a hundred miles an hour
and you know the price of gas, back then it meant something in France,
of course now America gas is almost as expensive.
And this is what we found.   These were grilled escargot.
And they're cooked over grape vine trimmings by the way,
sar mon de vignes [spelled phonetically], grapevine trimmings.
So this dish is sort of shows -- it's a little bit --
it's interesting in terms of methodology
because these snails were gathered in a vineyard and packed in a crate
with fresh bunches of thyme and shoved in basement
that had all kinds of wonderful wine aromas and mold.
And so you could never duplicate that.
You can't grill a snail fresh off the leaf.
You have to let it purge its system first and eat something safe to eat.
And when I went to recreate this I noticed that the snails,
when I tasted them they had an almost kind of a curry flavor
that came from the thyme and whatever they did.
So when I recreated the recipe I used lard as the fat not butter
and curry powder and shallots in the cooking, basting mixture
and the taste was dead
on even though it was totally different ingredients.
Okay, so this was in Venice where we went for another attempted vacation.
Figured where could you be safer from barbeque
than water locked place like Venice
but in fact this is the Charcoal Street, it was called,
and we met the first day, a guy name Mr. Ivo
who runs a restaurant called Da Ivo
who has the only charcoal burning grill,
wouldn't you know it, in Venice.
And here he's about to do a bifteka for us grilled
over the charcoal burning grill burned olive wood charcoal.
So that was my research into global barbeque and the fruit
of that four years of labor was the Barbeque Bible.
Some of you ask, what's the difference between the books?
Well, the Barbeque Bible is really about global barbeque and grilling.
The next, actually the fifth book I wrote in the series,
which we'll jump to next was BBQ USA
and in America we have this incredible barbeque tradition.
It's one of the few things we do better
than almost anybody else in the world food wise.
And this is at the Memphis in May International Barbeque Competition.
Has anybody ever been there?
It's sort of like a cross between Mardi Gras
and the Indy 500 of barbeque.   Elvis sightings are frequent.
And people get very creative with their barbeque pits.
So this is the Lipton Tea team and their barbeque pit is a teapot
from which smoke emerges from the spout.
And these are some guys in barbeque drag
because they do have a talent show as well as a barbeque show.
These are the Sultans of Swine from Memphis, Tennessee
and this is another scene.
I guess barbeque and drag, people like to do that.
And this is Remus Powers who is a barbeque judge and the studs
on his tuxedo are rib bones.
And this is some scenes of classic, traditional American barbeque.
This is in North Carolina at a place called Lexington Barbeque.
Again we saw this in South America.
A fire pit where oak logs are burned down to glowing embers
and then these will be shoveled under the meat.
And you can see a similar scene here, this is Allen & Sons
in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, absolutely fantastic barbeque pit.
This guy is about as ornery as they get.
He wakes up at three o'clock every morning to fire up the pit
and these pork shoulders, once they're tender enough to pull
out the bone, they are chopped up with vinegar sauce.
And I stood in the kitchen watching this guy chop with two cleavers,
the sweat pouring off his nose into the meat.
[Laughter] And that was, I guess, the secret ingredient.
Here you go.
You can see him chopping the pork here.
He was real cantankerous and was just ribbing me about,
"Oh it's nice to see somebody's making some money in barbeque."
And then another customer came over about half way through the meal
and said, "Don't listen to him, he owns three quarters of Chapel Hill."
[Laughter] But that was fantastic barbeque.
You know normally when I'm traveling
and doing research I would never go back to the same place.
I had a chopped pork sandwich at lunch.
It was so unbelievably delicious I came back
at dinner and I had one then.
And that was so unbelievably delicious I thought maybe I was just
sick or hungry or imagining things.   I came back for lunch the next day.
That's how good that was.
This is Arthur Bryant who was sort of the dean and legend
of Kansas City barbeque and it was Calvin Trillin's article
about the best restaurant on the planet is not in France it's
in Kansas City and the best dish are the burnt edges,
that's the trimmings from the brisket.
And you see him here with a rack of ribs.
Leonard's in Memphis.
Nnow in Kansas City they do use a lot of wood smoke, in Memphis --
anybody here from Memphis?
Okay, so you know then, and this is sort
of an interesting anomaly in barbeque.
In Memphis traditionally all the meats are cooked over charcoal
with no wood, so smoke does not play a part
of Memphis barbeque traditionally.
However the dry rub does and also the mustard slaw.
This is Big Bob Gibson railroad man with a Barbeque Jones who turned it
into what's today a fourth generation multi-million
dollar business.
This is in Decatur and his trademark was a barbeque sauce
that contained not only no ketchup or no Worcestershire sauce,
but it's a white barbeque sauce for God's sakes.
It's made with equal parts mayonnaise
and cider vinegar and black pepper.
He created it for someone who was allergic to tomatoes,
it's iconic in Decatur today.
What I love about barbeque, for me the best kind
of barbeque is barbeque if you stuck a pin in a map and you drew a circle
in a 20-mile radius and that's the only place on the planet they eat it
and that is the case with this barbeque chicken
with white barbeque sauce.
Moonlight Barbeque is another one of those micro regions.
It's in Owensboro, Kentucky,
anybody ever been there or anybody from there?
What they barbeque there is mutton and I'm not talking
about delicious young spring lamb.
I'm talking about tough old ornery giant mutton that you can smell
when you walk into the meat locker.
But after 16 hours of smoking and swabbing,
mopping with a Worcestershire based black barbeque sauce it becomes
pretty tasty.   Santa Maria, California.
Do we have anybody from Santa Maria?
Okay, anyhow, the barbeque there is a tri-tip.
It's a triangular piece of sirloin that cooks like a steak and slices
like a brisket and it's always grilled over red oak.
And here you see tri-tip about to be sliced and served at a barbeque.
Another legend of barbeque, Mike Mills, the only person
in human history ever to win the Memphis
in May grand championship three years in a row.
This is at his restaurant in Las Vegas
at the pit that he calls Smokey.
And actually here's a little interesting detail for you.
You can see that at the edge of the ribs the bones are exposed
by about a quarter of an inch.
It's nature's own pop up thermometer that lets you know
when your ribs are cooked and ready to eat.
Dr. Rich Davis here using an actual floor mop to apply the mop sauce
to a spit roasted quarter of beef.
Rich Davis was a child psychiatrist and founder of a couple
of medical schools who always had this hobby with barbeque sauce.
And he created a sauce that he started marketing under the name
of K.C. Masterpiece and then sold it to Clorox for about $50 million.
He remains a terrific guy.
This is Rick Schmitt [spelled phonetically] at the Croyts Market
in Texas and what you can see here, these are Texas hot guts,
they're smoked sausages, piece of paper,
wax paper for serving the saltines.   What's conspicuously absent?
Sauce. He believes the meat should stand by itself.
And some more specific kind
of specialized regional American barbeque, barbequed oysters
from Tamales Bay, California.   This is Jamaican Jerk.
Now the next series of pictures come from my book How to Grill
and I do a lot of these lectures and I ask for questions
and habitually it's the women who ask the questions like they should
and the men never say anything and then after the lectures
over they come up and grab me by the sleeve, "My steak's always tough."
"My chicken catches fire."
"My fish gets stuck to the grill grate, how do I avoid it?"
So I started writing these questions down
and the result was the book How to Grill.
A book with a thousand step-by-step colored photographs of how to do it
and what it should look like so that you don't have to ask directions.
So that's Jamaican Jerk.
Here's the use of that mop sauce again with a barbeque mop.
And this is a pork shoulder we're going to pull.
That's a vinegar, onion and chili pepper mop.
Mop sauces typically don't contain sugar
so you can apply them throughout the cooking process
without the sugar burning.
They add an extra layer of flavor, keep the meat moist
and most importantly give you something to do aside
from drink beer during the six hours it takes to cook a pork shoulder.
Texas style brisket, you notice this little subcutaneous layer of pink
or red underneath, just right under the surface,
that's called the smoke ring.
It's the red badge of honor of traditional American barbeque.
As you climb the ladder of barbeque enlightenment you want to have this
in your barbeque, it gives you great boasting rights.
Here are Kansas City style ribs,
but again you'll notice the sauce is on the side.
I like the sauce on the side, I want to taste
that spice and that smoke flavor.
Dry rub beef ribs, again you can see that smoke ring,
vinegar sauce, these are mopped.
Once they're cooked, they're mopped with vinegar sauce,
sprinkled with the dry rub and served dry.
That was a style pioneered
by the Rendezvous Restaurant in Memphis, Tennessee.
The Vietnamese version, these are ribs that are marinated
in fish sauce and then topped with peanuts and then chopped cilantro.
Okay. And even rotisserie ribs, which is how they do them in France.
In Europe when they cook ribs they really want to emphasize the flavor
of the pork not the spices and smoke.
This is called a matambre, a hunger killer from South America.
It's studded with sausage, it's got carrot, hard cooked eggs,
cheese and the whole thing is rolled up to get this sort
of mosaic effect when it's sliced.
And notice the bacon on the side to keep the meat moist and tender.
This is an interesting dish.
It's called cheraso [spelled phonetically] with chimichurri.
Now cheraso's one of those words in South America like barbeque is
in North America and in Nicaragua it means a beef tenderloin that's
either prepared this way or else it's butterflied through the top.
In Brazil it just means food cooked out on a grill.
And this is the finished result served with chimichurri sauce.
Now remember barbeque sauce varies from region to region
as well as barbeque itself does.
So in Argentina you'd never find a sweet tomato based barbeque sauce
but you'd find this chimichurri, which is a mixture of garlic
and parsley, olive oil and vinegar.
Very clever preparation because if you think about it,
garlic makes your breath stink, parsley is a mouth wash,
a natural mouth freshener,
so you put them together and you wind up okay.
[Laughter] A Thai grilled beef salad,
shish kabob in the Turkish style on these flat metal skewers,
which keep the meat from rolling around.
Now actually there is one sort of Americanism in this and that is
in Turkey the peppers would be cooked on one skewer,
the tomatoes on another, the onions on another,
meat on another all separately
because they all cook at different rates.
Just a roasted chicken but what's interesting about it is we took --
this is a parmesan garlic butter and it's actually placed under the skin
so when you roast the chicken the butter melts right into the meat,
which is pretty fantastic.
You can see it going in here; it looks a little strange.
[low audio] Well, we'll cover that in a minute.
And this is a dish from Italy called pollo sotto un mattone chicken
under a brick.
Chicken marinated in lemon juice, hot peppers, garlic, rosemary
and you physically cook it under a brick
and the brick serves three purposes.
First of all it keeps the meat from drying out, it presses the meat
into the bars of the grate so you get these killer grill marks,
which are another signature of master grillsmanship
and finally it just looks totally cool.
Remember when you're out there grilling it's theater folks
and you want to look cool when you're doing it.
Even the lowly hot dog gets a sort of interesting remake
in this version, my version of a hot dog.
It's butterflied down the center and stuffed
with cheese and jalapeno chilies.
This is actually inspired by a dish I saw
at a samba club in Rio de Janeiro.   Fish grilled in leaves.
This was probably the earliest way to grill food was to stick it
in the embers and the second was to put it on a stick and roast it
over a fire and the third was to wrap it in a leaf.
This is a Yucatan preparation
with an annatto seed marinade grilled in banana leaves.
And here you can see shrimp grilled on sugar cane
and bacon wrapped shrimp kabobs, another way to add flavor
and texture to grilled shrimp.
And grilled lobster, a favorite of ours in the Northeast
and a local specialty here, grilled soft shell crabs, which are dipped
in butter and then just put on the grill.
They're really fantastic!
They did them at the National Press Club last night as part
of the dinner that I did there.
Scallops skewered on rosemary skewers, another way to get flavor
into the food and wrapped in prosciutto.
And straight from Japan.
Who here has ever tried to grill asparagus?
Well you know that the stalks tend to migrate around and drop
through the bars in the grate.
So the Japanese make these rafts pinned cross wise with toothpicks,
which are both, way cool looking, easy to turn
and quick and easy to cook.
Barbeque cabbage, which is hollowed out, stuffed with barbeque sauce,
bacon, onions and butter.
All of those ooze into the cabbage as it's cooked.
You wind up looking something like this.
And I'll tell you what, I'm conscious that I should be wrapping
up now, but I have a few more minutes.
If you all have about 10 more minutes we'll just get through this
and then I'll open it up.   I hate to rush through it too much.
For our vegetarian friends here, this was my version
of a steak or a pork chop.
It's a portabello mushroom that's stuffed with pine nuts, rosemary
and parmesan cheese and then it's grilled.
And by the way, all the grilling we did for all the books,
it really does come off a grill.
If you see a grill book that has beautiful looking steaks
with super naturally symmetrical grill marks they were probably
cooked in a grill pan not on the grill.
And this is from a wonderful restaurant
in Barcelona called Lato Marcara [spelled phonetically] forgive the
photography, but it's a grilled artichoke.
Normally we think of grilling high moisture vegetables
but in fact artichokes slathered with parsley and garlic
and olive oil and grilled over low fire are absolutely fantastic.
Grilled garlic bread, a favorite at the Raichlen house,
because if something tastes good baked or fried
or sauted it probably tastes even better grilled.
Grilled quesadilla's, the Mexican grilled cheese sandwich.
And even grilled pizza, which is a specialty of the restaurant Al Forno
in Providence, Rhode Island.
When you assemble grilled pizza, the cheese goes on first interestingly
because it takes the longest to melt.
And then the vegetables and the toppings and the sauce goes on last
because it's cooked already.
Here's a grilled pizza, you can see I've left the toppings pretty sparse
because it's really about the flavor of the grilled dough.
Grilled tofu for our vegetarian friends, which may seem like a bit
of an anomaly here but in Japan it's as popular
as grilled hotdogs and hamburgers are.
It's a national dish, with a tangerine teriyaki.
This is another grilled crab.
This is back at the restaurant in Akaia.
You eat these in one bite with this wonderful salt
and they just have a fantastic flavor.
A smoked turkey, which we would never cook a Thanksgiving bird any
other way.
This was on the shoot at the TV show.
And beer can chicken which is another icon of American barbeque.
Is there anybody here who is not familiar with beer can chicken?
Thank God there's still people to buy the book and room for growth.
[Laughter] What you do is you open a can of beer and you drink half.
Then you take a chicken and you rub it outside and inside
with home made barbeque rub.
And you hold the chicken in one hand by the wings
and you hold the beer can by the other and insert the beer can
up the nether region of the chicken
and you smoke roast it using the indirect method, coals on the side,
drip pan in the center and what happens is three things.
The beer boils and it keeps the meat incredibly moist
and adds a delicate beer flavor.
The vertical position helps all of the fat melt out
and the whole thing looks so unbelievingly eye pop,
jaw drop cool that you are the master.
I did not invent this dish contrary to popular belief, I discovered it
at the Memphis in May Barbeque Contest, but I did take it
to Good Morning America and write about it in the New York Times
so I was sort of, you might think of me
as the step-father of beer can chicken.
And I'm constantly working on new ideas.
This is a chicken that's suspended in a fireplace over a string
and you twirl it up and then it untwirls and it roasts in front
of the fireplace and twirls backwards.
That's still in work here.
And here's the finished version of those grilled eel
and burdock root creations.
This is another Kyoto grilled specialty.
It's a little tiny bird, a little bit like the alouette in the
"Gentille Alouette" song and it's barbequed
and you eat it whole almost with a napkin over your head
to keep the shattering bones and juices from squirting out.
And grilled eggs!
Yes, in Vietnam they grill eggs and also
in the Safartic tradition eggs were roasted in the embers.
And they're really fantastic.
The Vietnamese version you grill them over low heat, quarter them
and wrap them in lettuce leaves, mint and chili and cilantro
and dip it in to that fish sauce, and vinegar dipping sauce.
Absolutely spectacular!
Grilled eggplant with boniato leaves and grated radish.
Traditional Japanese barbeque.
Grilled gingko nuts, which taste kind of waxy and smoky.
Plank salmon, this is another dish I've gotten a lot of mileage out of.
You cook -- it's sort of inspired
by that traditional Native American Indian version
of the salmon roasted on a cedar shakes.
This is a cedar plank or an oak plank.
This is a smaller version, but you put the fish on top
and it can either be a mustard glaze or brown sugar
and brown sugar mustard glaze or a mayonnaise glaze
and you indirect grill the fish on the plank
and what happens is the plank imparts this incredible cedar flavor
and it also eliminates the dual problems of having your fish stick
to the grill grate or having it fall apart when you turn it.
Now a few years ago we had this amazing little Japanese experience,
and I was born in Japan so this year is all
about life coming full circle.
So I was born in Japan, we get a call
from a Japanese production company that wanted to do a little profile
of an American grilling guy.
So eventually they came to Martha's Vineyard and we did a fourth of July
for them and they taped that.
And then they sent a famous Japanese TV chef over, Kamehachi,
and he brought a barbeque challenge.
So he brought me some exotic ingredients and my job was
to grill them and see how I did.
So in the bag of mystery ingredients we had, let's see, we had --
this is red bean paste and this is lotus root
and there was fermented cod row and these are sea urchin ovaries,
which apparently are very hot barbeque items in Japan.
Well this one, I put the bean paste in a hollowed
out smoke roasted apple with cream cheese and brown sugar and butter
so that worked out pretty well.
And the burdock root right here, I tried kind of grilling
that I just kind of tried grilling it like a vegetable
and that didn't work out so well.   But these guys are really fantastic;
they are sort of like briny potato chips on the grill.
And the fermented cod row, I put that on top of grilled oysters
so all in all we did pretty well with this experience.
At least I was able to hold my head up.
Now, that's kind of out of order
but that's the cinnamon grilled peaches I was telling you about.
Looks like I'm going to have to come back to the Japanese story.
Anyhow, cinnamon grilled peaches, fantastic dessert!
Here's another dessert, it's a homemade marshmallow.
This is from BBQ USA, served with of course,
home made graham cracker cookies and a home made chocolate sauce.
This dish, this marked a real milestone
in the history of barbeque.
I call this my baked Hawaii and this was the first time human kind
and human history actually crossed the threshold of grilling ice cream.
Because in these hollowed pineapple shells there is ice cream.
It's topped with meringue, it's indirect grilled
on a really hot grill with a lot of wood smoke to get the smoky flavor
in the meringue and that's a pretty neat dish.
I think that's in the Beer Can Chicken book.
Grilled pineapple, fantastic summery dessert!
Smoke roasted pears, that was sort of the inspiration
of the red bean apples that I did earlier stuffed with butter,
brown sugar and crumbled breadcrumbs.
And in no particular order this is barbequed eel from Japan.
I guess we're heading back to Japan.
So I decided once I wrote the first book Barbeque Bible
that it was really -- I thought about maybe I'd write a Noodle Bible
and then I did a book proposal and it just wasn't working.
So I thought, "You know what, there really is a lot
of barbeque to barbeque."
So I came up with this program that may or may not have been aided
by a controlled substance.
And the program I was going to do a Barbeque University
at the Greenbrier which you see here and I was going
to do a barbeque TV show, which you'll see in a minute.
And I was going to do these six books, which are out
and I have a few more in the works.
I was going to develop a line of products, which have just come
out this year and I have a few things for the future.
I want to develop a grill and I want to develop some restaurant concepts.
But anyway this is a scene at Barbeque University
and these are some of the 30 grills we have at BBQU.
That's an offset barrel smoker, a water smoker, big green egg,
the giant ranch grill which is a kettle grill on steroids,
a couple of gas grills, front loading charcoal grill.
How do you sign a front loading charcoal grill?
[Laughter] Okay.
And this is the barbeque bus, which my publisher created.
I don't actually travel around on it, but it serves as a backdrop
for demonstrations and TV shows.   And here's Peter Workman.
This is actually a very rare --
Peter Workman is the founder of Workman Publishing,
one of the most successful privately owned publishing houses
in the world.   And he is totally invisible.
He wants all the attention to his authors
so this may be the only photograph you will ever see of Peter Workman,
studying the drawings for the barbeque bus.
There's the barbeque bus on Rodeo Drive --
[Laughter] -- in Los Angeles.
And like a rock tour, a rock star, I'm always on tour,
but unfortunately my groupies are middle-aged guys with beer bellies.
[Laughter] This is on the set at Barbeque University.
Does anybody here watch Barbeque University, ever seen it?
Great, on PBS and it looks like we bought another year for PBS
but let's keep the pressure on everybody on the funding for PBS.
[Applause] Thank you, thank you.
This is where the magic happens in the control room.
And this is a class I did in Calgary.
I had arrived from Miami with my little coal hound loafers
and it dumped six inches of snow on the ground.
Which goes to show that any weather is good weather for barbeque.
You know in my field we ask a question, "When it snows,
what do you shovel first, the path to your car
or the path to your grill?"
How many people here grill in the winter?
All right, I am preaching to the converted.
So this was Chef Kamehachi with the infamous sea cucumber ovaries
and my success in that experience led to an invitation
to battle the Iron Chef in Tokyo.
This happened two years ago so we brought Jake over.
This is on the set.
Ominously when we were doing the prep
for the show the American flag fell
down three times while they were setting it up.
[Laughter] But here is the prep.
It was the guy that I faced off with was a guy named Roksbura Michiba,
the meanest, scariest and most undefeated Iron Chef
in Japanese history and the grill, I kind of had to jury rig something.
So what I did is down here is one of those ring burners you use
for like doing a crab boil and this is a refrigerator shelf
that served as my grill.
And then underneath I got some ceramic briquettes
to kind of diffuse the heat.   And here is Chef Michiba and myself.
And that's with Jake and with my wife Barbara.
Now an amazing thing happened at that contest.
You know, I knew I'd never be able to compete with him in terms
of the presentation, the chopping, and he grabbed the lobster
and the abalone and the hundred dollar a piece matsutake mushrooms
and I'd been promised a charcoal grill and then
when I got there mysteriously it was no where to be found
so I was given a gas grill, but I was not allowed to hook up to gas.
And that's why I rigged up the thing
with the Bunsen burners and came out.
He had the charcoal and he took this thing with lobster and charcoal
and ferns and seaweed and abalone
and hundred dollar a piece matsutake mushrooms and it was fuming
like Mt. Vesuvius and I came out and thought, "All right,
you know what I'm going to do, barbeque chicken,
I'm going to do barbeque ribs and grilled fruit
because I can't compete with the other thing."
And the host was railing me mercilessly for the first half hour
of the show because when the lights came on I started talking.
What do you do on American television?
You talk. But you don't do that in Japan apparently.
And then I had the -- would you come up and just stand
with your back toward the audience for a minute?
would you come up and stand with your back to the audience?
I'm not going to hurt you; I just want to show you something.
So I do this little rib thing where I want to show people
where baby back ribs come from and they actually are cut right
from here next to the bone, so when you eat a baby back rib,
you're eating high off the hog.
Well I tried to do this to the assistant host on the show
and she looked -- I mean that was --
I broke every etiquette rule there was to break.
[Laughter] But ultimately when the --
and they voted with ping pong balls in kind of plastic tube
and when the tally was tallied up I got the host over and I cut a piece
of chicken off the grill and I gave it to him to eat with his fingers
and he had never done that before.
And all of a sudden a light bulb went off and he said,
"You know what, the Japanese guys using $2,000 worth of ingredients
and he's got the charcoal,
so of course his barbeque is going to be great.
The American's cooking ribs which we wouldn't even eat and chicken breast
and fruit and working on nothing."
And so then all of a sudden everybody in the audience
and the judges got very interested in my barbeque chicken and ribs.
When the final tally was done, I can't tell you the final score,
but it was a [unintelligible], so...
[Laughter] The following year the book came out in Japanese.
And I went to Japan to do a little book tour so here's
with Playboy Japan at a photo shoot.
And then two years ago I was on book tour and I got a call from my wife
at seven o'clock in the morning saying,
"Howard Stern is calling me about your book."
Well I'd never listened to Howard Stern.
I sort of knew he was mega controversial,
but turns out he became the only working journalist
in American history to buy one of my books with his own money.
[Laughter] Then he started talking about it!
And he started talking because we send 10,000 books out a year.
So he started talking about it
and eventually it was decided I would teach a private class
for Howard Stern.
He's a very cool guy, not at all in person like he is on TV.
And here finally is just the former French Literature major turned
barbeque professor and researcher hard at work doing research,
not at the Library of Congress but out in the field.
So that's the end of my formal presentation.