Life of Fire
Mastering the Arts of Pit-Cooked Barbecue, the Grill, and the Smokehouse: A Cookbook
-
- $9.99
-
- $9.99
Publisher Description
“The most important book on cooking over live fire in decades. Life of Fire illuminates it all, from coal beds, to home-built pits (in minutes!) to simple, delicious, recipes and enough whole hog know-how to impress the weekend warriors without intimidating newcomers.”—Andrew Zimmern
ONE OF THE BEST COOKBOOKS OF THE YEAR: Saveur
One of the few pitmasters still carrying the torch of West Tennessee whole-hog barbecue, Nashville’s Pat Martin has studied and taught this craft for years. Now he reveals all he knows about the art of barbecue and live fire cooking.
Through beautiful photography and detailed instruction, the lessons start with how to prepare and feed a fire—what wood to use, how to build a pit or a grill, how to position it to account for the weather—then move into cooking through all the stages of that fire’s life. You’ll sear tomatoes for sandwiches and infuse creamed corn with the flavor of char from the temperamental, adolescent fire. Next, you’ll grill chicken with Alabama white sauce over the grown-up fire, and, of course, you’ll master pit-cooked whole hog, barbecue ribs, turkey, pork belly, and pork shoulder over the smoldering heat of mature coals. Finally, you’ll roast vegetables buried in white ash, and you’ll smoke bacon and country hams in the dying embers of the winter fire.
For Pat Martin, grilling, barbecuing, and smoking is a whole lifetime’s worth of practice and pleasure—a life of fire that will transform the way you cook.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Pitmaster Martin impresses with his fiery debut, a celebration of West Tennessee barbecue and a thrilling exploration of live-fire cooking. To paraphrase Shakespeare, one fire in its time plays many parts, its utility here filling seven chapters. The first, entitled "Birth," offers advice on wood selection and blaze maintenance; a young fire ("intense and fleeting"), for instance, is ideal for vegetable dishes like charred carrots with sorghum and buttermilk. When flames reach middle age, they emit the slow and patient heat needed for an open pit, where spareribs, continually flipped and mopped with a vinegar "creek sauce," are a three-hour labor of love, and a whole rabbit, bathed in wine or beer, cooks low and slow, before being brushed with a mayo-laden Alabama white sauce. A fire's "golden years" are spent on the main event, a daylong whole-hog barbecue. In this expansive chapter, Martin covers everything from sourcing the pig to using a hatchet and mallet for prepping the beast. As the coals cool, potatoes can be baked directly in the embers, as can foil packets filled with vegetables. Meanwhile, cold-smoked meats and heavenly desserts like strawberry pie emerge in the fire's afterlife. The hours add up but the barbecuing never gets old in this satisfying outing.
