Man With a Pan (19 page)

MARINADE, DAY 1

Cover the rib slabs with yogurt and massage it into the meat. Place the ribs in a nonreactive container and refrigerate overnight. The yogurt acts as an excellent tenderizer.

MARINADE, DAY 2

In a large bowl, whisk together the ketchup, Dr Pepper, brown sugar, honey, apple juice, soy sauce, onion powder, and white pepper.

Remove the ribs from the refrigerator and wash the yogurt off the slabs with water. Clean the nonreactive container thoroughly.

Place the ribs back in the container, then cover them with the second marinade. Let the ribs marinate 12 to 24 hours.

THE RUB, DAY 3 (COOKING DAY)

The morning of the day you intend to BBQ, remove the ribs from the refrigerator. Hold the slabs over the container and wipe the excess marinade (or let it drip) back into the container. You want only a thin film of the marinade left on the meat. Do not discard the marinade in the container. You’ll need it later.

Prepare the rub by combining the paprika, salt, and brown sugar in a small bowl. If you like your ribs spicy, add cayenne pepper and/or chili powder to taste.

Massage the rub into the slabs so that they are fully coated. Wrap them in foil and put them back into the refrigerator till about 1 hour before you’re ready to cook.

Prepare the grill for indirect grilling as specified in the recipe for Beer-Can Chicken. Soak the wood chips for 1 hour.

About 1 hour before you’re ready to cook, take the ribs from the refrigerator and let them come to room temperature.

Fire up the grill, place the drip pan in the middle, and throw the soaked wood chips on the coals (or, if you have a gas grill, place them in a metal box or aluminum foil pouch). Oil the metal grill and place it over the coals.

Place the rib slabs on the metal grill over the drip pan. If space is an issue, you may purchase a rib rack from a BBQ store; this will hold the ribs up vertically and allow for more room on the grill.

Close the BBQ lid and cook for 1¼ hour at 300°F to 325°F.

While the ribs are cooking, put 2 cups of the Day 2 Marinade and ½ cup of apple cider vinegar in a pot. Bring it to a boil, then let it simmer for 30 minutes, stirring occasionally.

The marinade will be reduced to a thicker, saucier mixture. Open the BBQ lid and baste the rib slabs with the mixture, then cook the ribs for another 30 to 45 minutes.

Remove the ribs from the grill and let them rest for roughly 10 minutes. Slice the slabs into individual ribs and serve.

Note: In my opinion, the ideal way to prepare ribs is with a smoker. If you do happen to own one, follow the above recipe, except smoke the ribs at 200°F to 225°F for a total of 3½ hours.

On the Shelf

The Barbecue! Bible,
Steve Raichlen. This is the book that got me into grilling and BBQ. Great recipes from all around the world, excellent for beginners and grill aficionados alike. The word
bible
is not an overstatement here.

Barbecue! Bible: Sauces, Rubs and Marinades, Bastes, Butters, and Glazes,
Steve Raichlen. A great sauce, rub, or marinade, baste, butter, or glaze lies at the heart of most BBQ. You’ll find a treasure trove of them here, each matched perfectly to specific meats and veggies.

Smoke and Spice: Cooking with Smoke, The Real Way To Barbecue,
Cheryl Alters Jamison and Bill Jamison. Note: This is for cooking with smokers, not grills. This really teaches the meaning of cooking “low and slow.” If you don’t own a smoker, the recipes in this book will make you want to go out and get one.

Bobby Flay’s Boy Meets Grill,
Bobby Flay. If you want to push the envelope on your grilling, this is your book.

The Great Ribs Book,
Hugh Carpenter and Teri Sandison. A bible for rib fans. Spareribs, baby backs, and big, honkin’ beef “dinosaur bones”—it’s all here. Just don’t forget the Lipitor.

MANUEL GONZALES

The Pie Guy

Manuel Gonzales bakes and cooks for his wife and two children in Austin, Texas. He holds an MFA from Columbia University, and his work has appeared in
Open City, One Story,
the
Believer, Fence, Esquire,
the
Lifted Brow, McSweeney’s,
the
L Magazine,
the
Mississippi Review,
and the
American Journal of Print.
He is currently the executive director of Austin Bat Cave, a nonprofit writing and tutoring center for kids.

I hardly remember the first pie I made, mostly because it was one of about thirty. In 1997, a friend of mine, Barry Margeson, opened a wholesale pie company, which he called the Clarksville Pie Company, named after the neighborhood in Austin where he lived when the idea first struck him. The decision to open a pie company took most of his friends, including me, quite by surprise, but we encouraged him. He didn’t have a job and seemed to be listing ever so slightly, and he was smart and funny and handsome, and it seemed to us that whatever business he put together promised only exceptional success. Plus he made good pies, and when he tested recipes, he would eat a slice and then call us up and offer the rest of the pie to us.

Shortly after going into business, however, he fell in love with an Italian woman, who visited him for two weeks in Austin and whom he then desperately needed to visit in Italy. Before he left, he taught me what he knew about making pies, drove me from account to account to introduce me to the restaurant managers, gave me a key to the kitchen he rented downtown, and then, wishing me good luck, fled the country for two weeks.

My baptism into making and delivering pies is little more than a blur to me now. Barry shared his kitchen space with another baker, a woman named Robyn, and she later told him that there were a number of nights that involved a good deal of swearing, a lot of ruined pies and pie crusts, at least two pies dropped as they were pulled out of the oven, hot grease poured down the sink (because at the time I didn’t know that grease didn’t go down the sink), and a number of other mishaps. Added to her account were complaints from his customers, who reported pies undercooked or burnt or flattened (smashed together in the bed of my truck, no doubt). He laughed these off, partly because I’d done him a huge favor, but mostly, I think, because he was deeply, rottenly in love, and nothing else at the time really mattered.

A few months later, he left again, and I went into the kitchen again. I had spent more time with him overnight at the bakery by then, and I knew more about what to do. I panicked less and made fewer mistakes. Then his girlfriend moved to Austin, and they moved together to Cambridge. He sold the company and all its holdings—which consisted of two KitchenAid mixers (one of which was broken), three one-quart measuring cups, a bevy of rubber spatulas, metal bowls, a pair of chef’s knives, a list of accounts, and a notebook of printed recipes, smeared and scratched out and amended and torn—to a mutual friend, Brian LeMaster. He was in his early twenties and the manager of three branches of a chain of restaurants, and he seemed primed to move the pie company forward.

I never told Barry, but I had harbored the hope that he would bequeath the company to me. That he didn’t, I’ll admit, made me a little sad.

But this did not stop me from making pies.

Soon after Barry left, I became enmeshed in a group of rowdy, hard-drinking, hard-smoking jazz and Latin-jazz musicians who held weekly potluck dinners where they would drink and smoke and eat food and play music and dance and talk, often until daybreak. The first potluck I attended, I arrived empty handed. After that, I always brought a pie.

The pies weren’t very good. But they were oohed and aahed over, which I liked. They were always devoured, which I also liked, even if I knew that when you’re drunk or stoned or both, there isn’t a lot you won’t eat. These potlucks were full of musicians and hangers-on, all of whom knew each other. Only a few of them knew me, until I brought the first and then second and then third pie, at which point they knew me as the Pie Guy, and when I would see them in bars and clubs and after shows, they would say, “Hey, Pie Guy, where’s my pie?” And then, whenever I met someone new at the potluck, or at a party, or in a bar, and they asked me my name or who I was, I would shrug and smile and tell them, “I’m the Pie Guy.”

For the next five months, I bounced around from one job to the next. I wanted to be a writer, and maybe a musician, too, though mostly I wanted to be the kind of writer who hung out with musicians. After a while, I realized that when not writing and when not baking pies and when not hanging out with rowdy jazz musicians, I didn’t enjoy doing much else. Then a temp job ended, and all I saw before me was a vast field of other mindless temp jobs, so I called Brian and asked him what he had done with the pie company. He still had it, had all of the equipment, the recipes, but had done nothing with it, and so I bought in and we started up the company again.

For nearly two years, I comanaged and co-owned the Clarksville Pie Company. Brian found kitchen space and equipment, contacted our old accounts and convinced them to start buying pies from us again, negotiated with the Sysco Corporation for our ingredients, and performed other essential tasks associated with the company, but I was the one in the kitchen. Of all the pies we sold, I can count on two hands ones that I didn’t bake. They weren’t great pies, but by the end, they had become good pies. I tweaked Barry’s recipes, adding more cinnamon to his apple pie (he’d been averse, no one knows why, to cinnamon) and less sugar to his strawberry rhubarb, and changing his pecan and chocolate pecan recipes entirely. I toyed constantly with the crust recipe, using more or less water, all butter, a mixture of butter and shortening, all shortening, and, for one brief but regrettable moment, butter-flavored shortening.

It wasn’t fun, exactly, and I wouldn’t do it over, certainly, but I liked it and sometimes even loved it. I loved the smell of apples and vanilla, and of butter creamed with sugar, and the exhaustion I felt after a night of baking fifty or sixty pies in an oven that couldn’t hold more than eight pies at a time. I still remember the smell and feel of the cool morning air of the Hill Country, where I baked our pies, and that look of the violet hour as it spread across the hills and scrub brush while I loaded my truck with boxed pies at dawn.

Still, I was broke and gaining weight and sleeping odd hours (if I slept at all), and all I could think about was the company and the pies. My mind was filled with thoughts of new accounts, advertising campaigns, ingredients, the two other pie companies we were about to buy, and a new rival pie company, the Texas Pie Company, whose pies were popping up all over.

I needed a break, so I took a two-week vacation and helped a friend drive to Connecticut. In the first half hour of the plane ride back to Austin I decided I should work for another year in the pie company, find a way to save some money, and then move to the Northeast. Within the next hour, that period had shifted to six months, and by the time we landed, it was down to three months. This was in May 1999, and by July the company had been dissolved. By August, I packed everything I could into the back of my pickup truck and drove to Boston.

But I still did not stop making pies.

That November, I volunteered for the Cambridge branch of Pie in the Sky, a nonprofit organization that bakes pies for needy families during the holidays. For Thanksgiving, I took a bus to visit friends in New York, bringing with me a pie plate, my favorite rolling pin (a solid piece of wood—I never liked the spinning pins), and a half-butter, half-shortening concoction, melted together and then frozen, that would provide a unified kind of fat to cut into the flour and would add structure (shortening) and flavor (butter) to my pie crust. (This sort of packing list, with minor variations, became standard; there have been times when I have carried onto a plane everything I might need to make a pie but an oven—whisks, spatulas, pie plates, pie dough, parchment paper, old pinto beans to use as pie weights, and, one time, a double-crusted apple pie that I’d put together and then frozen for the trip.) Over Christmas, which I spent back in Texas, I baked five pies, two apple, two pecan, and a chocolate pecan. When I got back to Boston, I baked another pie, just for the hell of it.

Or not strictly just for the hell of it. I was getting ready, to an extent. Ready for a seduction.

Thanks to my tenure with the Clarksville Pie Company, I discovered a strange but fairly consistent phenomenon: If a man bakes a pie, or a cake, or cupcakes, or cookies, even, he becomes a curiosity to the opposite sex. He’s something of a rare find. This has always surprised me. Baking, even baking from scratch, is not difficult, and the amount of praise and attention gained by presenting something so basic as an apple pie or a chocolate cake borders on the astounding. To any man who cooks but has never dabbled in baking, I highly recommend that you learn a good biscuit recipe, a good waffle recipe, and then a pie and a cake, or cupcake, recipe, something simple and good that you can turn out at a moment’s notice. It’s well worth the effort.