Lately I\u2019ve been thinking about barbecue pizza. My favorite local purveyor of pies recently had a daily special he called, \u201cBBQ Pizza.\u201d\u00a0 I could not order it.\u00a0 I have little doubt that it was a delicious nosh, but the name just rubbed me the wrong way, and I shared my thoughts, which follow here, with the pizziaolo.<\/p>\n
Topping a pizza with some combination of meat and barbecue sauce\u2014regardless of quality\u2014does not constitute barbecued pizza.\u00a0 Likewise, grilling a boneless, skinless chicken breast covered with sauce is not barbecued chicken. To be sure, the term \u201cbarbecue\u201d is one of the most misunderstood, and consequently, abused terms in the culinary world.<\/p>\n
A quick web search for the definition of barbecue clearly demonstrates the lack of clarity<\/p>\n
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surrounding this seemingly simple word. It is a noun which describes the gathering of friends, family, enemies, neighbors or anyone else in an area to eat food cooked on a grill, or not.\u00a0 It is also a verb that describes cooking in some fashion, though exactly how depends on who is supplying the definition. As a barbecue purist, or \u201cbarbesnob<\/em>,\u201d I find comfort in the definition of barbecue that was provided by the Kansas City Barbecue Society (KCBS) while I was training to become a Certified Barbecue Judge with that group. According to the KCBS, barbecue is: ” Meat cooked over wood or charcoal\u2014not gas, though it is OK if gas was used to ignite the wood\u2014at low<\/span> heat until the exterior has formed a crust (or bark in the parlance of the folks that ‘Q for a living), the fat has rendered and the meat, after cooking, weighs less than or equal to 70% of the raw weight.”<\/p>\n According to this definition, a barbecued pizza cannot exist! Sure there are outrageously good pies made in wood burning ovens. And I admit that my view of pizza was forever changed while watching an episode of Julia Child\u2019s television show nearly twenty years ago when she had the owners of Al Forno, a restaurant in Providence, RI, on her show demonstrating how to cook pizza on a grill. But these are not “barbecued” pizzas.<\/p>\n All of this barbe-confusion might not bother me at all except for one mighty fact\u2014I\u2019ve actually once eaten a pizza that I absolutely consider a true barbecued pizza. The occasion was the 18th Annual Jack Daniel\u2019s World Championship Invitational Barbecue competition, a gathering of 65 of the very best competitive barbecue teams on the planet going head to head in a number of categories. I had the honor of being selected to judge this event, which meant I got to eat samples of mind blowing barbecue all day long. Before the serious and highly regulated meat categories are judged, they have a \u201cCook\u2019s Choice\u201d category, in which teams can present the judges with any creative item they want as long as it is cooked barbecue style. Since the judging is blind, I\u2019ll never know who prepared the pizza that was submitted to my table for judging, but it was a pizza I will never forget. The sauce was made from tomatoes, garlic and onions that had been slow smoked and pureed, topped with smoked mozzarella cheese and smoked hot Italian pork sausage.\u00a0 And while I will never know for sure how they did it, my attempts to re-create this masterpiece lead me to believe that they formed the dough into a pie shape and placed it in the smoker, far away from the heat, so the dough absorbed what tasted like crisp oaky-smoky flavor, before being placed directly over the burning wood and covered with the aforementioned topping ingredients and getting crazy crispy while staying soft and springy inside.<\/p>\n It was amazing, and the only pizza I\u2019ve ever had that passes for real \u201cBBQ Pizza.\u201d If some barbecue smokehouse out there adds this pizza to the menu, let me know and I\u2019ll be there.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"