Column: Barbecue is metaphor for life

For as long as I can remember, I have always loved barbeque. Let me rephrase – I have always loved GOOD barbeque.

I love the smell of it smoking, I love hearing people argue about sauces, flavors and Carolina style versus Texas versus St. Louis versus Memphis. To be honest, good barbeque to me is a little bit like pizza, you really can’t go wrong with any of it.

Bad barbeque is still better than a good salad.

So, I decided to take the plunge. For Father’s Day, I bought myself a Weber Smokey Mountain smoker. The WSM (as it’s known to enthusiasts) looks like the love child of Darth Vader and R2D2. I have affectionately named mine Ike. Not after Dwight Eisenhower, but after the fictional character in the adult cartoon series “South Park.” If you Google the WSM and Ike you will get it.

Interesting things happen when you make your own barbeque.

First, you make a lot of new friends.

Then you find yourself daydreaming about new things to smoke and new ingredients for rubs and sauces. You really can’t help but turn into a mad scientist, because at the end of the day, it still tastes pretty amazing.

You will also find yourself obsessing about times and temperatures, because the more you read, the more opinions you see. I invested in a fancy device that can take up to four temperature inputs from probes and transmit it to my phone or iPad to alert me when the meat hits temperature, or the smoker gets too hot or too cold.

Two months ago, I could barely operate our microwave.

Everyone has their favorite cut of meat. Some like ribs, some briskets, or maybe fish. For me, the granddaddy of all cuts is the pork shoulder, aka pork butt, although shoulder is a more accurate and appetizing description. This is the cut that pulled pork comes from, and I have come to consider myself a savant of making it just right.

A pork shoulder is a large cut of meat, typically 8 to 10 pounds. Because of the nature of the cut, it is full of cartilage, connective tissue, fat and the best ones still have the bone in them.

The beauty of barbeque is that all that nasty stuff goes away with time in the smoker, hence the expression that the best barbeque is cooked low and slow – low temperatures for a long amount of time. Fat renders into gooey goodness, and even the toughest of cartilage becomes gelatinous with the right amount of time, leaving a tender piece of meat.

Long time is a bit of an understatement. My last pork shoulder took almost 20 hours. It was also a little disruptive to my sleep that day. I started it at 11:30 at night, and it went until almost 9 p.m. the following day.

That gives you a lot of time to think. It also gives you a lot of time to drink beer, and combining the latter and the former could lead to some pretty marvelous activities – writing columns for example.

In the 20 hours sitting in my chair watching the smoker, I thought about how barbeque is a great metaphor for issues facing us today: as a town, as a state and as a country.

What we have in Fort Mill is like a great piece of meat – nutritious, tasty and filling enough for the whole family.

There is some grizzle – over population, lots of development, roads in need of repair and new schools. But with time (election cycles), patience and temperature (constant, steady heat on our elected officials) all of that goes away.

I am not naive enough to think that if we close our eyes, the monsters under our bed will disappear, but it does seemthat most problems we have faced in this country and in this community have a way of working themselves out over time, sometimes painfully, sometimes out of pure luck.

Ultimately, what makes one barbeque better is the rub or the sauce. Sure, you can go to the store and buy it, but the best sauce is homemade. You make your own recipes, experiment and create new flavors. THAT is what it is all about – enjoy what Fort Mill has to offer.

Take it low and slow and make some of your own memories and make it great for you and yours.

This story was originally published August 3, 2015 at 2:02 PM with the headline "Column: Barbecue is metaphor for life."