punkerque

Groovy! We had Q in a place that didn’t suck. A treat in the recent swath of disappointments.

We were headed south to attend the 57th Annual Mobil1 12 Hours of Sebring and needed to eat some lunch. As we neared Cordele, GA, we saw a billboard for Smaokie’s BBQ. I caught it in the periphery of my eyesight, so I figured I had read the sign incorrectly and that it was called Smokie’s BBQ. A few seconds later Punkerdoo said, Wanna try SmooAaaakies”? We decided it was worth the try just to see if that was really the name or if the billboard people had screwed up.

We pulled off of I75 and drove for about 2 miles and found Smoakie’s BBQ in what looked like an old service station. They were open, so we went in and grabbed a booth. They had all sorts of good BBQ hut items on their list and their sides were great: Vidalia onion rings and pork rinds were on the list. The strangest part was the weight watchers numbers on the menu. Pork rinds=8 by the way. We ordered fairly usual items, pulled pork plate with Vidalia onion rings and stew for me and pulled pork plate with slaw and waffle fries for punkerdoo.

First let me say that pulled pork is the way to go, chopped is just lazy. It was great to see that Smoakie’s did it right. The plates arrived and they came with BREAD, not some bun or other crap, proper BBQ white bread. The portions were quite large. To me the pork was a bit suspect in its smoke, very light to none, but Punkerdoo said that I was wrong and that had good smoke. Maybe I was losing my taste to a cold, maybe not. Anyhow, the pork was moist and was not pre sauced, so I was mostly happy.

This place has four different sauces, they recommend each one for a different use such as ribs, chicken, pork, you get the idea. The hot was mustard based of which I am not hugely a fan of and the mild was vinegar based. Both were really good. Q life will go a long way with the proper sauces which can be applied by the customer and not the waitress.

We were full and happy. A man who I assume was the owner stopped by to ask if we had had enough to eat. It was a pleasant place to which we will certainly return. They are dark Sunday and Monday. Never did ask about the name, will have to go back. Their website is currently a Bob The Builder, but I linked to it anyway.

Smoakie’s BBQ
107 Cemetery Road
Cordele, Georgia
229-273-0802

For Christmas, Punkerdoo was given a copy of BBQ Joints. On the cover in the top left is Bubba himself standing in front of his establishment.  Since we were headed to Tampa for Super Bowl XLIII and would be going through Tifton, we thought it would be great to stop in to what looked like a great, old school, southern BBQ shack.

Wrong.

The shack looks the same as on the cover.  I think even the circa 1973 Datsun pickup was still parked under the tree.  There was even a sepia cast to the sunshine. But Bubba is gone; taking with him any vestige of Q goodness with him.

It started out well enough.  They had menus with several types of BBQ shack food on it.  The Q came in two varieties, chipped and chopped.  Not being a huge fan of chopped pork, we both opted for a lunch involving chipped pork.  Punkerdoo went for the chipped pork sandwich with chips and I got the pork plate with slaw and potato salad.

Apparently chipped pork looks like Manwich.  Tasting like Manwich would have been an admirable trait for this pork.  It was not good: no smoke, no texture, even the soup it was constrained by had no flavor.  Bewildered, I looked at the two un-labeled sauces on the table.  One was brownish and one was greenish.  I tried the brown concoction.  Nothing changed.  I put some on my Texas toast.  Nothing.  I put some on my fork, nothing.  Ok, I’ll try the green sauce.  It yielded a small bit of heat but tasted more like salsa verde than BBQ.  Not good.  The potato salad was yellow, bright yellow as in the color of French’s Mustard.  The texture was more like cold buffet style hollandaise with a healthy quart or two of mayonnaise.  It was extremely unlike any potato salad to come before it, a new subclass of side dish disasters.  Again, not good.  The slaw was ok, but at this point peppery sawdust with a hint of lime would have been a great success.

Bubba, wherever you went, I am sure you are bummed.

This sucks!  The last two places we have been to were really bad.  Doesn’t anyone make decent Q any more?  I am sure you are out there and we will find you.  And eat you.

Bubba’s Ribs & Q

1629 Tift Ave N
Tifton, GA 31794
(229) 386-2888

Man!

We always want these places to have great Q. We really, really, truly want these cool, small, ramshackle cabins with polaroids of past Presidents to have good Q. Why is it that so many of them don’t? I really don’t get it. Is it because the owners have been doing it so long they always taste smoke and don’t realize their pork could easily be mistaken for pot roast? Maybe. Maybe it was never good, but the clientele never knew any better. Maybe we always end up there on non pit days and get old meat. I have no idea, it vexes me.

Pink Pig BBQ is in Cherry Log, GA. We have driven by it several times when up north cabinizing, detoxing and retoxing. On this trip we had met with good food from GA Boys BBQ, so we were hopeful that our lingering doubts of returning home would be covered in swine goodness. Alas, the only thing that we liked about the place was the fact that they had 3 picnic tables outside so we could enjoy the Sunday morning air with our dogs.

We ordered the usual:

Husband: Pork Plate with stew, potato salad.
Punkerdoo: Pork Plate with stew, potato salad.

The meat was pre-sauced with a ketchup based sauce. The sauce was bland and not good. The pork had little to do with Cherry Logs or any other form of wood and it was cold. The Brunswick stew had ground beef in it. A first for us. Pretty sure I disliked it strongly. Once again a drag as it is supposedly, magically, arcanely cooked in a giant cast iron pot. We really want things like this to work….damn. The potato salad made Kroger’s potato salad look like a good option.

Understand, we did not want to come back home that day. We ate and left Pink Pig in a hurry. Bummer.

This is the worst review I have ever given to a Q joint. I feel bad and I hope that our visit was just a working of stars that colluded to make our food so un-memorable. Then again, it was across the board bad.

You can decide on your own.

Pink Pig
824 Cherry Log Street
Cherry Log, GA 30522

Our campsite at Road Atlanta is literally 30 feet from the back straight. People can become very hungry watching Ferraris, Porsches, Audis and other fantastic sports cars roaring by at three times the legal limit. You need food that you can ignore for hours while it cooks. You need Q.

The problem is when you are far away (in this case 43 miles) from your pit, you need to use what you have handy. In this case, we used our old water smoker and a few pieces of firewood we were not allowed to burn to keep warm. (thanks Hall county) The ingredients are simple, you need a 7-10lb pork butt and some sort of dry rub. In this case we used Bad Byron’s Butt Rub which works great if you don’t have the time or resources to make you own.

You wash the butt, pat it dry, oil it down with some olive oil (not extra virgin, no need here) and coat the outside with your rub. Some let it sit, some put it in the fridge. Me, I put it in a zip-loc or wrap it in plastic wrap and throw it on the counter (much to punkerdoo’s distress) while I make fire. Fire! Fire!

I alway make sure to fill the water bowl before I start the fire, so that it warms up as the flame gathers. The water bowl is really nothing more than a way of keeping the temp level, it doesn’t provide much (if any) moisture to the meat. At home, I always throw a bunch of aromatics in the water bowl just to make the air smell just that much better. Once you have your wood burning well; flames, but past the blaze point, throw the butt on the rack fat side up.

Come back in 4 or 5 hours to throw another log (in this case red oak and maybe some white) in the fire.

Come back in 3 or 4 hours to check the fire and the butt. It should look like you burned it to a crisp, but if you poke it with your finger, it will give way easily and ooze at you. 8-10 hours is about right for that weight and a low fire.

If you have decided the butt is done, pull it from the smoker and wrap it in aluminum foil. Let it sit (rest) for 1 hour minimum. Some people put it in a small cooler, I just make sure its not sitting on ice. Wait. You must wait.

After a minimum of 1 hour, you can pull the pork. Grab it and rip it in half. It will burn you. This is fun. If it won’t twist in half, you either bought a really crappy boston butt or you did not cook it long enough. If this is the case you will need to chop it (ever wonder why the difference in BBQ places between pulled pork and chopped pork?).

If you cooked it right it will easily shred into small pieces. You will not have to wonder if you have done it right. It it falls apart, you are golden. If not, better luck next time. When you get it right, you will know. You will start to pull the meat and you will realize the difference since the last time when it was not quite right. You will be pleased with yourself.

eat

In this example, we put the butt on around 10:30 or so in the morning, fed it a log around 3, fed it again around 6 and wrapped it about 7 or 8. Our neighbor came over about 5 and yelled at us for torturing him all day. He said “you did the same thing to me last year, starved me all day long with your smoked pork.” Sorry Barry, nothing personal.

We were in the North Georgia Mountains in the hopes of both celebrating Punkerdoo’s 40th Birthday and removing our brains from the incessant grind of our jobs.  The dogs had come along as we were staying with the pet friendly Mountain Paws Cabin Rentals.  We had arrived late evening on Friday and woke up on Saturday with the realization that the OJ needed to make mimosas was still in the fridge back home.  Thinking quickly, we loaded up the dogs in the LandRover and set out on Safari.

McCaysville and its sister city Copperhill seemed to be having a citywide yard sale.   Undeterred, we located an IGA an I headed in for supplies.  Returning triumphantly with not only OJ, but vinegar and other items, I was prepared to return to the cabin to create Eggs Benedict.  Eying my packet of McCormick Hollandaise (I know, I know, I was feeling lazy), Punkerdoo wisely suggested looking for a Q joint for lunch.  I agreed and we headed down the street.  About 1/2 a block later we found:

Georgia Boys BBQ is a small place set back from the road with mainly outside seating.  There is a covered porch with a wood stove which is doubtless popular when the temperature drops.  I went in to order and found myself in an ice cream parlor.  I could smell Q, so I went left through a doorway and found the spot.  We normally order pork plates, but the special of the day was a Pork Sandwich with slaw, beans and potato chips (Sierra Nevada was portaged into this dry county).  

The Q was quite good.  It was moist and had almost enough smoky flavor to keep us happy.  They did pre-sauce the meat with a ketchup based sauce (two no-no’s in our book)  but it was not slathered and its flavor was that of smoke with a just a trace of heat, so we let them slide.  The Beans rocked and came with more smoked pork added as a topping.  The slaw was top rate as well as it was not made with old cabbage nor was it drowned in mayo and celery seed.  All in all a very satisfying lunch.

If you find yourself in McCaysville, GA, this is to be considered a required stop.

Georgia Boys BBQ

Fantasy Football & Smokin’ a Butt. Great for the same reason: You sit around drinking and watching for hours and then reap the rewards in the end.

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If you head north out of Athens on GA29, you will come to the intersection of 29 and 106. A quick left onto 106 (Forston Road) will show your the parking lot for Bill’s BBQ. We had seen it several times coming back into town from SC, but had never stopped. One Monday we tried to have lunch there, but apparently Bill’s is dark then. Months later we made it back.

Smells like fry grease inside. The walls are covered in Dawg posters and memorabilia so that’s cool. They had a great picture of Richt talking to Meyer with augmented with (paraphrase) right over there we will do a team dance. We also are going to sack you Heisman winner 5 times…….(/paraphrase)

This doesn’t really seem like a Q place. They have too many things in the menu which are not Q; Bill’s Burgers and Fries might be a better name. Anyway, the counter help was hugely lacking in Southern Hospitality and seemed bothered by our presence. When we ordered our pork plates, we were asked, “Hot or Mild?”. This ended up meaning that they were going to dump some cayenne based sauce on our pork. By the time we got home, the pork had absorbed all of the sauce liquid and we were left with some dried on cayenne. The plate apparently had no options and included a huge amount of stew and very little pork. Picture your standard three hole styro to-go conatiner; the little one on the top left was pork, the big one on the bottom was full of stew…..Bill’s Deep-Fried Brunswick Stew Palace? The stew was good, the pork was ok.

Its a hassle for us to get to, the counter was indifferent and the Q was mediocre. We’d say skip it and go somewhere else.

Ambiance rating: 1 Squealers

(Only the Bulldog posters kept the grease at bay)

Food rating: 1 Squealers

(meh, it wasn’t bad)

Beer rating: 0 Squealers

(Nada)