Carolina BBQ

Carolina BBQ is about pulled pork, but more importantly, it's about vinegar sauce. This makes it very different from pulled porks from everywhere else and their tomato/ketchup/molasses based sauces. I finally got to sample some Carolina style stuff today at Smoky Mountain BBQ in West Jefferson, North Carolina (sorry, no web link, but if you search it, you'll find dozens of reviews).


This type of BBQ is much more subtle than the sauce heavy, messy pulled porks you get normally. In fact, there's a sweetened vinegar on the table, plus some home made BBQ sauce. Smoky Mountains pork was really tender, cooked nice and long but seem to lack burnt ends, much in the way of smoke ring, or discernible smoked flavour. In fact, according to their menu, they

"cook the whole hog long and slow over 20 hrs at low temperatures to insure the meat is tender, delicious and smoked just right."

Most folks just smoke the butts (shoulders) to make pulled pork. Cooking the hog whole would explain why there's not much crust and not a whole lot of smoked flavour.


But add a splash of vinegar, and just a touch of their sauce, and you get something that's very good. Unfortunately, the cold sauces on the hot BBQ makes it lukewarm BBQ by the time you're done. Still, very nice, though not spectacular.


A long list of sides included excellent cole slaw, a strange "red" slaw made with ketchup, delicious sweet potato casserole (with candied pecans), and a whole bunch of other stuff. So all together 4 starts out of 5, but for the BBQ alone, 3.5 stars out of 5.