Product Description

Argentinean Veal and Chicken Kebabs. Balinese Prawn SatSs and Grilled Sweet Potatoes with Sesame Dipping Sauce. Mexico's Yucatan-Style Grilled Fish, Italy's famous Bistecca alla Fiorentina, Senegalese Grilled Chicken with Lemon Mustard Sauce, and the best Memphis Ribs, Texas-Style Barbecued Brisket, and North Carolina Pulled Pork ever. Plus grilled sides, grilled starters, grilled desserts, The Ten Secrets of Perfect Grilling, and master recipes for steak, chicken, fish, and vegetables. Written by Steven Raichlen, the multi-award-winning cookbook author whose boundless enthusiasm took him 150,000 miles across 5 continents to discover the world's best grilled food, The Barbeque Bible! (over 310,000 copies in print) is a 512-page celebration of sizzle, smoke, secret sauces, and everything we love about cooking over fire. Main Selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club's Good Cook Club. Winner of a 1998 IACP/Julia Child Cookbook Award.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #582765 in Books
• Published on: 1997-12-09
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 576 pages

From Amazon.com
There's a world of grilled food out there, and Steven Raichlen seems to have wandered through all of it the State Department deemed "safe." No Afghanistan, for instance. No Iraq. But not to worry. Any decent conflict produces refugees, and nothing travels quite so easily as your own way with food. So Raichlen availed himself of restaurant cooks in this country where and when he had to--all to get right down to the meat of it.

"Barbecue," as Raichlen points out, is a confusing word in the U.S. because it means so many things, up to and including slow-cooked barbecue with its smoky aroma and succulent charm. The word stands in for the tool itself. It's an event. It's food. It's the style of cooking.

To set the record straight, 90 percent of Raichlen's recipes (there are more than 500, from drinks to appetizers to main courses, salads, and desserts, not to mention sauces and dry rubs) are for grilled foods--and that can mean cooked on a hot grill, a moderately hot grill, a relatively cool grill, or an indirectly heated grill (which is more like an oven than a grill, but that's another story). Raichlen gets into some barbecue recipes: pork ribs, for example, or beef brisket, or chicken. But the reader would be better advised to look elsewhere for instruction specific to barbecue (cooking for long periods of time with smoke at low heat). The results will be more appealing.

But grilling. Well, Steven Raichlen has a lock on grilling. This book is absolutely overwhelming it is so deep, so comprehensive, so far-reaching, so all-encompassing. This isn't one of those chefs with taste memories from a grill in Barbados, now let's try to jazz it up and be clever kind of books. No. This is a book by an author who squatted in the market in Vietnam eating whole grilled eggs dipped in a special sauce, and he gives you the recipe and the technique. You could go set up your own egg-grilling stand in a Vietnamese market with this book. You could open shop in Central or South America. Or North Africa. Or the Middle East. Or Korea. Anywhere food is grilled--be that meat, poultry, seafood, or vegetables--Raichlen's been there and brought home the goods. The real goods.

But there's another angle, too. Raichlen freely shares his travel experiences with you, making this a valuable travel book. And he freely shares his techniques, too, telling you exactly how he learned and all about who taught him. His book is worth it just for the section on salads and sauces. Start there and work your way from cover to cover. Hey, take all summer trying. You won't regret it. Your life will never be the same. You'll probably find yourself thinking that if one grill in the backyard is good, two is no doubt better. See? You're already on your way. Let Steven Raichlen be your guide. --Schuyler Ingle

From Publishers Weekly
The title of the latest assemblage from the author of James Beard Award-winning Raichlen (Miami Spice; High-Flavor Low-Fat Cooking) doesn't begin to convey the international scope of the nearly 500 grilling recipes he gathered while on a three-year, 25-country pilgrimage. Starting with appropriate drinks to accompany grilled food (try a Smoky Martini, flavored with a single drop of Liquid Smoke), Raichlen next turns to appetizers as varied as Shrimp Mousse on Sugarcane, which he discovered in Vietnam, and Grilled Snails, which Patricia Wells told him about during a trip to France. Entrees bold enough to stand up to such beginnings include Korean Sesame-Grilled Beef and cumin-scented Peruvian Beef Kebabs (adapted for American tastes with sirloin rather than beef heart). Raichlen's blendings of tastes and traditions are exemplified in Argentinian Veal and Chicken Kebabs, savory with pancetta, red bell pepper and prunes. Revered American traditions are captured with such recipes as Elizabeth Karmel's North Carolina-Style Pulled Pork and The Great American Hamburger. Raichlen also includes a host of non-grilled salads and vegetables to serve as worthy foils to the intense flavors of food hot from the fire. Sesame Spinach is a favorite dish from Japan, and A Different Greek Salad takes its zip from romaine and dill. This will be a must-have collection for any home cook hoping to expand his or her grilling horizons.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review
This spirited book contains recipe after mouthwatering recipe that demonstrate what food is truly aboutsensuality! I can't wait to get into the kitchen to try a few of these gems! Charlie Trotter, chef-owner of Charlie Trotter's and author of Charlie Trotter's Seafood

Customer Reviews

How can I put this?
Okay, it's not like there's any giant downside to owning this book, other than perhaps the money spent, but my question is - does anyone really need like 800 gazillion pages to learn how to cook a hunk of meat over a fire? I know this book's getting good reviews on here, but I'd be willing to bet that most of the reviewers haven't tried more than three of the hundreds of elaborate, time-consuming recipes in here. Everytime I crack open this book, it's like, "Hmmm....that looks pretty good, too bad it has 25 different ingredients, sounds complicated...that one's too much trouble, too...that's interesting, too bad I don't have a giant steel drum to turn into the smoker I'd need for this one...Gee, I've never heard of these spices, and I'll never get around to mail-ordering them...if I ever come across an entire, dressed goat in the supermarket, I'll have to come back to this one...", etc.

Having lived in Argentina for two years (serious barbecue country), and having put on tons of my own barbies since and attended loads of others, I guess I have a different perspective on the whole experience. In my mind, you don't really get points for how many hours you put in preparing your marinades, or how many different types of crushed spices you sprinkle on to your ribeye, or from how far away your recipe comes from, or how many recipes you've memorized or whatever. These are all ancillary considerations. Let's be honest: what matters most about doing a barbecue/grill is basically the admiration and glory a man receives by giving his guests a killer meal cooked over the more challenging heat source of open flame. The thrill of, and skill required for, cooking over that open fire is part of attaining this glory, but it's still about the performance's end result. It's like a rooster doing his mating dance, or a canary singing his song (I can think of a few other analogies, but I think they'd probably get edited). Anyway, barbecue is a performance by a male in which he shows off his superior talent. This is why no guy ever barbecues only for himself, and why no guy ever wants help from his wife while he's doing his barbecue (less glory). And this is why when you do a barbecue, you have to make sure the end result is better than any of the guys you invited could likely have done, and make sure all the girls are really impressed by your prowess with nature's primal elements. If you wind up giving your guests something average, or dud-like - well, that's some serious face-losing. You can laugh it off, but you'll still look weak. It's like stealing the ball, running down the court all by yourself, doing your lay up and missing.

Anyway, if I am right about this, you don't want to get this geek-festival book with 8000 recipes in it. You need a good understanding of basic barbecue/grilling techniques, and maybe at the most three super killer recipes (and believe me, there are a lot of fantastic barbecuers out there that just have one). It's like pitching - if you have two incredible pitches, you're a god, you're Greg Maddux or Nolan Ryan or Mariano Rivera. If you have 12 okay ones, you're driving a milk truck somewhere. Unfortunately, trying to find three totally killer grill recipes in this book is like trying to find three pro-life delegates at the Democratic Party's National Convention - who knows if there even are any, and even if they are, who has the time to try to figure it which ones they are? (And even if you did find them, do you have the time necessary to prepare an elaborate recipe, when a faster one may be just as good or better?) I think Mr. Raichlen's book would be far more valuable if it was pared down to maybe 70-80 discriminating pages of top quality advice, recipes, etc., rather than a dumptruck load of every last aspect of barbecue lore collected after a tour of the entire planet (which is literally what this is). Quality control, rather than just overwhelming quantity, would have been far more helpful.

My experience with barbecues is that often the finest are the simplest: Start with the best meat you can get (you can find out about the various cuts and their characteristics in any book about meat - for beef, I prefer rib steaks for all the marbling; the Certified Angus Beef brand you can get at Albertson's is usually good), salt them, don't burn them, and the bottom line is you're 80% of the way there. When you come up with a few of your own little twists, and a great sauce (the Argentine chimichurri is my fave - olive oil, oregano, garlic, some vinegar and a bit of parsley), you'll almost certainly have something as good or better than most of the over-compensating extravaganzas in this book.

I wish I knew of a more practical book on grilling/barbecue, but the truth is I don't really know of one that would set the would-be barbecue superstar on his way (not that it's that hard to get going). But, if someone is really serious, any text that takes time to explain the building blocks of how various foods work together, and what effects various cooking techniques have (in other words, culinary theory), will only help you nail down your one, two, or three superb open flame recipes (the magazine "Cook's Illustrated" is a pretty good start for this kind of thing).

Get this book if you want, but don't think you need it (or that you'll end up actually using its recipes). You'll do far better experimenting on your own, chatting with your butcher or barbecuing buddies, and getting an understanding of why great dishes work so you can then come up with your own.

I hope this has been a help to someone.

Good luck.

All the basics, plus even more
I love this cookbook -- it's one of my favourites and most-used. I didn't have any "formal" barbecuing experience, so my skills were limited to grilling hamburgers and hotdogs. Even steaks were beyond my skill level, as I always over-cooked them, and never knew how to get the outside crispy while keeping the inside rare. Thanks to this book I can cook a perfect steak, make great ribs (thanks to "indirect heat"), and even cook whole chickens. It's also encouraged me to expand my grilling horizons, so now items like plantains and cuttlefish are grill regulars. I like to choose new recipes to try, so the variety is appealing. I have no problem stocking up on new items to try a recipe -- it's not going to kill me to go out and pick up a can of coconut milk, for example.

To answer one criticism that others have made, I grew up in Canada, and I had no idea that there was a style of cooking called "barbecue" (i.e. long slow cooking with smoke). To me, "barbecue" means you cook stuff on a grill, whether it be a gas grill or a charcoal grill. So, I had no confusion over the title - it said "barbecue" and it did exactly that -- it taught me to cook on a "barbecue".

One of the best BBQ books around
The BBQ Bible is unique in that it takes the reader around the world with its grilling recipes. It is not your standard North American set of "good ol boy" grilling and sauce recipes. Rather it offers recipes, marinades, sauces and spices from Afghanistan to South Africa, the Middle East, India, Europe and Australia as well as New York, Texas and New Orleans. The writer also explains the many fuel sources and grilling methods available.

In my view this book offers the most comprehensive information about outdoor grilling available and is definately the best book on the subject I have come across.