That’s right by where i grew up!
I’m not very knowledgeable about meat (since i’ve been veg forever) but tri tip is/was a standard in the area. Served as sandwiches more often than southern style bbq plate
4 Likes
I see it at the meat counter on occassion but not always.
I haven’t seen it at bbq places. But NC bbq has tradionally been all about pork. We are startting to get a few bbq joints focusing on other regional styles so I’m sure tri-tip will show up.
1 Like
You must remember the Central Texan in Castroville .
How is the whole hog down there? I know they are big on ribs and pulled. I need to get down there and eat some pork. Around here we have some whole hogs usually cooked by the Puerto Rican community so I’m sure it’s different.
We often used rolled up balls of Wonder Bread as fresh water fish bait. They were easy to put on a hook and we always caught something. A slice was easier to grab than digging for worms!
5 Likes
I LOVE Steinbeck. I could never go anywhere near Salinas/Monterrey/Carmel and not feel like I need to kidnap a chicken to simmer over a tinder fire in a Folger’s coffee can, seasoned with a couple of grains of salt scavenged from my coat pocket. Washed down with a seemingly endless supply of Dag* Red, of course. Or, camp out on a sandy beach amongst the Monterrey Pines and gorge on periwinkles and whatever vertebrates and invertebrates that may be foraged at the tide line, boiled in prestine Monterrey Bay sea water.
Then again. I did drive onto ten miles of Pismo Beach with my honey at the time, set up our tent on a secluded stretch of sand and had a great secluded evening loving the moon/stars, ocean breezes and pounding surf mere meters away. The next morning, my Toyota 4x4 was hopeless mired in the sand. The AAA rescue truck suffered the same fate. The second AAA was able to pull us both out, back to civilization and asphalt. Always will have fond memories of that area. 
- air down your 33’s if you are going offroad in the sand. This was pre-Google guidance days.
3 Likes
And the fish say “Amen”!
22re? Sounds like fun either way
1 Like
Whole hog is Eastern style - cooked low and slow. It is chopped for serving, which mixes outer and inner bits together. People from other areas often say the result looks like cat food. The style is very pure in flavor and seasoned with pepper vinegar. It shares succulence with the PR and Cuban roast porks but is seasoned in a much more minimal fashion.
Lexington style (Piedmont area) uses the shoulder. It is usually roughly chopped. Sauce is a ketchup/vinegar dip.
The real old traditional places don’t have ribs which makes me think these are more modern additions in this area.
2 Likes
Just to go back to the original question posed by the thread, which was why is white bread is seemingly always served with BBQ, the answer goes back to Southern food history. Maybe I’m older than all of you, but when I grew up in small town southern Indiana, back in the 40’s and 50’s, there was really no other bread available in the grocery store than soft white bread, plus soft versions of whole wheat and rye. Crusty and sourdough breads were unknown; maybe somebody who had traveled to a place like New York might have seen something like that in a window and wondered what the heck it was and why anybody would eat it. Even local bakeries only baked fairly soft breads. That’s basically all most rural people knew existed.
Real BBQ made in a smoker then was pretty much a small town southern thing. Maybe in some Southern cities too, but anyplace where decent bread was sold, like NYC or SFO, BBQ, if it had ever been heard of, was looked upon as a strange, poor people food from the south. In fact, even where I grew up which was north of real BBQ country, what was then sold in stores as BBQ was sliced pork in a glass jar with strange icky sweet sauce. No resemblance to the real thing. This is a fact. My how times do change, but I digress.
Anyway when eating BBQ, especially wet, something was needed to soak up the sauce and serve as a counterpoint to the richness of the meat. Bread was perfect, but as I said above soft white bread was the only thing available in those places in those days. So that’s really how it started, and serving some soft white bread with BBQ at a BBQ joint just became entrenched, i.e. a southern tradition that lingers to this day. Keep in mind that most BBQ is still served in small town southern joints, and many of those folks, to this day, don’t really eat any bread other than soft white. It wasn’t/isn’t just BBQ by the way: Southern fish fry places generally include some soft white bread with an order.
So that’s the story as I understand it.
6 Likes
I’m not sure I agree with your views on the current state of que and the joints that serve same.
1 Like
Thanks for sharing your memories. I also remember when there was only soft bread at the grocery. My parents went to France in 1970 and fell in love with baguettes which were not then available even in the city we lived in (perhaps in a specialty store). My father taught himself how to bake them (so many flat, dense versions we ate until he “got it”!!) and baked all our bread ever after.
2 Likes
OP here: This thread sure had legs to go in unexpected but welcome directions!
On reading the responses so far specifically about Wonder Bread and BBQ. I come away now with JohnB’s latest response–returning to the bread issue–finding it sensible that the tradition of using Wonder Bread, or the like, as descending from a simple scarcity of regional bread alternatives in the early places making up the development of BBQ.
But I also come away thinking that, indeed, very soft white bread might in fact be much more adaptable to the sauce-sopping cleanup phase of moist BBQ eating. I haven’t tried using a crusty European-style loaf for brisket, etc., but it frankly doesn’t seem that crusty, open-crumbed loaves would be a better accompaniment than Wonder Bread. Much as I love and in fact make almost exclusively that crusty style of bread, which I adore for most purposes. I think a neutral soft bread with a tight crumb is fitting, but that leaves open that some brioche or halves of a Kaiser Roll could also serve. Thanks, all!
2 Likes
I also don’t understand the plain white bread served with BBQ. I think saying that you shouldn’t eat BBQ with a nice sourdough or brioche is as silly a saying you shouldn’t put ketchup on a hotdog.
1 Like
Not sure what you are saying about “my views on the current state of que and the joints that serve same.” Are you saying there is more BBQ served in, say, Chicago than in rural NC?
The OP started with the proposition that lots of Q joints serve it with soft white bread and wondered why that is. It wasn’t my view – I only tried to explain why that is. Where do you live and where have you eaten BBQ? There are many places in the South to this day, probably hundreds, especially in rural areas, that serve Wonder Bread and similar with their Q. BBQ has of course become popular everywhere in recent years, but in quantity terms I have little doubt the vast majority is still served in the rural South, where Wonder Bread rules and baguettes are practically unknown and even looked at as strange and foreign by any locals who know what they are.
1 Like
You may have a point there about soft bread being a better sopper-upper, but it’s a preference matter, so you can expect blowback and already got some. History however is a factual matter, not a preference matter. It developed the way it did for whatever reason it did, and I think my theory has explanatory power. It would be interesting to know whether, if “good” bread had been widely available years ago in rural areas of the South, that would have been preferred, but of course there is no way to know that.
Sorry. Putting ketchup on a hot dog is a travesty. End of discussion. As to using better quality bread with BBQ, that is certainly non-traditional but hey, if it turns your crank, go for it.
1 Like
I like the idea of questioning my bona fides.
Cool.
I’ll get back to you when I’m on something other than this phone.
BTW, Chicago has some happening BBQ beyond the aquarium smokers these days
According to sources on the scene.
This little read from the Southern Foodways Alliance touches on the topic briefly:
1 Like
