Dairy Free

The most sophisticated desserts combine a little salty component with the sweet. Try this crystallized yin/yang blend sprinkled on chocolate sauce, caramel, smoky s’mores, or a simple piece of chocolate for a subtle bang of unexpected flavor. A blend of coarse sugar crystals, like Demerara, with kosher salt delivers a chic look and immediate impact.

Our friend Mary Ellen Chavez of Belen, New Mexico, owns the wildly popular Burritos Alinstante, a small chain with a cultish following in the Albuquerque area. When he met her, R. B. (a swamp Yankee from Rhode Island) asked what kind of Mexican food she served. “We don’t serve Mexican food, R. B., it’s New Mexican,” she gently corrected. “New Mexico is the only place for red and green chiles like ours.” Serving her mother’s famous burritos with New Mexico red and green chiles has earned the small chain Best of Show among more than 230 vendors at the New Mexico State Fair. Number one on the menu is Carne Adovada, pork that’s first browned or grilled, then slow-cooked in New Mexico red chile sauce. We’ve swapped Mary Ellen’s restaurant steam pan for a slow cooker. Fortunately, dried New Mexico red chiles are available pretty much everywhere now. To make the sauce, rehydrate the dried chiles in hot water and blend them with garlic and a little water. After a warm night in the slow cooker, you’ve got breakfast burritos Alinstante. Mary Ellen has yet to tire of them, but she limits herself to one a day.

Okay, here we go. Either we have you hooked at “Ultimate Cheater Pulled Pork” or this book is headed straight for the library’s used book sale. We know that. You know that. So, let’s drop the chitchat and make some cheater barbecue. In short, you drop a pork butt into the slow cooker, add dry rub and bottled smoke, close the cover, go away for a while, pull or chop the meat and pile it on a bun, add sauce, get out the pickles, open a beer. BOOM! That’s barbecue, baby. Can you feel it? That’s Ultimate Cheater Pulled Pork.

Our friend Philip Bernard of Raleigh, North Carolina, has plenty of hickory-smoked barbecue options, and still he’s a cheater. Philip likes to add molasses and vinegar to the pork butt to create a built-in sauce while it cooks. Be sure to trim the excess fat from raw meat in recipes like this when you want to serve the barbecue right away in its cooking liquid.

In between cruises when you’re pining for the late-night lido deck scene, there’s no better way to escape the quotidian than an island-themed luau. Lining the slow cooker with banana leaves and filling it with seasoned pork can really generate a breezy mood. The cheater way is to put a whole banana, skin and all, on top of our Luau Pork during cooking. It gets the party point across just as well. To carry the theme, think side dishes with tropical fruits, macadamia nuts, coconut, and rice.

Three thousand miles from the Atlantic, California sauces welcome Asian influences. Honey, ginger, soy, citrus, and Asian hot pepper sauce mingle with ketchup.

Eastern North Carolina’s pungent vinegar sauce is accented with black pepper notes and a light sweetness, but no tomato. Because it works so well with pulled pork, its popularity has traveled way beyond the region.

Moving through the Plains toward the Southwest, the sauce flattens out with more tomato, less vinegar, and a touch of chili on the horizon.

Farther south in South Carolina and Georgia, tangy yellow mustard predominates.

Nashville Crossroads is an even balance of vinegar, ketchup, and sugar, combining the influences from the Carolinas to our east and from Memphis to our west. It’s our number one pick to brush on Ultimate Cheater Pork Ribs (page 61) and pretty much any cheater pork. Even dry-rubbed Memphis ribs enjoy a bath at the crossroads.

Heading west toward Missouri, the sauce darkens, deepens, and sweetens, thanks to molasses and bottled smoke.

Heading west toward Tennessee on I-40, Pink Vinegar is more voluptuous, kinder, and gentler thanks to a little ketchup and more sugar.

An Arctic cold snap certainly inspires one to rethink the traditional all-day hickory-smoked approach to barbecued ribs, especially with a 10°F wind chill outside and football and a roaring fire inside. Saucy Asian-style Rooster Riblets were named when we first made them for Chinese New Year, then the Year of the Rooster. Rename them annually, throw them in the oven, set the timer, and relocate your cooking post to the recliner. Even better, cook them a couple days in advance. Before serving, reheat the ribs with their sauce for a few minutes in the oven, on a grill, or under the broiler to add a little crust. Chinese ribs aren’t a good match for the usual baked beans, potato salad, and creamy slaw. If you’re up for it, serve pan-fried dumplings (find them in the grocery freezer section) or rice and an icy rice vinegar–cucumber salad (page 153).

Like fried chicken and good corn bread, oven drums are all about the crust. The key to Hot-Oven Drums is to get the skin working for you. Hot-Oven Drums are inspired by Nashville’s cultish hot pan-fried chicken that’s dusted-to-dredged in cayenne pepper. Proceed with caution! Here the skillet meets the oven. The bread crumbs, dry rub, and oil keep the Hot-Oven Drums crisp and the cayenne pepper, added right before cooking, lets you control the heat. Serve the drums just like chicken wings with ranch or blue cheese dressing and celery and carrot sticks. Eat them on your feet with a beer in the other hand and no worries about the red mess all over your face and hands.

A heavy little cast-iron hibachi is R. B.’s favorite outdoor grill for fast and efficient high-heat cooking. Indoors, that efficiency is called the broiler. Both tools use direct high heat to sear tender cuts of meat hot and fast. It’s just that the broiler heats from above, the grill from below. Even better, the broiler gets burning hot in minutes with the turn of a knob. Quick Sticks are a very loose version of Thai satay—thin cuts of chicken and steak rubbed with curry, threaded onto skewers, and quickly broiled. The dipping sauce is first-class cheating—barbecue sauce with some chopped peanuts thrown in. Icy Q-Cumbers (page 153) are a Quick Sticks must.

Dating back at least to the 1950s is a party classic known as sweet-and-sour meatballs, or smoky sausages in an easy blend of mustard and jelly. We’ve seen signature variations on this theme using just about every flavor of jelly and mustard around. In the end, they all work the same, producing an easy sweet-and-sour sauce for the meat to bathe in. R. B.’s Aunt Kate, a veteran hostess and merrymaking ringleader in Melbourne, Florida, gives particularly high marks to dishes like this that score lowest in effort and highest in empty bowl at cocktail-recipe swap meets. Our somewhat Asian fusion variation calls for broiled fresh pineapple and kielbasa.

In addition to seasoning the Roasted Eggplant White Bean Spread (page 25), roasted garlic with a little smoke adds great flavor to hummus, mashed potatoes, and butter or olive oil spread on bread or over a steak. Blend roasted garlic with some mayonnaise for burgers and sandwiches.

In the south near Cagliari, in the town of Sant’ Elena, is staged a September festival—a tribute to their patroness and a celebration of the vendemmia—the harvesting of the grapes. There are four ascendancies in the week’s pageantry. The ancestral dress of the townsfolk, the great, pendulous, ambered muscat grapes, called zibibbo, with which the whole, humble precinct is festooned, the wine pressed from their honeyed juices, and, finally, the luscious breads baked from zibibbi left to dry and crinkle in the sun. Though the bread is sweetened and ornamented with raisins, it is most compatible with game dishes such as fagiano arrosto alla Saverio di Nulvi, (page 240) or braises such as the cosciotto di maiale al coccio del pastore Sassarese (page 237). We ate pane di zibibbo in Sant’ Elena with the sweet, white flesh of a myrtle-roasted pig. The bread, still warm from the oven, or roasted over a wood fire, makes for a gorgeous fine pasto with a piece of young pecorino and a glass of moscato. I reserve the bread’s golden-crisped fringes for the baker.