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INTRODUCTION

Today, the interest in BBQ is growing like never before, with local competitions springing up all over and slow-cooked, smoked meats making their way from hard-to-find back-woods shacks into manicured suburban neighborhoods. People love barbecue and are expressing that love by learning how to do it. If you’ve decided to learn the craft, or even if you have cooked a few butts in your day, you’ve probably come across the million blogs, forums, books, and magazines that are available to those that want to perform carnivorous alchemy, and you’ve likely been overwhelmed by it all. I know I too was.

Nowadays, the word barbecue is synonymous with outdoor grilling but for a long time they were considered very different. The history of grilling and barbecue and how they’re connected can be at times confusing but the one thing that historians agree on is that barbecue derived from the Native American word ＂barbacoa,＂ which was the word for a raised wooden rack that was used, among other things, to cook meat and other food over a low fire for an extended period of time. Today more and more people use gas or electric grills that allow them to adjust the heat for quick grilling or slow barbecuing. And there remains a high demand for wood grills.

All of these different methods can create different tasting experiences, making for more diverse additions to dinnertime. One common way of cooking is using a grill, more specifically for barbecue. Here is how this style of cooking became popular. Over the years, there have been many changes to the way that people cook food, and specifically the way that people barbecue their meat. Grills have gone from being inefficient and messy to being popular and relaxing methods of cooking used by the world today. Originally all barbecue and grilling was done with logs of wood as the sole fuel source. Energy from the combustion cooked the meat, and smoke from the wood and from dripping juices imparted a distinctive seductive scent that is the essence of barbecue. But it is difficult to control energy and flavour when cooking with logs, so today, only a few expert pit masters outfitted with special rigs cook with logs only.