HIT THE SAUCE.

Byline: Jim Boyd The Register-Guard

Barbecue sauces differ markedly from region to region in the United States, a fact not obvious to many consumers. That's because the Kansas City style sauce, with tomato and sugar as its basic ingredients, is the kind universally found on grocery store shelves.

In North Carolina, where pork is the primary barbecue meat, the sauces are thin and vinegary and they are used both to baste the roasting meat and as a condiment when the meat is served on a bun.

In North Carolina east of Raleigh, the sauce is made with vinegar, salt, black pepper, cayenne pepper and other spices. West of Raleigh, small amounts of ketchup, molasses or Worcestershire sauce get added to this basic mix.

In southern North Carolina and South Carolina, mustard-based sauces predominate. They're thin vinegar-mustard sauces slightly sweetened with honey or molasses.

In Memphis, Tenn., all three major ingredients - vinegar, mustard and tomato - go into the sauce.

Four of those regional sauces will be served Saturday by father-and-son pitmasters Dennis and Ryan Solin to the 200 guests at Swine & Vine, a fund-raiser for Slow Food Eugene at LaVelle Vineyards in Elmira. Tickets for the event ($30 members, $35 nonmembers) are being sold at Newman's Fish Co., Long's Meat Co. and LaVelle Vineyards' tasting room in the Fifth Street Public Market. The recipes for the sauces are listed below.

The Solins plan to offer a barbecue sauce bar where participants can construct a pulled pork sandwich with a bun, a helping of barbecued pork topped with cole slaw, and choice of regional barbecue sauces.

The idea behind the event is to allow people to experience barbecue flavors they may never have tasted.

"There are people in Eugene who have never had a vinegar-based sauce out of the Carolinas, for instance. Never seen it!" Dennis Solin said. "They've never seen a true pulled pork sandwich. Now they might have seen some pork between a bun, but they've never actually experienced putting some good slaw in that with a Carolina sauce, putting that together and having a little bit of heaven right there."

Swine & Vine is a production of Slow Food Eugene, an organization devoted to the preservation of traditional foods and the promotion of local food producers such as Keith Cooper of Sweet Briar Farms, who will be providing locally raised pork for the event.

Pulled pork is one of the holy trinity in barbecue competitions, the others being smoked beef brisket and barbecued pork ribs.

Pulled pork requires long cooking (1 to 1 1/2 hours per pound) at a low temperature (225 degrees) until the collagen in the connective tissue is converted into soft gelatin, allowing the muscle fibers to be pulled apart.

The meat is properly cooked when the internal temperature of the roast reaches 195 degrees - 25 degrees higher than the 170-degree internal temperature that often produces dry-and-chewy "well done" grilled meats.

While home barbecuers probably would cook a 5- to 7-pound bone-in pork shoulder roast called the "Boston butt," the Solins plan to smoke and slow cook 20-pound whole legs of pork. They will use the 8-foot-long cooking chamber of a mobile barbecue pit built for them by David Klose, a barbecue pit manufacturer in Houston.

The Solins got into serious barbecuing about three years ago.

They fabricated a small mobile pit with a 40-inch cooking chamber for use at Oregon Ducks tailgaters for friends and clients of their firm, Solin & Associates. Dennis Solin is a certified public accountant and financial planner and his son is a financial planner and tax preparer in the firm.

It didn't take long for them to decide they needed to buy the big mobile pit from Klose to feed the crowd.

Six months ago, they purchased a Fast Eddy wood pellet model popular with winning barbecue teams around the nation. The Fast Eddy has a temperature probe and computer-controlled pellet feed.

"You just set it, fill the hopper full of pellets and go to bed," Dennis Solin said. "You don't have to sit back and feed it a log every hour like you have to do with the big guy."

The Fast Eddy model doesn't feed as many people as the Solins' big pit, however, so they will be using the big one to cook Saturday's barbecue.

Dennis Solin said the pork legs have to cook from 20 to 24 hours over hickory. The legs are skinned, leaving a quarter-inch-thick layer of fat, and then slathered with what Solin calls C.Y.M. (cheap yellow mustard). The mustard doesn't add flavor but does create a sticky surface that allows the "rub," a mixture of salt and spices, to adhere while the meat marinates and then is smoked and slow-roasted.

"What we're going to use is a quantity of Bad Byron's Butt Rub, because Byron (Byron Chism, a professional chef and graduate of the Culinary Institute of America) has won about everything in the country and we use that in our regular competition rub," Solin said.

The Solins said they baste the pork with a mixture of apple juice and olive oil. They spray instead of mop the mixture onto the meat to keep the rub from being mopped away.

As the Go Ducks! barbecue team, the Solins enter four or five barbecue contests a year, and about six months ago helped form the Western BBQ Association to sponsor tournaments sanctioned by the Kansas City Barbecue Society.

Their biggest wins so far were the reserve grand championship (second place overall) at a barbecue contest held in Imperial Beach, Calif., and a first place for salmon at a contest held in Seattle.

Surprisingly, barbecue competitors don't have to come up with original rub mixes and sauces but can use commercial ones marketed by previous winners on Web sites such as www.hawgeyesbbq.com.

Texas Rib Rangers rubs and sauces, Bonesmokers rub by Dr. BBQ and Texas-style barbecue sauce from Austin's Iron Works barbecue restaurant are all products the Solins have used with success.

Not surprisingly, a home barbecuer doesn't need a huge mobile pit to produce tasty pulled pork, ribs and brisket.

"A person getting started in barbecue, they could do far worse than buying a little Weber Smoky Mountain if they need a smoker," Solin said.

"You can buy them over at Jerry's or other places for less than $200. ... They are used in competition all over the United States. It will cook every bit as good a barbecue as our big custom pit that was done down in Houston. It just doesn't cook as much."

Pulled pork also can be cooked on either a charcoal or gas-fired barbecue grill by using the indirect heat method of cooking and water-soaked hardwood chips to make smoke. Steven Raichlen's "How to Grill: The Complete Illustrated Book of Barbecue Techniques" provides a recipe for North Carolina Pulled Pork and shows the process with a series of photos.

And if you need better temperature control than your grill provides or are just tired of adding charcoal briquettes, the Solins suggest you might try smoking a pork shoulder roast for a couple of hours on the barbecue using indirect heat. (That's about all the smoke flavor meat will absorb, the Solins say.) Then wrap the roast in aluminum foil to keep the roast from drying out, and place it in your kitchen oven to roast at 225 degrees until the internal temperature of the meat hits 195 degrees.

Here are the four barbecue sauce recipes the Solins plan to serve:

Big Al's K.C. Bar-B-Q Sauce

A Kansas City, tomato-based barbecue sauce recipe credited to Alan Arthur of Kansas City.

2 cups ketchup

2 cups tomato sauce

1 1/4 cups brown sugar

1 1/4 cups red wine vinegar

1/2 cup unsulfured molasses

4 teaspoons hickory-flavored liquid smoke

2 tablespoons butter

1/2 teaspoon garlic powder

1/2 teaspoon onion powder

1/4 teaspoon chili powder

1 teaspoon paprika 

1/2 teaspoon celery seed

1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon

1/2 teaspoon cayenne pepper

1 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon coarsely ground black pepper

In a large saucepan over medium heat, mix together the ketchup, tomato sauce, brown sugar, wine vinegar, molasses, liquid smoke and butter.

When all is mixed together, stir in garlic powder, onion powder, chili power, paprika, celery seed, cinnamon, cayenne, salt and black pepper.

Reduce heat to low and simmer for up to 20 minutes. For thicker sauce, simmer longer. For thinner sauce, less time is needed. Sauce can also be thinned using a bit of water if necessary.

Brush onto any kind of meat during the last 10 minutes of cooking.

South Central Carolina Gold

A mustard-based barbecue sauce as posted on thebbqforum.com.

1 1/2 cups prepared mustard

5 tablespoons brown sugar

4 tablespoons tomato paste

3 tablespoons apple cider vinegar

1 tablespoon Worcestershire Sauce

1/2 teaspoon cayenne pepper

1/2 teaspoon black pepper

1/2 teaspoon garlic powder

1/2 cup water

Combine and simmer for 5 minutes to dissolve sugar. Keeps well in the fridge.

Eastern North Carolina 

Barbecue Sauce

This thin sauce is used both as a basting sauce during roasting and as condiment after the meat is cooked.

2 quarts cider vinegar

1/4 cup salt

2 tablespoons cayenne powder

3 tablespoons red pepper flakes

1 cup light brown sugar

1 tablespoon hot pepper sauce

In a large bowl, mix together cider vinegar, salt, cayenne, red pepper flakes, light brown sugar and hot pepper sauce. Stir until salt and brown sugar have dissolved.

Cover and let stand at least 3 hours before using as a basting sauce or serving on meat.

Down-Home Barbecue Sauce

This Memphis-style barbecue sauce is from "Paul Kirk's Championship Barbecue Sauces" (The Harvard Common Press). The recipe is scaled down to make about 2 1/2 cups, half the amount in Kirk's book.

1 tablespoon chili powder

1 tablespoon ground black pepper

1 teaspoon ground cinnamon

1/2 teaspoon ground allspice 

1/2 teaspoon salt

1/4 teaspoon cayenne

1 16-ounce bottle ketchup

1/4 cup prepared yellow mustard (French's mustard)

1/4 cup cider vinegar

1/2 cup brown sugar

1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce

1 tablespoon soy sauce

1/2 tablespoon liquid smoke

Combine all ingredients and simmer on low for 30 minutes. This sauce keeps well in the refrigerator.

Jim Boyd can be reached at 338-2363 or jboyd@guardnet .com.

BARBECUE LINKS

www.thebbqforum.com: Probably one of the most respected barbecue forums on the Internet.

www.virtualweberbullet.com: The best site for information on the Weber Smoky Mountain smoker.

www.hawgeyesbbq.com: Huge collection of commercial sauces, rubs, marinades, books and videos for sale.

www.cookshack.com: Site for BBQ Pits by Klose, the kind the Solins use.

www.wbbqa.com: Homepage for the Western Barbecue Association.

CAPTION(S):

Dennis Solin sits by his Klose Mobile Pit barbecue. The huge barbecue can cook 60 racks of ribs at once.