Quick's: Mild Barbecue

Restaurant: Quick's
Location: 1007 Merriam Ln., KC, K
Food: Barbecue
Service: Counter + Server
Atmosphere: No frills BBQ
Price: Sandwiches $4-$7, Dinners $9-$13
Rating: One Napkin

Writing reviews on barbecue places in KC is about as worthless as arguing that my dad could beat up your dad (we all did that, right?).

If you've lived here any amount of time, you've figured out your favorite and are unwilling to even entertain the idea it could have an equal.  And in a way, you're right. We're all right. Because the truth of the matter is that most of the barbecue in this city is darn good, and our individual preferences are derived from the smallest unique components that each different proprietor highlights in their own recipes: the flavor and consistency of the sauce, the spices in the dry rub, the special side dishes or even the location of the restaurant.

So I'll give you my review of Quick's – my most recent new barbecue venture – but I don't expect you to agree with me. As barbecue goes, the bottom line is that KC does it well and Quick's sits squarely in the company of our proud tradition if you happen to prefer their flavors. It's just not my personal favorite.

If I were pressed to describe Quick's in a single word, it would be "mild." Like it or not, if a BBQ joint serves sauce, that sauce is immediately part of the restaurant's identity and mild is how I found Quick's sauce. They poured quite a lot of sauce on the boat of ribs we ordered (in the proverbial debate of wet vs. dry, Quick's apparently is all wet). And as Elizabeth and I tested out the sauce, we both couldn't help feeling like it was darn near flavorless. So thick and with that dark burgundy hue, how could it not be bursting with spice or tomato or molasses?  I don't know, but we agreed the key flavor that we picked out of the Quick's sauce as we ate more and more was… apple. Well, apple sauce, really. And it wasn't bad—just surprising. The stomach wants what the eyes think they see and we thought we "saw" more flavor in that thick red sauce.

We've had ribs, brisket and burnt ends at Quick's, feeling they represent the essential flagship meats in the barbecue world. And without generalizing too much, I can say, across the board, they were mostly tender and lean. Not as tender as the best barbecue I've had, nor as lean, but in a very acceptable range. But in the meat, too, there were aspects we found surprisingly different than we anticipated.

The first of these surprises was the temperature of the food. It was luke warm. As if it had been taken off a buffet line or something. Pretty odd. Not off-putting or disappointing, just not quite as hot as I like barbecued meats. Secondly, though boasting a visible ring of pink on the thinly sliced brisket, it seemed lower on smokey flavor than it should have. It was a little baffling, really. Seeing that pink ring and with a good, soft texture, I wouldn't imagine there wasn't anything strange about the methods used to smoke Quick's meats, except that, perhaps, they use mild-flavored wood and not too much of it. Bite after bite, I kept asking myself where all the flavor could be.

Even after the meal, the toned-down flavors of Quick's meats haunted my thoughts. The conclusion I've finally come to is that the recipe-makers for Quick's simply prefer a subtler-tasting plate of barbecue. And you know what? That's okay. I went back to Oklahoma Joe's after my trip to Quick's to study and compare and had my eyes opened about just how far on the other side of the seasoning spectrum OK Joe's is. No two ways about it: Oklahoma Joe's is wildly strong stuff. The rub on the pork has a ton of salt in it. The famously seasoned fries are doused in salt, too. And the smoke is so strong in the food that a single takeout bag containing no more than two sandwiches can make the inside of a vehicle smell like a meat-smoking chamber.

So what did I learn on my trip to Quick's? More about myself than anything. When it comes to 'cue, I like a LOT of flavor. I want so much smoke and salt that I wake up in the middle of the night parched, with a foot cramp. I want to see my face and fingers swell up from retaining water. I want my lips to taste like hickory the next morning and my hair to reek of it, as I shampoo. For me, barbecue isn't about subtlety. At all. It's about bold, bold flavor and meat that has taken on a tender texture that can only be derived from hours upon hours of low and slow cooking. Quick's is for a more refined barbecue fan, I'd say. I don't know who those fans are, but I'm sure they're out there. And I hope they've discovered Quick's.

Parting note on the sides: we had baked beans, onion rings and fries. The beans will not impress, the fries and rings, though, are good. Thick and crunchy, both, begging for ketchup and lots of it.

Rating: one napkin

A Smoking Success

My escapades with smoking meats, to date, have included attempts at pulled pork (episode 1 and 1a), brisket and trout (episode 2), the trout being the most successful among them.

No, I can't say I was as pleased as I'd hoped with the other two meats, but perfecting one's barbecue technique is done through time and many, many pounds of meat, not the first few attempts.

With this mantra in mind - that I needed to keep trying any chance I got - I jumped all over a recent opportunity. The family came to town and stayed with us Easter weekend, and Mom, ever-conscious of my love for cooking (thanks for the support, mom! Photo at the end of this post), brought with her an entire turkey breast!

The next Saturday morning as I was making breakfast, I remembered the turkey and placed the frozen bird out to thaw. Sunday morning it was ready to go, so I dried it off and then doused it in tons of my all-purpose seasoning rub from Oklahoma Joe's, being sure it was well coated all the way around and inside. I didn't even check the temp in the smoker when I dropped the bird in, I just made  sure the water pan was full and that it was reasonably hot; put the turkey on the lower rack and three good-sized chunks of hickory in the bottom.

My suspicion, from previous experience, was that I had used too little wood and, thus, hadn't imparted as much flavor into the meat as desired. So this time I amped up the amount of wood I used - about three to four chunks in the smoker at all time. It came billowing out around the cracks between the lid and the sides of its cylindrical base. A good sign.

Eight hours later, I pulled it out and wrapped it in foil. And when we finally sliced into it, we were thoroughly pleased. Dark, super-flavorful skin on the outside, moist white breast meat all the way down to the bone. I cut both of the breasts off whole and then thinly sliced it.

We've been living off that turkey for a while now... one of the benefits of smoking is that the leftovers are available for a long time thereafter - an apt award for such a labor of love. So last night, wanting a good warm weather meal but not in the mood to spend a lot of time on it, we created a menu utilizing the leftover turkey, along with our favorite cookout sides: barbecue baked beans and potato salad.

For the baked beans, we simply buy Bush's Homestyle beans, get rid of the chunks of bacon and drain quite a bit of the liquid, which we replaced with Gate's original style barbecue sauce. Let them simmer in a sauce pan for 20 minutes to thicken up a bit.

For my potato salad:

Ingredients

• 2 pounds potatoes - Yukon Gold or red new potatoes rinsed and scrubbed
• 3 scallions finely sliced
• 1/3 cup chopped dill
• 4 Claussen mini pickles
• 4 hard boiled eggs, diced
• 3 tablespoons dijon mustard
• 3 tablespoons coarse grain mustard
• 1/2 cup mayo (I prefer Hellman's made with olive oil)

Bring a pot of water to a rapid boil. Add a palmful of salt. Dice the potato into half inch cubes and place in a bow. Cover with the hottest water you can get out of your tap, to warm up the diced potatoes and release some of the excess starch. When water is boiling, dump out the water with the potatoes and transfer them to the boiling pot.

Meanwhile, slice the scallions, pickles, eggs and chop the dill. When the potatoes are fork tender, strain the hot water and run some cool water over them to bring their temperature down to warm. Place potatoes in a large mixing bowl. Add the dijon, coarse grain mustard and mayo. Fold with a spatula to combine. Place bowl in the fridge and allow to cool 20 minutes. Remove from fridge and add in the rest of the ingredients. Stir well to make sure ingredients, especially dijon, are well mixed.

The photo doesn't do it justice, but we enjoyed refreshing glasses of sangria to go with our summery barbecue meal. Elizabeth can whip this up very quickly, and the fresh fruit makes it deliciously juicy. Just watch out because it packs a deceiving punch, too.

Elizabeth's Sangria:

Ingredients

• Ice
• Bottle of red wine, preferably Spanish
• 1/4 cup brandy
• 1/4 cup triple sec
• 1/4 cup freshly squeezed orange juice
• 1/4 cup freshly squeezed lime juice
• 1/4 cup sugar
• Large bottle sparkling water like Pellegrino or Mountain Valley

Combine all the liquid ingredients in a large pitcher except the sparkling water. Add the sugar and stir to combine. If desired, add slices of the fruit for garnish. Then slowly add the sparkling water, allowing it to preserve as much of its fizz as possible.

Serve in any type of glass over ice.

Mom and Dad with grandparents in the background:

Second Time Smoking

Last weekend was, for us, a Valentine's weekend. And my genius wife surprised me with a gift any man would love to receive... meat from McGonigle's! And beer!!!

These weren't just any meats or beers, though. They had meaning.

The beer was Anchor Steam. My favorite in the world. It's very good but I admit my lofty opinion of it comes from the fact that the first time I ever had it was on day one of our honeymoon, sitting on the rocks in Sausalito, California, looking out over the San Francisco Bay under a warm, orange, September afternoon sun.

The setting was picture-perfect. We'd landed in San Francisco, taken a cab to Sausalito, over the Golden Gate Bridge, off Redwood Highway, down the incredibly steep, winding roads that dropped into our honeymooners' refuge. We dropped our bags at Casa Madrona and immediately set out on food to find food and drink. Only a five minute walk down the street, we walked into a friendly little deli, selling everything from Italian meats to Dom Perignon. We grabbed a fresh and particularly tasty looking antipasto bean and olive salad - lightly dressed with olive oil and vinegar - and our Anchor Steam suds, and started off our vacation in what was, to us, the perfect way. I tell you all these things just to relay a piece of the wonderful thoughts and feelings that flooded my senses when I opened the fridge and saw that beer sitting there, waiting to be found.

My two meat gifts were a small piece of brisket (2.5 lbs) and a beautifully filleted rainbow trout.

Minutes after finding them, I emerged from the basement, grunting and groaning as I singlehandedly carried up my red Brinkmann smoker. This would be only the second time it had been used since being purchased. Its first use - smoked  pork shoulder for pulled pork sandwiches - was lackluster at best, so I was appreciative that Elizabeth wanted me to make another attempt.

The brisket took some preparation. I rubbed it in Koop's yellow mustard and then doused it with all-purpose dry rub; wrapped it tightly in plastic wrap and let it sit for several hours. Later in the day I got the smoke going, brought the temp up to about 235, dropped the brisket on the lower rack and the trout on the top.

When the trout came off, it looked perfect. A light crust on the surface, but moist and tender underneath. We flaked the fish off its skin with a fork, made a quick dill sour cream sauce and enjoyed an appetizer of smoked trout on crackers with big cool dollops of the dill sour cream sauce.

The brisket tasted pretty amateurish. It lacked the smoky flavor I'm used to and didn't seem to be as tender as it should have been. Once sliced and piled on a bun with Gate's barbecue sauce, we were fine with the results, but had a hard time not being a little disappointed since we couldn't keep from comparing it, mentally, to the great brisket we're used to getting in this city. I guess I'll have to keep working at it.

Theories on the sub-par brisket:

• New smoker - hasn't built up enough use to impart super-smoky flavor
• Low-grade hickory (Best Choice chunks from a bag I got at Sun Fresh)
• Small piece of meat = shorter cooking time. Less time to impart smoky flavor
• Large opening around the lid of the smoker letting out too much smoke. Need to try sealing it off with foil

To me, this is what the art of smoking is all about, though. The act of smoking meat takes a lot of time, but perfecting the whole process takes trial and error experience spanning months, if not years, and many, many pounds of meat. I got a smoker for a reason, so I'll have to stick with it.

Or, I can just stick to trout.

Thanks, B, for the wonderful gifts. You are gift enough.

Oklahoma Joe's: KC's Four Napkin Gas Station Barbecue

In a posting a little while back, I mentioned a forthcoming soliloquy on barbecue. Ironically, it turns out that soliloquy is being delivered with my first four napkin review.

I am happy to live in a city that is widely regarded as the barbecue Mecca of the world. Sure, there are other regions that naively claim stakes to this title – your Texas’s, your Carolinas, your Tennessees (specifically Memphis) – but there can only be one true King of Barbecue, and that King is Kansas City. After all, we host the American Royal – the annual festival held in celebration of barbecue, where the best of the best are crowned each year! I don't debate this topic. KC is the barbecue capital.

With that out of the way, I move on to the second point of the soliloquy: barbecue and grilling are completely different things and should be regarded as such. Example: when the numbskulls on The Hills unwittingly claim they’re having a “barbecue” at their Malibu beach houses, they’re just grilling. To quote the authority of all authorities – the internet, and specifically Wikipedia – “…practitioners consider barbecue to include only indirect methods of cooking over hardwood smoke, with the more direct methods to be called 'grilling'". If you ever question whether you are, in fact, grilling or doing barbecue, ask yourself these questions: 1) am I using a smoker? and 2) Will a dry rub or barbecue sauce be used? You are only doing barbecue if you answer "yes" to both of these questions.

Now having established both the capital of barbecue as well as its correct definition, I’ll point out that there are several restaurants in Kansas City that do barbecue very well. Most are little shacks tucked away in discreet nooks of the city, but upscale variations are also found downtown, on the plaza and out south. And they all serve the exact same plates of food regardless of how it may be presented (though each claims their own slight variation makes their food the best).

However. Within the last decade, a leader has emerged... a place that draws ridiculous crowds every weekend of the year, and every week day during lunch. This is a place that embodies the no-frills atmosphere I love in a barbecue restaurant (it's literally located in a gas station), meaning it stakes its reputation solely on the quality of its delicious. smoked. meats.

This place not only has a massive Midwest following, it’s received some serious national accolades, my favorite among them being listed as number 13 on Anthony Bourdain’s column for Men’s Health Magazine: 13 Places to Eat Before You Die. Bourdain, who I’ve written about before and of whom I’m a big fan, has eaten the best of everything, from hyper delicacies at the world’s top rated restaurants (many of them also on this list) to wildly fantastic street foods and specialties at famed local joints across the globe.

Of all the places he’s been, and of all the foods he loves, he chose Oklahoma Joe’s barbecue in Kansas City, Kansas, for the final spot on his enviable list of must-eats.

Normally I wouldn’t take the opinion of one New York-based chef so seriously... certainly not on the subject of barbecue, and especially not one who spent most of his career cooking at a French Brasserie. But having watched all his shows and read the book he wrote about his career as a chef and the restaurant industry, I respect his viewpoint. When I saw Bourdain speak at The Midland downtown about a year ago, someone in the audience asked him where he was going to eat that night. He replied (paraphrasing), “I’m flying out of town so I won’t be eating here.” (pause and disappointment from the crowd…) “But if I did eat anywhere in Kansas City tonight, it’d be at Oklahoma Joe’s.” (eruption of applause from the OK Joe’s fans in the house!!!)

Okay, enough guffawing over its national media attention. Let me tell you what sets Oklahoma Joe’s apart from the rest with three simple words that encompass all that's important in barbecue: flavorful, tender meat.

On the topic of flavor: obviously the meat has to shine, but what gives barbecued meat such great flavor is smoke. Whether mesquite or hickory (mesquite being my favorite by far), that smoky flavor must completely permeate your food. On a slice of brisket, you should be able to see a bright pink ring that comes from the penetration of smoke into the meat. You always get this at Oklahoma Joe's. Moreover, when you smell your food, it should absolutely reek of that smoke. Heck, the restaurant itself should have smoke visibly hanging in the air, and you should be able to smell it if you're anywhere within a quarter mile radius of the place. I'm not joking! And if you get your 'cue as takeout, the bag of food and any finger that touches it should smell like it was soaked in a bath of mesquite. Your hair, the morning after eating barbecue, should smell like mesquite. That's how important the smoke is, and Oklahoma Joe's delivers on every one of these criteria.

Tenderness is paramount to the experience of eating barbecue. Rib meat should be falling off the bones - literally sliding off cleanly when you wrap your lips around that first meaty bone. Brisket and pulled pork should essentially melt in your mouth. To me, the tenderness of the meat at Oklahoma Joe's is what creates the clear separation between it and all other barbecue. Whether Gates, Arthur Bryant's, Jack Stack or some other tiny shack, I've had ribs that weren't smoked long enough and wouldn't separate from the bone, resulting in a texture similar to an overcooked pork chop. Not good. I've had "crunchy" slices of brisket that tasted like cheap, metallic hamburger. But I've eaten at Oklahoma Joe's more than any of these other places and have never - not once - had anything that wasn't incredibly tender.

Meat. Barbecued meat should not be gristly or have huge chunks of fat in it. I can't use the word "lean" because there is plenty of fat in some of these meats, and there should be. But it needs to be evenly distributed. The low and slow cooking process makes the fat in a good, clean piece of pork butt melt away. You will never eat at a barbecue place that doesn't serve some fatty meat, but I've had inedible, fatty burnt ends at Gates and Jack Stack, stringy brisket from Arthur Bryant's, Danny Edwards, Smokehouse and Winslow's, and discarded huge chunks of fat-ridden pulled pork at others before. Don't get me wrong - I like all these places for one reason or another (well, not Winslow's), but they just don't measure up to OKJ's where you always get bite after bite of perfect, delicious meat.

For my money, the best choice in barbecue is pulled pork. I love it all, even chicken. And brisket is a close second. But in barbecue, pork is king and I personally enjoy the satisfaction of demolishing a massive sandwich to the sticky interaction with ribs. I must admit, in a departure with Kansas City 'cue customs, I enjoy a pulled pork sandwich Carolina style - meaning that spicy coleslaw is piled on top of the pork, in the sandwich, giving it a cooling, contrasting crunch that, for some reason, does more for me than pickles alone can.

The experience of starting in on one of these sandwiches at Oklahoma Joe's induces gluttonous euphoria. Noticing a juicy chunk of pork tumble from the overflowing bun and fall on the plate causes pleasure sensors to light up in my brain.This food is a drug and I'm happily addicted.

And like the worst addicts, I fully intend to share my love of this drug with as many people as possible. It always disappoints me when I see KC Masterpiece on grocery store shelves, or when my company caters meetings for clients from across the country with bbq from the wrong restaurant. Because these aren't the best representations of Kansas City barbecue. That's why, when my wife and I were planning our wedding rehearsal dinner, what to eat was the easiest of all the decisions we had to make. Oklahoma Joe's wowed our out of town guests and thrilled those who were already fans. It does the same for me every time I bite into a Carolina-style pulled pork sandwich, still, and always will. That's why Oklahoma Joe's is a KC Napkins four napkin restaurant.

Rating: four napkins

I'll save my soliloquy on bar-b-que for a later post, but last night's brisket sandwich and baked beans from Gate's were the ultimate impromptu Saturday-night-in-Kansas City meal choice. Intensely satisfying. (Best enjoyed with the sound stylings of Billie Holiday.) (mobile post)