Honest-to-Goodness REAL Barbecue Made in the Traditional Slow Food Way
As with most great tasting food, real barbecue is made using no shortcuts. Preparing full-flavored, memorable barbecue requires patience, practice and passion.
“If there ain’t smoke, It ain’t barbecue”
We’re fond of telling people that: “If there ain’t smoke, It ain’t barbecue.”
What most backyard chefs are doing to make a meal in minutes, cooking directly over a flame with high heat, is called grilling. Grilling is what you do with a hamburger, chicken breast or a steak. Grilling is a fine method of cooking, but it doesn’t produce food with the hearty, woody resonance of slow-smoked fare. You can slather on as much barbecue sauce as you want, but it still won’t be authentic barbecue.
Low and Slow Smoking with Hickory Wood
The authentic barbecue found on our barbecue catering menu is slow-cooked with indirect heat at a low temperature, say around 220 degrees, with plenty of smoke. Our smoke comes from burning hickory wood, imported directly from the Southern barbecue belt. Now it would be easier to use that shortcut some barbecue joints have adopted of cooking with propane, but at Albert Pit Barbecue we think smoking with hickory wood enhances the flavor of the meat for a genuine barbecue experience.
Our barbecue pit was custom made by a family in Georgia that specializes in quality barbecue pits. It weighs over 800 pounds and can cook up to 24 turkeys at one time.
Patience, patience, patience…
Other than the wood-burning cloud of smoke, the next requirement of real barbecue is plenty of time. Proper slow cooking at low temperatures can take up to twelve hours for a pork shoulder or as much as eighteen hours for a whole turkey.
Hand-Pulled to Select the Choicest Meat
After smoking the meat, we hand pull our chicken and pork so that we can hand select only the choicest meat. We know the modern automation seen in other barbecue kitchens may be faster and less expensive, but we believe that the traditional hand-pulled method is still the best one.
Sauce Served on the Side—Always
After spending all that time smoking and pulling meat, the last thing we want to do is cover up that great smoked flavor by drowning it in barbecue sauce. Our homemade Fat Albert Barbecue Sauce is always served on the side, allowing your guests to add as much or as little sauce as they like.
Authentic Barbecue Flavor
Our dedication to making “Honest to Goodness Real Barbecue” results in some of the best slow-cooked, smoked meat that you’ll ever taste. An authentic flavor that we are proud to serve to our own friends and family. It would be our pleasure to serve it up for your friends and family, too.
Albert Pit Barbecue caters “Honest to Goodness Real Barbecue” to our hometown of Fort Collins, Colorado and the surrounding cities of Loveland, Greeley, Windsor, Estes Park and Cheyenne, Wyoming.
Click here to find out why we say our barbecue is “As-Good-As-The-Best.”