Chef Seeto continues his culinary journey across the US as he visits the home to the US Space and Rocket Centre and discovers that fast food doesn’t have to be junk food. In fact in Alabama, history has given the region a tasty good reason to enjoy lip smacking cuisine — served fast.
Have you ever thought of why we eat the way we do or why we crave that foods make us happy? Doesn’t it make you wonder why the South East Asians eat snakes and insects; why certain religions don’t eat pork; or why the people of Alabama love barbecue breast, butt and thighs!
The way humans interact with food is a fascinating look at what influences us to choose the foods we’d prefer to eat and why we could cook in a certain way.
We all have one favourite food from childhood. You know, the food that gives you comfort, all-encompassing love and that warming feeling of satisfaction.
Mine is a roasted, crispy skin peking duck with warmed mandarin pancakes (a cross between a crepe and roti), Chinese pickles, spring onion and hoisin sauce. Mmmm!
The Southern US love for fried foods, barbecue, chicken and burgers may seem at polar opposites to a highly medicinal, plant-based diet of land and sea vegetables, nuts and fruit, but take a quick look at the history of this region and you begin to understand that what is called fast food to some, is in fact comfort food to others. Welcome, to Huntsville in Northern Alabama.
Alabama’s comfort foods
Alabama has a long agricultural history of growing cash crops that included cotton, sugarcane, tobacco and rice. If there was a drought, there was no money for anyone. African slaves were used to fuel an insatiable growth in cotton sales during the 18th century.
Long before Fiji was a united nation of 330 islands with hundreds of clans, dark skinned Africans were being called coloured people by the Europeans. They were separated and segregated from the whites in school buses, restaurants and most public places.
The rich land and plantation owners preferred the tender cuts and would leave the tougher and boney parts of the carcass for poorer farmers and of course, the newly arrived African Americans.
Learning to make the tough meat more tender and creating sauces to enjoy with them created techniques and foods that are still enjoyed by all Alabamians today. Parts like ribs, pork belly and boned meat can be deliciously tender if slow-cooked for many hours on a low heat.
The breast of the chicken was also preferred by the elite, who left the dark-meat drumsticks and boney wings for everyone else. Combined with the availability of lard from the piggeries, the Southern folk’s love of fried food, including fried chicken, started many generations ago.
Burgers may not be as popular in Fiji (American food never really took off here!) but in Alabama and most of the US, the pattie of minced-up meat cuts have influenced an entire nation to admire, revere and recreate the hamburger. One culture’s fast food is another’s comfort food.
When I told a waitress at one family restaurant that Fiji doesn’t have a love of fried oysters, fried pickles, buffalo wings, hush puppies, corn dogs or a po’boy, she said: “Where do you come from?” “I’m from Fiji!” I replied. “Well I’m not going there because I’ll starve if you haven’t got my favourite foods!”
I laughed and realised, her comfort foods are not mine.
Fast comfort food
When most of us think of fast food restaurants we tend to think of the big chains serving burgers and fried foods made by a machine rather than a real person. But as I headed three hours north of last week’s stop of Montgomery, to Huntsville in Northern Alabama, I discovered that Americans have turned their favourite comfort foods into a fast food industry to enjoy them every day and hot in your hands in just a few minutes!
In Alabama, fast food is not always junk food. Sure there’s plenty of fried food options but there are also restaurants and drive-through take-out windows that still embrace the region’s ancestral love of burgers, wings and barbecue.
America has turned what was once a long, slow wait for boned meats to cook and turned them into a convenience food. And judging by the ratings on foodie sites like Trip Advisor, Urbanspoon, the Rewards Network and Yelp, fast cultural food in Northern Alabama is serious business.
Barbecue pitmasters
In the Southern States, the barbecue is very different from throwing a few prawns on a hot, flat grill. There is a big difference between barbecue and grilling in America.
Barbecue is slow cooking over low indirect heat, like charcoal or wood. Grilling is cooking over high direct heat like a flat grill plate you see at the road stalls in Suva. The barbecue experts that tend to their fires with freshly cut, handpicked wood and stir the coals to keep a constant flame and temperature are no ordinary cooks.
Slow-cooking meats, seafood and baked potato in wood-fired pits is a culinary art, just as the Polynesian and Melanesian lovo earth oven is to master. America’s renowned barbecue cooks are not classically trained chefs cooking in a sterile kitchen, but are known as the pitmasters. There are no schools to graduate from to become a pitmaster. It’s dirty, hot, sweaty and smoky in the cooking pits.
The ability to master the technique of cooking with fire and smoke to create smoky, charred and deep flavoured foods accompanied by lip-smacking sauces must be earned, and many pitmasters have the scars and burns to prove it. The title of pitmaster is truly earned by a baptism of fire.
Fast barbecue food, cooked slow
Cooked slow, served fast. That’s the advertising slogan for one of the oldest barbecue restaurant chains called LawLers, run by owner Phillip Lawler and high school buddy Jim Kelly for more than 30 years.
The service is super fast, about five minutes, with typical Southern hospitality that I was beginning to get used to.
“Welcome all y’all” says the sign at the front counter. “Whad can I getcha, son?” says the elder woman in her deep Southern drawl.
Looking at their menu I am totally confused! Piggy plates, combo and sampler plates, St Louis-style ribs, pulled pork plate, barbecue by the pound, barbecue beans and stuffie taters. It was like I needed a dictionary or Google translate to decipher the strange menu for a foreigner!
Confused by all the choices I ordered the sampler plate of pulled pork, ham, turkey, quarter slab of ribs, two sides, roll, sauce and I just had to know what a stuffie tater was.
“Ya better be hungry!” I was told. “That’s OK I said, I’m from Fiji!” I thought Fijians ate a lot of food but the Alabamians would give any Fiji village boy a run for his money — with room for a bistro cake or two!
Taters and sauces
The tater turned out to be a giant-sized baked potato with hickory-smoked pork and lots of American cheddar cheese (it’s bright orange!), which I couldn’t finish but loved. The ribs were undoubtedly the best and Phillip Lawler shared his secret to soak the ribs in a salted brine before slow-roasting for at least six hours.
The technique reminded me of how Fijian villagers soak pork in seawater to remove germs and season the meat before cooking. Incredibly on the other side of the world I discovered something that Fiji and Alabama cooking had in common!
The best part of barbecue is the accompanying sauces. Red, white and spicy sauces are vinegar-based and provide a tangy contrast to the smoked meats. The recipes are the pride and joy of the pitmasters like the award-winning Chris Lilly at Big Bob Gibson Bar-B-Q in nearby Decatur.
Many of Chris’ sauces have won awards and contain multiple herbs and technique. Lip-smacking sauces must have penetrating flavours and there’s no doubt that world champion pitmasters like Chris Lilly have tangy sweet sauce running in their blood.
Ancestral and comforting. No wonder they call it Sweet Home Alabama.
NEXT WEEK: Chef Seeto spends a final day in Alabama to discover two award-winning food producers of goats milk and cheese, and a microbrewery who is using herbs, spices and fruits to pioneer the winenification of beer. Alabama offers Fijian food producers some innovative ways to make use of the local produce and make money.
* Lance Seeto is an award winning chef, television host and international food writer based on Castaway Island, Fiji. He was a recent guest of Alabama Tourism. Follow his global culinary adventures as he goes in search of cultural flavours at www.lanceseeto.com
