Review: The Smoking Bacon & Hog Cookbook

The Smoking Bacon & Hog Cookbook – The Whole Pig & Nothing but the Pig BBQ Recipes is written by championship pitmaster Bill Gillespie. He started cooking competitive BBQ in 2005 and won the Jack Daniels World Championship Invitational Barbecue in 2011 and in 2014 he won the American Royal Invitational, probably the two most coveted titles in the world of competitive BBQ. Bill knows what he’s talking about and shares his hog knowledge with us in this book.

Bill Gillespie covers everything in this book. From the rooter to the tooter (ok, not quite but pretty close). The recipes are easy to read and follow. He covers appetizers, snacks, drinks (with bacon in them) main courses, whole hog, and dessert (with bacon). The book is worth it just for the section on whole hog.

Review - Ultimate Book of BBQ

I received an email a couple weeks ago asking if I would be interested in reviewing a BBQ cook book. My initial response was, "Is this a trick question?" I'm always looking for new recipes, tips on cooking and just improving my BBQ skills in general.

I agreed to review Southern Living Ultimate Book of BBQ - the complete year-round guide to grilling & smoking. A couple days later I received it and two other grilling books which I will be reviewing later.

Pitmaster Christopher Prieto of PRIME Barbecue in Wendell, NC has worked with Southern Living to compile over 200 recipes, creating a hefty cook book that covers the basics to the finer points of BBQ.

Review: Southern Living's Big Book of BBQ

Creator: Southern Living (Time Inc. Lifestyle Group)
Requirements: Compatible with iPad. Requires iOS 3.2.2 or later.

Cost: $7.99 (Price increasing to $12.99 after July 4, 2012)
Link: Big Book of BBQ


A few years ago I took one of Chef Troy Black's BBQ classes, he is the Southern Living Pitmaster. It was a great class and I learned a lot about competition BBQ from it. A couple months later, I found out he had worked on the Big Book of BBQ for Southern Living. I saw it at Books-a-Million on day and flipped through it. It looked good but I didn't have it in the budget to purchase it. A couple weeks later, I was looking through iPad apps and came across the Big Book of BBQ app. I thought it sounded very familiar so I looked at the information about it and it was the app of the same book. At $7.99 I figured it would be worth the purchase. It was.

App Review: On the House – Great Backyard Grilling

Creator: CulinartMedia, Inc.
Requirements: Compatible iPad. Requires iOS 3.2 or later.

Cost: $3.99
Link: Great Grilling

This app is well designed with intuitive navigation and great-tasting recipes that are easy to follow.

My likes:
There are some cool features that make this app shine for me. When I find a recipe I like, I can add it to my favorites, menu or shopping cart. Favorites help you find the recipes you like quicker. The menu helps you put together a menu for a dinner party or a grill night. The shopping cart puts all the ingredients in a list so you can figure out what you need to buy.

Being able to change the number of people cooking for and having the app modify the amounts of ingredients automatically is a great feature for chefs like me who may cook for my wife and kids one night then for the neighborhood block party the next. When the recipe calls for you to cook an item for a set time, you can touch the time in the recipe to open a timer and track your cooking time.

My dislikes:
A grilling app should not tell you to preheat the oven to make ribs. And working with multiple recipes simultaneously means I need multiple timers. Some recipes, for example, have you cooking a sauce on the stove and the meat on the grill. You need to time both. The currently empty video tips section needs to be populated. That would be an excellent addition to the app.

Overall the app is really useful. I recommend it for the recipes and ability to set up menus. The little extras make it nice, but the timers and lack of videos detract from its overall usefulness.

This was a tough decision to rate this app. It is so close to a full rack but in the end it receives a 3/4 rack of ribs on the rib's Gibbs scale*. Multiple timers, videos and turning the ribs recipe into a grill recipe would allow me to change the rating to a full rack.

*When I do reviews, books or otherwise, I will rate the items with ribs (they are my favorite BBQ dish). A full rack is great and a single rib is poor.

Book Review: Dr. BBQ's Big Time Barbecue Cookbook

Dr. BBQ's Big-time Barbecue Cookbook
By Ray Lampe, aka Dr. BBQ

The Dr. is in and he has the prescription to cure your hunger.

This is the first BBQ cook book I owned. I was given it as a gift along with my first cooker and it started me on my way to finding the flavors I love.

As cookbooks go it didn't read like any other cookbook I have read. As I started to read it, it was like sitting down with Dr. BBQ and listening to him talk about something he loves with a passion. He talks about what BBQ is and what it isn't. Places he has found good barbecue and what made it good. He takes you on a quick journey through the history of BBQ and helps to understand the process behind it. Dr. BBQ also touches on some of the great controversies of BBQ like wood vs pellets vs gas.

That is like the appetizer of the book. Then he gets into the prescriptions to cure your cravings. The scripts cover sauces, mops, appetizers, main courses, side dishes, desserts, using left over Q and other delights you can make on a cooker. I have not made all the recipes in the book but the ones I have cured my family's and friend's hunger and cravings.

The sauce recipe I use now is his mustard base sauce but with some tweaks that I accidentally discovered. I also use his smoked pork recipe that my family and friends love so much.

Often when asked by friends who want to start cooking BBQ what cookbook to get, this is the one I recommend. It is a great resource and easy to read. It is not in full color, which makes the food pictures not quite as appetizing, but that makes it feel unpretentious like the BBQ recipes it contains.

Over all I would give Dr. BBQ's Big-time Barbecue Cookbook a full rack of ribs.*

*When I do reviews, books or otherwise, I will rate the items with ribs (they are my favorite BBQ dish). A full rack is great and a single rib is poor. I will tend to stick to a full rack, half rack or one rib.