A journey through the United States of barbecue

From whole hogs to smoked fish and brisket, this all-American smoke-infused cooking style is as diverse as the US itself – and just as rich in history.

In the US, "barbecue" is both noun and verb – a familiar siren, calling from a squat cinder block building with its smoky aroma of meat and char. Depending where it's prepared, it could be a multi-napkin pulled pork sandwich, a tray of hand-sliced brisket or smoked chicken wings tangy with mayonnaise, accompanied by a litany of rib-sticking sides. 

The country's wildly diverse barbecue canon evolved from a single style born during the 17th-Century colonial period in slaveholding states. "Barbecue required the hands and minds of enslaved Americans," said Dr Howard Conyers, a South Carolina-based aerospace engineer, pitmaster and barbecue historian. "They took Indigenous, European and African techniques and, through trial and error, put them all together."

While fire and meat are a global phenomenon, it was the enslaved workers in the US South who turned barbecue into something distinct. They dug trenches, filled them with hot coals and slow-cooked whole animals for plantation feasts, basting – or "mopping" – the meat with vinegar sauce.

As is so often the case, their innovation was born of necessity. "You could feed 50 people to 10,000 people in a day at a time when you didn't have refrigeration," said Conyers.

Barbecue morphed from elite-funded banquet fare into everyday food as it spread from east to west with slavery and out of the south through the Great Migration. 

And it's never stopped changing. The proteins shifted from whole animals to pork shoulders and ribs as barbecue moved from rural communities to cities, and as the nation's butchery and slaughterhouse industries grew. Sauces followed suit. Vinegar mop worked as a tenderiser, antimicrobial agent and insect repellent, but refrigeration and smaller cuts allowed for sweeter tomato-based sauces. Pits eventually evolved into cinder block constructions, and, in some regions, gave way to offset smokers with their gentle, indirect heat.

Today, a modern wave of chefs and immigrants are putting their own stamp on the tradition. And while there's still no single definition of American barbecue, here are seven iconic regional styles, plus an emerging bonus category, through which you can literally taste the history of the United States.

Ryan Mitchell, son of pitmaster Ed Mitchell, cooks whole hogs just like his father, uncles and his sharecropper grandfather before him: shovelling coals into a pit, laying an unseasoned, butterflied pig on top and cooking it for around 12 hours. Once tender, he chops the meat and seasons it with paprika and an apple cider- and hot pepper-spiked mop sauce.

Using the whole hog is about as close as it comes to the US's earliest barbecue, and the technique survives almost exclusively in farming communities in the South Atlantic states of North Carolina and South Carolina. However, the end product has a few distinctions. Most North Carolina joints no longer apply the vinegar mop sauce during cooking, now using it more like a condiment. In South Carolina, sauce is often added toward the end of the smoke and might include mustard and/or tomato. "My county is a dividing line," said Conyers. "Half of Clarendon County uses vinegar-based sauce, and the half I grew up in introduced tomato and mustard." 

And where North Carolina hogs are chopped, South Carolina pigs are smoked until tender enough to pull apart. In both states, plan on piling meat onto a bun or white bread and pairing it with coleslaw, green beans, collard greens and potatoes (boiled and in potato salad). South Carolina specialties include hash, a gravy of chopped meat and innards served over rice.

At first glance, Alabama's barbecue resembles that found in nearby Southern states, like Georgia, Mississippi, Virginia, Tennessee and Kentucky, where pork shoulders and butts are doused in a tangy tomato-based sauce. Coleslaw, potato salad and baked beans are a near guarantee, and smoked whole chickens and pork ribs round out menus.

But in 1925, Big Bob Gibson Bar-B-Q in Decatur, Alabama, radicalised the art of smoked chicken when Robert Gibson smoked his birds for three hours over hickory wood coals then dipped them into a modified mop sauce now known as Alabama white sauce – a combination of vinegar, lemon, salt, pepper and mayonnaise.

The fat in the mayonnaise locks in moisture, according to Chris Lilly, a fourth-generation pitmaster who has run Big Bob Gibson's pits since 1991 and is the winner of 17 Barbecue World Championships. Now, white sauce – which is also applied to smoked chicken wings – is ubiquitous throughout the state and beyond.

Alabama has a few other barbecue quirks. Pulled pork sandwiches come topped with coleslaw; while at Dreamland Bar-B-Que in Tuscaloosa, renowned pitmaster John Big Daddy Bishop developed a distinct rib recipe: grilled over roaring hickory fire, basted with a vinegar-based sauce and beloved for its char.

Before opening Tropical Smokehouse in West Palm Beach, Rick Mace researched Florida barbecue history in the hope of finding a signature state style – just to find that the only Florida dish recognised as barbecue was smoked fish.

For centuries, Florida's inhabitants – Indigenous tribes and then Spanish, Cuban, British and American settlers – relied on mullet as a food source and smoking as a preservation technique, and the tradition lives on along the coast.

Mace recommends visitors head to Ted Peters Famous Smoked Fish in St Petersburg, an al fresco joint with melamine trays and frosty beer mugs, where smoked mullet comes with potato salad, coleslaw, sliced onion and tomato and a pickle spear.

Mace built his own smoker based on the one at Ted Peters, a rustic vertical cabinet set with racks and smouldering red oak in the base. At Tropical Smokehouse, he smokes mahi mahi, cobia, wahoo and salmon, and turns the smoked fish trim into one of Florida's most iconic delicacies: a mayonnaise-laced fish dip that's ideally spread on a cracker and dotted with hot sauce.

"Smoked mullet tells a story about the generations of fisherfolk, all the way back to the Calusa [people] who were netting mullet in this area," said Chandra Jamieson, owner of The Fisherman's Daughter in Fort Myers, who smokes her mullet for four to six hours over locally harvested buttonwood.

According to John Bates, pitmaster and owner of Austin's Interstellar BBQ, all barbecue in Texas is measured by its brisket, which must be well-marbled and redolent of post oak flavour – no sauce required.

Early Texas barbecue resembled that found in the Carolinas, but cultural co-mingling cemented the state's smoking trajectory. German, Polish and Czech immigrants settled in Central Texas shortly after it became the US's 28th state in 1845, and many set up butcher shops.

These butchers smoked excess meat to prevent spoiling and sold it by the pound at lunchtime; counter service is still a hallmark of contemporary Texas ‘cue. Eastern Europeans also brought sausage-making traditions to the region. Today, along with brisket and pork ribs, smoked hot links form "the trinity" of Texas barbecue, says Bates, whose beef brisket undergoes a three-day process.

Regional varieties abound. In East Texas, pitmasters focus on pork and favour hickory wood and Cajun flavours. South Texas is mesquite country with a heavy Mexican influence; expect charro beans, flour tortillas, poblano-laced sausages and barbacoa (smoked whole cow's head) on Sundays.

Five days a week, pitmaster Ronald Payne of Payne's BBQ throws a cylinder of bologna into his charcoal pit and smokes it until the casing ruptures. For lunch, his team serves thick slabs sandwiched between white bread, topped with a mayonnaise-free, mustard-heavy coleslaw. "Smoked bologna is definitely a Memphis thing," said Payne, whose father Horton opened the restaurant in 1976.

Memphis represents a shift from rural to urban smoking tradition, flavoured by the exchange of immigrants and country folk who converged there. Most of the city's barbecue joints use charcoal briquettes rather than burned down wood to fuel their pits. Processed meats like bologna and salami dot menus and tomato-based sauces sit proudly on tables.

Pitmaster Charlie Vergos was a first-generation Greek American, and when he opened Rendezvous in 1948, he seasoned his pork ribs with salt, pepper, oregano and garlic, basting with vinegar sauce. After traveling to New Orleans, he added cayenne pepper and Cajun seasoning to the blend and birthed a new sort of Southern flavour.

Beyond bologna, ribs and chopped pork shoulder sandwiches are essential to Memphis barbecue, as is the curious side dish of barbecue spaghetti – or the neon-yellow Memphis-style coleslaw. "It's so bright, some people think it's macaroni and cheese," said Payne. "It's what sets us apart."

Kansas City's place in the pantheon of American barbecue was secured when a Memphis-born steamboat cook named Henry Perry moved to town in 1907. Within a few years, Perry became the city's first barbecue restaurateur, smoking meats as varied as racoon, rabbit, opossum, hog and mutton – all prepared with a spicy vinegar mop.

Perry's vinegar mop was long ago supplanted by molasses-sweetened sauces, but diners can still taste his influence in this former meat-packing city; Justin Easterwood, owner of Chef J BBQ and official pitmaster of the Kansas City Chiefs, notes that Kansas City remains known for cooking anything and everything. 

Kansas City also layers flavours. "There's always a rub, a mix of seasonings, and then somewhere in the process… putting a sauce on so it can set," said Megan Day, a world champion pitmaster. 

Ribs here come in all varieties: spare, baby, lamb and beef. The city’s famous burnt ends started as a free snack to quell crowds at Arthur Bryant's Barbeque; now everyone in town sells the fatty brisket cut that’s smoked extra hard and chopped into bite-size pieces. The lean part of the brisket (aka the flat) gets shaved on a deli slicer and piled high onto sandwiches. Pork shoulders get a similar treatment; smoked pork loin, turkey, wings and ham count as barbecue here, too. (Brobeck BBQ’s smoked ham salad is "legendary", said Day.)

And Kansas City sides pack Midwestern comfort: expect cheesy corn, meat-laced beans, warm potato casseroles and mounds of fries and onion rings. 

David Sandusky, owner of Beast Craft BBQ Co is quick to point out that the St Louis spare rib is a basic cut of meat and not a cooking style. Rather, what distinguishes St Louis ribs, and its barbecue in general, is direct heat grilling and basting. "Even though our ribs are sauced, that liquid gets baked onto the meat. You're getting full dehydration. It's a flavour bomb," said Sandusky.

But he'll forgive outsiders for the confusion; according to Sandusky, gentrification and national chains have greatly watered down St Louis' idiosyncratic barbecue character. There are hold outs though: among the city's quintessential flavours is sweet and vinegary Maull's, one of the US's first mass-produced barbecue sauces. Home cooks in St Louis augment Maull's with brown sugar, onions and an Anheuser Busch beer and use it like a braising sauce. Meats start on the grill and get finished in the oven – or vice versa.

In addition to ribs, St Louis specialises in pork steaks, smoked and then grilled at high heat. The city shares a tradition of saucy, crunchy rib tips with Kansas City and Chicago. But only a handful of spots still serve snoot (pig's face) that's grilled until rock hard and then simmered in barbecue sauce. "It has a burnt bacon quality," said Sandusky. "It's an acquired taste."

Barbecue's new wave started in 2009, when young upstart Aaron Franklin opened Franklin Barbecue in Austin, Texas, fast-becoming an international, brisket-proselytising sensation. By 2013, Franklin had earned the number one spot on Texas Monthly magazine's best barbecue list and chefs across the country left their kitchens for a life of smoking, homemade sauces and made-from-scratch sides.  

Since then, a new generation of chefs and pitmasters has turbo-charged the cultural exchange US barbecue was built on.

Shuai Wang grew up in the Chinese enclave of Flushing, Queens, and when he started cooking in Charleston, South Carolina, he missed foods like roast duck and crispy pork ribs. When Wang opened King BBQ with North Carolina-born pitmaster Brandon Olson in 2023, the duo delivered a mash-up of Chinese and Carolina-smoked meats. They now roast cured Peking duck over coals and make moo shu chopped smoked pork. Their smoked Chinese spare ribs are cured in salt, sugar, five spice and MSG.

Wang is particularly inspired by the rise of Asian barbecue and points to Eem, a Thai spot in Portland, Oregon, where diners are served spicy jungle curry with their brisket.

More like this:

• The truth about the US' most iconic food

• The flawless biscuit that took years to master

• From Tabasco sauce to Taiwanese Tex-Mex: Felicity Cloake's American Odyssey

In Lockhart, Texas, pitmaster Chuck Charnichart smokes medium-rare lamb chops and her signature Flamin' Hot Cheetos-inspired Molotov pork ribs (with heat from serrano chilli simple syrup) at her woman-led Barbs B Que. Further north in Arlington, Fasicka and Patrick Hicks likely serve the world's only Ethiopian-Texas barbecue at Smoke'N Ash, glazing and rubbing their meats with awaze spice.

"What’s exciting for me is when customers order Texas barbecue with Ethiopian side dishes like cabbage and carrots, or tikil gomen. Instead of Texas toast, they ask for injera," said Fasicka, who grew up in Addis Ababa.

"For so long, barbecue was just done in a traditional way," added Wang. "But people are starting to realise there are so many common denominators between Southern, Texas, Kansas City and all these different styles of barbecue and with other cultures and cuisines."

--

If you liked this story, sign up for The Essential List newsletter – a handpicked selection of features, videos and can't-miss news, delivered to your inbox twice a week.  

For more Travel stories from the BBC, follow us on Facebook, X and Instagram.