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In keeping with our New Year's resolution to eat more smoked meats,
my lunch pal Lori and I dropped by Big Joe's BBQ in Citrus Heights the other day, to tune up for 2006. "Big Joe"
Dunlap is serious about 'cue. You can tell by the smoker he keeps in back of his restaurant. It's nearly as big as
a locomotive.
"I had it built for me by Dave Klose," Dunlap said, giving a brief tour a few days after
our first visit. "It's handmade of solid steel and weighs 9,000 pounds when it's loaded with wood and 800 pounds
of meat."
BBQ Pits by Klose is a legendary company in Houston whose credo, found on its website (www.bbqpits.com) is "maintaining the integrity of the Old Western trail drive-style of cooking... All BBQ pits are made by hand."
Impressive, and it takes a special breed of cooker to live up to that smoker's credentials. "I learned
to cook (barbecue) in my backyard in Marin County in the 1970s, by trial and error," Dunlap said. "My purpose was
to put out some good food."
He succeeded. Dunlap segued to catering (still does it) and involvement in a
couple of local barbecue joints (including Barbecue Express in Folsom) before opening Big Joe's BBQ nine months ago. Big
Joe's was formerly called Smokin' Joe's BBQ. He burns almond wood exclusively "because I can always get it.
I started out using oak, but a couple of times I couldn't get seasoned oak. Different woods change the flavor of the food
and I want to be consistent, and the almond wood does that."
On our first drop-in, we ordered the three-meat combo
($17 with two sides and corn bread) plus a hot link ($7.50).
Understand that Lori has eaten some barbecue. For
10 years she lived in Dallas, Houston and Beaumont and often did "barbecue circuit" odysseys.
"I've
had barbecue from Abilene to Amarillo, San Antonio to Laredo, Del Rio to Lockhart which is the Mecca of barbecue," she
said.
We jumped on the pork ribs first because they looked and smelled so outstanding (they spend about seven
hours in the smoker). Big and meaty, juicy and smoky, Lori proclaimed them to be "possibly the best ribs I've had
in Sacramento." They're way up there on my scorecard, too.
Ribs demolished, we turned to the tri-tip
and chicken. The chicken breast was meaty and moist, but we longed for more smoke flavor. Dunking chunks of chicken into the
barbecue sauce helped.
Now, here's the thing about tri-tip: This triangular cut of meat - which is rarely
seen outside of California - is cut from the bottom sirloin of the cow. Its popularity slowly spread throughout the state
from its point of "invention" - Santa Maria, in Southern California, in the 1950s. Over the decades, barbecue joints
began substituting it for the traditional brisket, a tough, high-maintenance cut that requires 10 to 12 hours of slow smoking.
Why bother, they reasoned, when we can marinate a tri-tip and cook it much quicker?
Problem is, many of them still
think they're cooking brisket. Consequently, they leave it on the smoker far too long, producing a dried-out piece of
meat that masquerades as 'cue.
All that leads to this: we found Big Joe's tri-tip to be moist and tender,
with fine flavor that could be better with a bit more dry rub. (The eclectic In Cahoots in Plymouth is another restaurant
that doesn't overcook its tri-tip; the style there is Santa Maria, which means the meat is cooked in an open pit over
oak.)
We asked for the hot link to be served whole with no bun. Wow, it was gigantic and had some background heat,
but it lacked our longed-for depth of flavor. But we reminded ourselves that California isn't Texas.
Dunlap
makes the desserts and side dishes himself - peach and berry cobblers, potato salad, coleslaw, macaroni and cheese, beans
and corn bread. We thought the beans were excellent, but the corn bread behaved like pound cake.
We also sampled
his three sauces - hot, medium and sweet-'n'-sour and found them very tasty and tangy, a spicy addition to the meats.
The peaches in the cobbler ($3.50 and $6.50) were buried under a thick wedge of dry crust; maybe it's time
to retool that one.
After lunch, wiping our hands and mouths with paper towels from a dispenser at our booth,
Lori remarked, "Of everything we had, the ribs are the winner - no bones about it."
Later, I phoned
Dunlap to ask him about his sauce. "I like to keep the ingredients a secret because I plan to bottle it in the future,"
he said.
OK, then, what's the secret of great 'cue, Joe? "The classic answer," he said. "Slow
smoking over wood coals."
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Big Joe's BBQ
WHERE:
7967 Auburn Blvd. in Citrus Heights. One way to get there: Take Interstate 80 east to the Antelope exit and bear right. Make
a left on Auburn Road and look on the left for the Grand Oaks Shopping Center.
HOURS:
11 a.m. - 8 p.m. Tuesdays-Saturdays, Noon - 8 p.m. Sundays
FOOD: ***
AMBIENCE: ***
HOW MUCH:
$-$$
INFORMATION: (916) 726-2200
ABOUT THE WRITER:
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