You’ve had an interesting career. I understand you got hooked on barbecue while covering a story for Southern Living magazine. Yes, I was on staff as the garden design editor, but I filled in for a travel writer and covered a barbecue contest in Demopolis, Alabama, in December. I got hooked. Six months later, I entered my first contest in Lawrenceburg, Tennessee. Soon I was living my dream, competing on the road 300 days a year.You moved from Nashville to Memphis, and now you have some exciting plans for a vacant printing shop on G.E. Patterson. Yes, it’s a new venture called Southern Fire and Food. My partner, Yi Lynne Weber, and I are shooting for July, but it might be August before we open. It’s a pretty extensive build-out.Tell us more. Southern Fire and Food is part barbecue cooking school, part tasting bar. We will give you five different sauces from five different parts of the country with a small sample of meat from each region. So, you might have brisket from Texas, tri-tip from California, chicken with white sauce from Alabama, and, of course, ribs and pork from Memphis. So there will be a retail store and restaurant, as well? Yes. We will have one of the largest collections of barbecue sauces and dry rubs in the country, along with prepared foods to go, lunch service, happy hour, and brunch on the weekends. On Saturday nights, we will have a U-shaped chef’s table with a cooking island in the center. We will cook and interact with guests throughout the entire meal. You mentioned before that you are really excited about the project’s outdoor space. Absolutely. We are going to build a 25-by-45-foot covered outdoor kitchen for four 60-inch grills, two wood-fire pizza ovens, and fire pits. Plus, there will be a bar, outdoor seating on the existing patio, and raised beds for an urban garden. We want the whole complex to be an interactive food experience. We are calling it “foodtainment.” Tell me the secret behind this incredible Boston butt you made for us today. It’s delicious! I rubbed it with a dry rub. Then I put it on the smoker at 225 degrees until it reached 195 degrees internal, which took 12 hours. I will never tell you how long to cook a Boston butt. Today, that might take 10 hours; tomorrow it might take 12 hours. It’s the weather. It’s the humidity. It’s your ability to maintain a consistent temperature in the smoker. It’s a lot of factors that play into the time it takes to cook.
