A chat with grill master Steven Raichlen ahead of his BBQ talk on Wednesday in Overland Park

Steven Raichlen is, perhaps, the world’s leading authority on how to cook outdoors. 

With the publication of The Barbecue Bible in 1998, Raichlen established himself as both an enthusiast and a scholar of “bringing out the primal flavor of food,” as he put it in the introduction to that seminal cookbook. Since then, Raichlen’s helmed three different PBS series on barbecue and grilling, two French-Canadian cooking series, and opened his own cooking school, the aptly named Barbecue University. He’s published over a dozen books on the subject, covering everything from sauces to smoking to the various things one can cram up a chicken’s rear. His latest, Project Fire: Cutting-Edge Techniques and Sizzling Recipes from the Caveman Porterhouse to Salt Slab Brownie S’Mores, arrived last month from Workman Publishing Company.

Raichlen will be at a KCPT benefit at Smoke ‘n’ Fire in Overland Park on Wednesday, June 20, doing a live demonstration of some of the techniques in Project Fire. We grilled (sorry) Raichlen with some questions ahead of the event. 

It seems appropriate to be talking to you at the start of serious grilling season, although I imagine that’s year-round for you?

Yeah, pretty much. Although it’s easier for me because I live in Miami. It’s not quite as difficult as it is for you guys.

It’s the 20th anniversary of The Barbecue Bible. Did you anticipate just how much it was going to change your life?

Oh, boy. Not at the moment — no way. I thought it would be The Barbecue Bible, and then the next book would be The Noodle Bible. I never intended to become a barbecue expert. 

So many of the books you wrote before The Barbecue Bible were high-flavor, low-fat, which seems like a world removed from barbecue.

Absolutely. It’s been a crazy evolution. When I graduated from college, I won a Watson Fellowship, and my project was to study medieval cooking in Europe. I traveled around Europe and studied old books in great libraries, went to a modern French cooking school, and kind of immersed myself in the culture. In a sense, I’ve been doing that ever since. 

I wrote the book [The Barbecue Bible], and then I was going to write a noodle bible, but for some reason, I just couldn’t get into it, so instead, one night, I set down and wrote a list of everything I wanted to accomplish with barbecue. That included everything from a barbecue university to a TV show to a line of products, and I’ve sort of been just working through the list ever since. 

How do you write about so many world cuisines without cultural appropriation — without being the white guy saying, “This is the right way”? 

Well, that’s a really interesting question. When I’m writing books like Planet Barbecue or The Barbecue Bible, I’m a reporter, seeing what they do, and trying to describe it, but you’re right: everything gets refracted through my sensibility and my kitchen and the way we grill in America. What I try and be most faithful to is the final flavor. Sometimes you have substitute ingredients or you tweak the final formulas to get the end result.

… What’s interesting is that those ingredients have changed since I started writing about barbecue 20 years ago. Some recipes are made with something called strained yogurt, which you put in a strainer and drain through cheesecloth. Today, of course, with Greek yogurt, you’ve got it right there. Ingredients like lemongrass — 20 years ago, lemongrass was pretty esoteric, and I had to come up with a workaround like lemon zest. But today, you can find lemongrass in the supermarket. So that’s kind of been a wonderful thing.

Coming to a town with a deep-seated barbecue culture like Kansas City, does being “the barbecue guy” present any challenges?

No, I’ve always been pretty much of an observer. Short of my Iron Chef competition in Japan, I don’t compete. My position with any restaurant or barbecue joint that I go to, or any contest, is that I’m there to learn. Show me. I’m here to enjoy. Wow me. I would never say I could do it better, and in the case of true Kansas City barbecue, I probably couldn’t.

Re-reading The Barbecue Bible in preparation for this interview, I was struck by a sentence in the introduction: “I honestly believe I could spend the rest of my life writing about barbecuing and grilling and still find new things to discover.”

That is absolutely true. I’ve just done two stories for The New York Times in the last few months, and one is on what might be the most obscure regional American barbecue there is. It’s pork shoulder steaks, grilled — not smoked — over hickory, and dipped in a fiery, vinegary dip. You find it chiefly in Monroe County, Kentucky. So, I learned some more stuff.

♦

Steven Raichlen: Project Fire Live

Wednesday, June 20

Smoke N’ Fire (8030 151st Street, Overland Park)

$75 gets you dinner, drinks, live music, and a signed copy of Project Fire.