Moe Cason’s first barbecue experiments began on his mother’s homemade 55-gallon drum pit, often with a rabbit he’d shot, or a sunfish he’d caught.
That childhood hobby, fueled by cookouts with his large, tight-knit family in Des Moines, Iowa, stuck with him. In “Big Moe’s Big Book of BBQ: 75 Recipes From Brisket and Ribs to Cornbread and Mac and Cheese” (National Geographic, $30), the pitmaster tells how he came to win national barbecue championships, star in a National Geographic television series, and have his face emblazoned on commercially-sold jars of sauces and rubs.
Soon after he and his wife Nena moved into their first apartment, Cason writes, he purchased a small, inexpensive grill that he cooked on “so much that I put a hole in the deck.”
A neighbor with a big smoker and a bigger ego (“he thought he was a king snake”) stoked Cason’s desire to compete on the barbecue circuit. But the cost of proper equipment exceeded his paycheck as a night-shift water treatment operator. So he spent a year remodeling a house and flipped it, earning him enough to buy a trailer with a pit. He entered his first contest in 2006 and has been winning championships — and fame — ever since.
Cason’s first book captures his inspiring story and big personality with bold photography, easy-to-follow tricks of the trade, and recipes for barbecue and all the fixings. Some recipes were contributed by his four daughters and wife Nena (who died of cancer last fall), such as the Fry Bread passed down from his Native American mother-in-law, which wraps his Buffalo Steak Tacos.
On a recent evening, some friends and I tried his Memphis BBQ Chicken Thighs, Jalapeno Cornbread, and Red, White, and Green — a melange of bacon-seasoned red-skinned potatoes and green beans — and deemed them all winners.
Maybe next time we’ll make room for his Smoked Chocolate Bread Pudding with Bourbon-Caramel Sauce inspired by the traditional dessert he loved as a kid, and the relevation he’s had since, that “chocolate and smoke go amazing together.”
Susan Puckett is a cookbook author and former food editor of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Follow her at susanpuckett.com.
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