With four kids and both of us working, there was no way my wife and I could get meals on the table if we didn’t both participate. For quite a long time I could knock out a few staples for the kids, namely linguini with clam sauce and other mainstays like hot dogs, pizza and chicken nuggets. But I started to realize that I really liked to cook a about 10 years ago. Growing up in an Italian household with a mother who could make anything taste amazing, I had little impetus to get in her way by trying to my hand at the stove. Homemade sauce (we don’t call it gravy), dishes like ravioli, lasagna, stuffed shells and my favorite, eggplant parmesan. I’m no chef but I can get around the kitchen ok, now, usually limiting my dishes to things like Frutti di Mare (seafood pasta), steak, fish, variations of lemon chicken and my favorite thing to do, smoking and grilling wings and ribs. One thing my mom made that I always thought was unique was her barbecue sauce. It’s unlike anything I’ve ever had. It’s orange, for one thing, and is sort of tart but garlicky, too with no heat to speak of. She’d put it on ribs or chicken and as a teenager I’d devour anything she slathered it on. Of course, I devoured just about anything (including Jethro Bodine-sized bowls of Cap’n Crunch, though that’s another story), but this sauce of hers was like crack. Flash forward to my married self in the early 90’s and knowing I was hosting a barbecue, I decided to call Mama Borri to get her recipe.
”Well, you know I found this in a magazine in the early 50s right?” she said.
”What? You didn’t come up with? My life is a lie!”
”We’re Italian. We don’t make barbecue sauce.”
So she gave me the recipe which over the years I’ve adjusted the ratios, added and subtracted different ingredients and whatnot, giving her sauce my own twist. And whenever I serve it to people who’ve never tasted it, they absolutely rave about it. The sauce falls into none of the style categories you’d find in a typical BBQ joint, like Mop, Memphis, KC, South Carolina, et al. It’s chili sauce based and has a flavor profile all its own.
A few months ago I did a huge painting for a friend of mine and he paid me a very generous sum of money for it. He really loved the painting and I loved him for loving it so much and kept saying he needed to do more. Because he follows me on Instagram, where I’ve been known to post pics of the food I cook, he knew I had been using a broken down, poor man’s Green Egg; a Char Griller Akorn Kamado style unit. It’s a porcelain lined egg-shaped charcoal smoker/grill that worked well until it didn’t. I lamented in one of my Instagram posts that I couldn’t maintain heat because the lid was broken off. So one day my buddy drops by with a box the size of a small refrigerator.
”What the hell is this?” I asked.
”I loved that painting so much. Remember I said I wanted to give you more, like a tip? So here it is—smoke away my friend.”
What a magnanimous gesture! He bought me a Masterbuilt Electric Smoker with Bluetooth technology. This thing is big enough to smoke 16 chickens! Why I would need to ever smoke 16 chickens, I had no idea but I wasn’t looking a gift smoker in the mouth. I went right at it, smoking everything from pork loins and turkey breast to venison and wings to baby back ribs. I absolutely LOVE ribs. After many fails, I now have my rib technique down to a pretty exact formula, employing a 3-2-1 method at 230 degrees. I usually employ a hardwood mix of Traeger pellets in an A-Maze-N smoke tube when the cook is longer than 3 hours. This A-Maze-N thing is beautiful and a must if you like to smoke your food for long cooks. A friend in my Facebook BBQ group recommended it to me. You load it with wood pellets of your choice, hit it with a torch and wait 10 minutes for it to catch, then when you’re ready, place it in your smoker. It prevents you from having to manually load the smoker tray with wood chips every 45 minutes, which I do if I’m making wings or anything else that only requires a couple hours.
I can’t recommend the electric smoker enough. Do I miss the smoke ring from charcoal and the flavor it often can impart? Sure. But the convenience and ability to hold a steady temp for as many hours as needed, and to be able to check the progress from an app on my phone, even to the point of adjusting time and temp from inside my home, is a pretty fair trade off.
As far as Motor City Joe Mama’s BBQ sauce, thousands of people have begged me to bottle it. Ok, tens of people, but I’m telling you this stuff is like nothing you’ve ever tasted. I’d give you the recipe, but then I’d have to kill you. I’m only partially kidding. One day if the right circumstances permit, I’ll bottle it and share it with the world. For the time being, it’ll have to remain in the Casa de Borri under lock and key. Who knows, maybe if you’re good, you’ll get an invite the next time I fire up the smoker. Message me for PayPal or Venmo info.