Canadian celebrity pitmaster Darkside of the Grill, AKA Mel Chmilar Jr, will be a guest star at this year's Meatstock.
Greg Bruce embeds himself in the brave new world of barbecue and emerges transformed.
I’d been disappointed and frankly baffled to hear that Matt Melville, one of the country’s best competitive barbecuers, would be serving me rump. Like many New Zealanders, I’d grown up with the steak hierarchy: scotch, followed by sirloin, then rump, a sad and distant last. The idea that a bona fide meat master would serve me meat from a cow’s butt seemed like trolling at best and cost-cutting at worst: a thumb in the eye to me, you and the mainstream media – not to mention a real own goal in a self-promotional sense.
But when I walked through the door of Melville’s suburban Birkenhead home at 9.30am on a Tuesday, I was hit by the sweet, thick smell of meat charring over charcoal, and saw the fat, glistening slab skewered on the rotisserie, and I realised instantly that my understanding of meat had been deficient, that I had been misled by Big BBQ, that the scales were about to be removed from my eyes and the world of meat presented to me anew. Melville, I instinctively knew, was a prophet of The New BBQ, and if the information being fed to me by my senses was any indication, I was about to become a disciple.
He told me the cut rotating deliciously before me was in fact “picanha” (Pronounced pa-KAHN-ya), an impossibly romantic-sounding Portuguese word which I only later discovered means “rump steak”. Picanha is not your average rump, though. Taken from the top of the cow’s butt, it’s covered with fat and known for its incredible flavour. It’s long been a staple of South American fire cooking, but has only become common in New Zealand’s butcher shops and meat fridges over the last couple of years, in lockstep with the booming interest in charcoal/wood barbecuing methods.
The meat had come from his local Pak’nSave, a supermarket hardly known for its gourmet foodstuffs and therefore a clear sign of stratospheric growth in the New Zealand barbecue scene. As Melville pointed out: “The owner probably doesn’t give two sh**s as long as whatever’s on the shelves is moving.”
He waxed lyrical about the flavour properties of picanha, and particularly the glory of its fat cap, of which he said: “That’ll render off and we’ll get that crackling like pork belly.” It may have still been breakfast time, but that was easily the most delicious sentence I’d heard all day.
It’s easy to think the driving force of humanity is simplification, but the booming of The New BBQ proves it is not. The New Zealand BBQ Alliance Facebook group, which describes itself as “... a forum for like-minded people to discuss and offer advice on all things charcoal/wood barbecue related”, has 55,000 members, which is 2000 more than when I first came across it in December.
Where the barbecue was once a place for culinarily incompetent men to pretend they were helping with the cooking by nudging sausages, The New BBQ requires study and practice, to the extent that I often had no idea what Melville was doing or even talking about. “You can reverse sear this stuff,” he said at one point. “So with something like this, it’s not really set up, but everything’s kind of got two sections to it. This is a half-moon here and there’s another half-moon there. So you can get deflector plates that sit under it, and...” I nodded and smiled because I have spent enough time socialising with men around barbecues to know the most important thing is to not appear dumb.
It is always surprising to discover you are ignorant about subjects on which you previously considered yourself knowledgeable, but it can also be liberating. When I walked through Matt Melville’s door that morning, I walked not into a suburban home, but a whole new world – and it smelled good.
Meatstock, which calls itself New Zealand’s biggest barbecue festival, arrived in New Zealand in 2017 and became an instant success and annual fixture at the Auckland Showgrounds until the arrival of Covid put an end to it. This year’s two-day version, at Mystery Creek is clear evidence interest has not waned. It will be the first edition since 2020 and already the first day has sold out.
Meatstock has ridden the wave of barbecue cooking that has overflowed its origins in the American South and swept this country and many others over the past two, five, 10 or 15 years, depending on who you talk to. Most industry insiders agree the growth has at least something to do with the rise of the image and video-driven social media era. It’s hard to look at all those pictures of smoky, charred brisket or pulled pork on Insta and not want to get some of that in you, and so it has proven for a generation of New Zealanders.
This form of cooking is about solid fuel, and it’s about cooking at temperatures that are far lower, and for far, far longer, than on the four-burner gas barbecue on your back deck.
If there’s a villain in this story, it’s gas. The gas barbecue, or what many of us still think of as a “barbecue” is still top dog, but it’s on the decline, and the reason for that is once you’ve tried picanha cooked over charcoal on Matt Melville’s back deck, you will recognise the gas barbecue for what it is, which is mid. Yes, it’s fast, easy, efficient and delivers acceptable results, which is great if that’s how you want to live your life, but is that how you want to live your life?
Although I knew things were changing, what I saw when I walked into the BBQs and More store shocked me. Yes, there were still a reasonable number of gas barbecues, but there were far more of what I then thought of as “everything else” many, many contraptions I had never seen before, the workings of which I could not even begin to comprehend.
BBQs and More director Chris George refers to gas barbecues as “gassys”, which was by far the least appetising word I heard in the reporting of this story. George wasn’t hating on gassys – they still make him a lot of money – but it was obvious within minutes of meeting him that his passion lay in the superior flavours and textures emerging from the kamado smokers, offset smokers, wood pellet grills and multitudinous accoutrements of The New BBQ.
When I asked him what happens when a potential buyer comes in the door, he said they’ll often start off looking at the gassys, but with some expert guidance will end up on the true and righteous path: “We take people through a bit of a journey,” he said. “We call it ‘going back to the romance of charcoal’.”
Compared to gas, charcoal brings with it an entirely different and tastier lexicon: “low”, “slow”, “smoky”, “charred” and “moist”. Charcoal and wood require more effort, more care and more attention than gas (George, who sells some very expensive charcoal and wood barbecues, disputes that), but the result is indisputably more delicious.
George showed me a high-end pellet grill that could be operated remotely from anywhere on the planet, via Wi-Fi. During a holiday last year, he used one of these to cook his kids’ meals from England. His daughter would defrost some meat during the day then put it on the grill, and he would cook it from 18,000km away.
“People go to me, ‘You’re f****** joking, aren’t you?’ I didn’t do it every night. But it was just hilarious. My cousins are like, ‘What are you doing?’ I said, ‘I’m just cooking the kids’ dinner back in New Zealand’.”
Some of the equipment is eye-wateringly expensive. A good kamado comes in around $3000, while a high-quality wood pellet grill is around $6500. The most expensive one in the BBQs and More catalogue is $16,000.
Croydon Cole, who owns and operates one of Auckland’s leading barbecue restaurants, Smokin Cole, is shocked by the amount of money some “backyard barbecuers” are dropping on equipment: “I’m like, ‘You got what?!’”
But he’s not surprised people are interested. Our tastes are changing: “Maybe people are sick and tired of gas barbecues… I think people are realising that when you’re using solid fuels, you’re getting a different flavour, different textures, depending on how you cook it and how versatile it can be.”
It’s not necessarily surprising people are spending more money, though. Shopping for barbecues is now more like buying a house: Before going anywhere near a salesperson with mouthwatering stories about the romance of charcoal, you need to be able to answer a whole bunch of questions about who you are, who you aspire to be and how you want to live your life, especially regarding meat.
The choices now are multitudinous The quantity of fuel alone is terrifying: Lump charcoal, briquettes, cherry wood, pōhutukawa, mānuka, oak, black wattle, mesquite, tawa maple, cherry, pecan, apple, hickory. Then you’ve got to think about things like sustainability (is the wood from a FSC-certified forest?) and forest location (George says you want something grown inland, because it has a lower salt content).
If you spend as much time on the NZ BBQ Alliance page as I have, you’ll very quickly start to feel overwhelmed: Endless discussions about fuel types, lighting methods, cooking temperatures, cooking lengths, spritzing, the snake method, how to beat the barbecue stall and on and on and on.
Then there’s the meat. It’s no longer socially acceptable to have people around for two types of sausages and a bit of sirloin. Once-unheard-of terms like short rib, pork butt, beef cheeks, baby back ribs and lamb shoulder are now common guests on the NZ BBQ Alliance page. The benchmark meat for competitive barbecue cooking is brisket. Until around 15 years ago, brisket was a cheap cut butchers would sell as burger mince. Premium meat supplier Neat Meat now sells 10 different types of brisket. Managing director Simon Eriksen puts this down to the explosion of interest in the new low and slow barbecue: “In the last 10 years, it’s just gone hell for leather.”
In the 90s, everyone knew that brisket sucked and always had, but now we know it doesn’t and never did. Cooked low and slow over many hours, the fat and connective tissue breaks down, making it tender, juicy, smoky and delicious. In other words, it wasn’t the meat that sucked – it was us.
In 2017, the year Meatstock came to New Zealand and changed his life, Matt Melville was a fulltime electrician who had never cooked with charcoal. Now, he owns 15 barbecues, travels regularly to competitions here and overseas with his elite Rum and Que team, and long ago quit his job as a sparky in favour of his lucrative and fast-growing business selling barbecue rubs.
“We’re just having huge growth, right?” he said, standing over his spitting picanha. “Huge growth. I just couldn’t believe the figure that we had for the last financial year, and then we’re sort of 30 per cent up on that again.”
He poked a probe into the meat and the digital readout showed 135F, which he said was a perfect medium. He removed and rested it it, telling me as he did so about the two rubs he had used – a porter and something else – and he served it to me, at 10.30am, with a glorious layer of crackling and a glass of his own barbecue rum, which he believed to be a world-first. He presented me with neither any vegetables nor any apology for their absence.
I was yet to even have my morning coffee. As I looked at the pale pink slices of picanha, full of moisture and coated with fat, I felt a bit queasy. Now that eating was required, it all felt a bit too much for a man whose lunch typically consists of plain rice or porridge.
But as I forced the first forkful past my lips and felt the meat dissolve in my mouth and the smoky goodness rise through my sinuses, my brain unleashed a flood of feel-good chemicals, washing away the fear and queasiness and replacing it with unalloyed pleasure. This, I understood, was the romance of charcoal. The primal joy of fat and char and smoke and meat was in me and it was of me, and I knew that it was right and good.
I understood then, immediately and intuitively, that the story of The New BBQ was one of hope, and of the delicious benefits we accrue when we refuse to accept that the best way to do things is the way we’ve always done them.
Then I took a sip of the barbecue rum and came to the exact opposite conclusion.
Meatstock, February 24-25, Mystery Creek, Hamilton. meatstock.com.au/hamilton.
Unmet psychological needs can drive people towards ideas lacking substance.