We Americans absolutely love our grills. When there are Home Depot bbq grills on sale almost everyone gets excited. The Hearth, Patio, and Barbecue Association (HPBA) says that 75% of us have a smoker or a grill, and 60% of us use them all year round. That?s a lot of BBQ.
If you love BBQ, you?ll love knowing every weird fact about the stuff that we can dish up. Use your knowledge of BBQ trivia to impress your friends next time you have them round to test out your new classic grill!
Where Did Barbecuing Come From?
We seem to have gotten this national habit from our nineteenth century cowboys. Cattle barons had to feed the cowboys working for them, but didn?t want to give them the best steaks and other cuts they could sell for a good profit. Instead, they gave them brisket, which wasn?t considered a good cut at all.
Those resourceful cattle punchers couldn?t go down to find Home Depot bbq grills on sale, but they still managed to find a way to cook the brisket low and slow. They discovered that what was tough and nasty when cooked hard and fast was amazing when cooked on a low heat for a long time. We still love our brisket over nearly any other thing for BBQ: unless you?re from the South, where pork is king. That?s because early nineteenth century Southerners ate five times as much pork as beef because the pigs were so much easier to raise.
Where Does The Word Barbecue Come From?
Probably from somewhere in the Caribbean Islands, but possibly from Europe as well. The Taino people and the Timucua peoples had a word for cooking meat this way: barabicu. In several Romance languages, though, such as French and Italian, the word is barbacoa. No one knows for sure from where exactly it entered English.
What Do We Use To Grill?
Some of us have a classic grill, others a portable barbecue grill. There?s smokers and the portable smoker, if you need to take the party to the beach. Home Depot bbq grills on sale will include cast the aluminum gas grill, the franklin grill: the possibilities are nearly endless! It’s possible to categorize grills many different ways, though the simplest is into six major types, which are open, covered, vessel, rotisserie, smoker, and campfire style. A trip to look at Home Depot bbq grills on sale should turn up lots of options.
What Do We Eat On Our Grills?
Brisket and pulled pork always make a strong showing, but so do hamburgers and hot dogs. People in the United States eat around 50 billion burgers a year, and just over the July 4th holiday alone we manage to consume 150 million hot dogs nationally.
As for the brisket, the pulled pork, the rib tips, and all those other delicious types of barbecue, Americans tend to cook them in one of the four major distinct styles: Memphis, Kansas City, Texas, and Carolina. And we love our sauces, too. The most popular flavors are hickory, honey, mesquite, and spicy.
When Do We Grill?
Americans grill all year round, and 5.5% of us do it more than once a week. (That?s because 71% of us claim that the flavor of grilled or smoked meats is superior to any other method of cooking.) But we do the most grilling on July 4th, when 87% of the United States is planning on hosting or attending an outdoor cooking party.
Have You Got One More Random Cool Fact?
Absolutely. Back in 2015, the governor of Oklahoma, Mary Fallin, made a bet with the governor of Texas, Grego Abbott, about which state’s college football team would win a game. Fallin lost, so she had to donate 600 barbecue meals to the food bank in Austin, TX. Abbot, meanwhile, won the bet but sent the same amount to the Oklahoma City Rescue Mission anyway.
It?s probably time for dinner, so why not go fire up the grill right now?