Brookwood Farms Barbeque & Their Eastern-NC "Carolina Style Barbeque"
Siler City, NC
(Available Only At Larger Grocery Stores In North Carolina)
My Revised Review, January 2008
Genuinely hating to do this, I am not only giving Brookwood Farms new "Carolina Style Barbecue" that dreaded worst-of-the-worst single-pig rating but also am, after much thought and consultation with others, downgrading their "classic" Western-style barbeque from best-of-the-best 4-pig rating down to a more modest but unfortunately deserved 2-pig average-at-best rating.
I was so hopeful that Brookwood's new plain pig cooked with plain vinegar sauce in the tradional Eastern North Carolina style would be comparatively good as their classic Western-NC-influenced fare used to be but unfortunately their "Carolina Style" was just awful, full of fat both cooked and uncooked, sloppy-soppy with way too much weak vinegar sauce and in general it just tasted awful. I made a promise to you, my dear readers, not to go into detail when I relegate anyone's barbecue to the 1-pig quarantine area so the above is all I have to say about it. That said, you also need to know that Kemp's Seafood House in Raleigh switched wholesale suppliers from another source to this, so don't order the barbecue plate if and when you ever go to Kemp's.
What has been my real disappointment with Brookwood is the continued downhill slide of quality of their classic 'cue which has been available in larger grocery stores in NC for some years now and which I used to love, 'used to keep a container basically in my 'fridge almost constantly. I don't know what they've done over the past couple of years especially to so drastically reduce the overall quality of the base-meat and change their sauce recipe to be so completely overwhelmed by the added liquid smoke as to almost completely mask the taste of the poorer-quality meat but whatever they've done and whyever they've done it has resulted in an average at best product that now, quite frankly, I am shy to buy.
My Original Review
H. Kent Craig ©2000,
As much as I love NC-Style BBQ, what BBQ do I eat most often? Brookwood Farms BBQ. And why do I eat it so often, usually weekly or even more frequently? Because, even though I can't find every time I go to Harris-Teeter (the only local grocery store chain I've been able to consistently find it at), I do find it often enough to where there's usually a one-pound tub stuck in my freezer.
But if wasn't equal to the very best NC-Style BBQ, I wouldn't bother with it. Neither Eastern nor Western-Style, though more Western than Eastern, with a very light vinegar-based & ketchup sauce, with paprika and onion powder and black pepper and Worcestershire sauce and mustard and mustard seed and a whole bunch of other sauce ingredients, such a five-flavors-combination could end up tasting like a so much overwrought tongue-hating steamroller dogfood, but it doesn't, in face just the opposite, it's damn near perfect!
The flavor is truly unique, but oh-so delicious! If you take
Speedy's BBQ from Lexington
as a rep. of Western-NC-Style, blend that in with Bullock's BBQ from Durham as a rep. of Eastern-Style, then drop dollops of excellent vinegar-mustard-sauce pork BBQ from rural Maryland and Pennsylvannia, then you'd have something close to Brookwood Farms BBQ. More finely chopped than I usually like BBQ, almost ground in texture, it embraces your mouth like a silken sexy lover, kissing your tastebuds with one of the most pleasant initial tastes, as well as pleasant aftertastes when you burp your signal of approval later that night, giving you pleasant dreams as you count BBQ pig carcasses jumping over the fence in the most pleasant of culinary dreams that it gives you.
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