I have been very lucky, and much of that luck is due to the help of some really talented people to whom thanks is an inadequate word.
Professor Greg Blonder, Ph.D. Greg is an amazing polymath and the science advisor to this book and AmazingRibs.com. Greg attended MIT as an undergraduate and has a Ph.D. in physics from Harvard. He has served as chief technical advisor at AT&T’s legendary Bell Labs, he holds more than eighty patents, and he is currently a professor of design and manufacturing at Boston University. His love of food, especially barbecue, brought him to culinary science research, some of which appears in this book. His kitchen-science research and more can be found at genuineideas.com.
Sally Ekus, Agent Extraordinaire, The Lisa Ekus Group. Sally is my negotiator, taskmistress, consultant, shrink, and favorite jalapeño. What an honor to be invited to join her family of distinguished authors and work with the effective and efficient LEG staff.
Jerry Goldwyn, Inspiration. Dad grilled and he let me watch. He was also a serial entrepreneur, with a degree in food technology, so in more ways than one, I am a chip off the old block.
Norma Goldwyn. One of the fringe benefits of having a retired schoolteacher for a mom is that she will gladly underline all the spelling and grammar errors in red and tell you how wrong you are.
Max Good, Director of Equipment Reviews and Keeper of the Flame, AmazingRibs.com. Max is the man in charge of finding the best products for the huge equipment reviews section on AmazingRibs.com, and he keeps me informed on the latest grills and smokers.
David Joachim, Editor of my first draft. David is the author or co-author of many cookbooks, among them Fire It Up: More Than 400 Recipes for Grilling Everything by Andrew Schloss and David Joachim. He tightened, focused, and helped make this book flow.
Lisa Kolek, Illustrator. How lucky can a writer get? My neighbor is an accomplished artist, and she is responsible for the polished illustrations that explain the concepts in these pages.
Sarahlynn Pablo, Assistant Editor, AmazingRibs.com. When the load got heavy, she carried more than her share.
Chef Ryan Udvett, Test Kitchen Director. Ryan is my closest collaborator and a great coworker. He is excellent at fixing problems in my recipes. Several of these recipes began as his formulations.
Rux Martin, Editor at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and her team. Rux has welcomed me to her prestigious stable of cookbook authors, including such luminaries as Jacques Pépin, Dorie Greenspan, Bruce Aidells, and Mollie Katzen. She really worked hard to make this a better book.
Rebecca Springer, HMH Managing Editor. Her knowledge, patience, effort, and care were indispensable to this book. She was assisted by Allison Rottman and Jacinta Monniere.
Melissa Lotfy, HMH Art Director, and Jill Lazer, HMH Production VP. They saw this book through from the beginning to the end.
Endpaper Studio. They are responsible for the bold and polished look of my book.
Alton Brown, my paragon and inspiration. When I grow up, I want to be like him.
Melissa Clark of the New York Times often inspires me. She has such a love of food and cooking it right.
J. Kenji López-Alt of SeriousEats.com and author of The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science. He thinks about food the same way I do, never accepting conventional wisdom without testing it first.
Harold McGee, Ph.D., food scientist and author whose seminal volume On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen made me hunger for the whys and hows that led to this volume.
Jerry N. Uelsmann and John Paul Caponigro, my mentors, muses, and guides to the worlds of art, photography, and creativity.
I have benefitted from the help of scores of people more knowledgeable than me, and I could fill pages naming them all. Here are a few: Sterling Ball, Brigit Binns, Ardie “Remus Powers” Davis, Stephen Gerike, Paul Huntsberger, James Maivald, Antonio Mata, Chef Etienne Merle, Marietta Sims, Barry Sorkin, and Carolyn Wells.
The helpful librarians I have met at the many libraries I have visited over the years. They are uniformly the most helpful, friendly professionals you can imagine.
The many chefs who have let me pick their brains.
Doctors Bradley Clifford, Jeffrey Schwartz, Lowell Steen Jr., and their teams at Loyola University Health System. I am alive because of them.
You. I am especially indebted to the readers of AmazingRibs.com who have questioned, commented, spell-checked, and criticized. They have helped me fill the gaps in my writing with their questions. As Dad said, “Praise is cheap, but criticism is priceless.”
And special thanks to the gods of grape, grain, and fire who have watched over me so far.