These books are the best you can buy and give you recipes, examples and enough instruction to get the beginner going and to make the master better. These books give you the knowledge and skills you need to make real barbecue on a real smoker whether it is gas, charcoal, electric or anything else. These books also explore the world of real barbecue through Q joints and competitions.
1. Smokestack Lightning: Adventures In The Heart Of Barbecue Country
This book has become a legend in barbecue not because of its loads of great recipes (which it doesn't have) or its careful, step by step instruction (which is also doesn't have), but because it so perfectly captures the culture and history of true Southern Barbecue. This book will give you not just a taste of real barbecue but enough knowledge to not only make your own great, low and slow, traditional barbecue. If you are serious about barbecue, you already own this book.
2. Peace, Love, & Barbecue : Recipes, Secrets, Tall Tales, and Outright Lies
Mike Mills is a legend in barbecue. He is the only man to win Grand Master and the Memphis in May barbecue competition. This book is as much a biography of this, as told by himself and hit daughter, as it is a cookbook. The recipes are great, but the story telling is better. This book will give you the recipes that won the Memphis in May competition and launched seven restaurants from New York to Las Vegas.
3. Smoke & Spice: Cooking with Smoke, the Real Way to Barbecue
This is The Book. When the Jamison's put this book together they created the real Bible of Barbecue, the one book most even modern barbecue cook starts with (and keeps going with). This is a great cookbook that puts barbecue in the hands of real people with hundreds of fantastic recipes for pretty much everything you can put in a smoker. If you want to learn to cook barbecue, this is the book to start with.
4. Paul Kirk's Championship Barbecue: Barbecue Your Way to Greatness
Paul Kirk is the kind of chef that can think up a recipe and then win a competition without having tested it. This book is a great resource for anyone serious about barbecue. The systematic approach to rubs, mops, sauces and marinades give any serious smoker the tools they need to make great barbecue because this book starts with the basics and builds its way up. Kirk understands that any one barbecue dish is actually a combination of recipes that make one thing.
5. John Willingham's World Champion Bar-B-q : Over 150 Recipes And Tall Tales
John Willingham takes his years of experience on the competition circuit and puts it all into this book. What you find here is 150 good recipes, the tips that make them better and the stories that make them great. Willingham is a legend of barbecue just like this book. Willingham encourages authenticity from making your own smoker to making sauces from scratch, and I mean scratch.







