While largely rooted in the South, barbecue spread across America along with the automobile in the middle of the 20th century, until the advent of fast-food chains supplanted roadside barbecue joints in popularity. Since the early aughts, though, barbecue has experienced a major rebirth. Barbecue restaurants and festivals thrive in urban outposts, Texas A&M University hosts a barbecue summer camp that sells out in minutes, and Aaron Franklin continues to draw massive crowds of foodies (and Presidents) at his Austin restaurant. Hell, even across the pond they’re embracing the greatness of the low-and-slow mantra.

Despite this near universal affection for smoky meat, people are awfully opinionated about what actually represents True Barbecue™. To sauce or not to sauce? Can you use gas? Who invented it? Where does the word actually come from?

These debates burn on because the rich American tradition of barbecue is so broad. From the Carolinas to Kansas City to Memphis to Texas, you’ll find disparate meats and styles that make it hard to neatly categorize barbecue. That doesn’t mean people don’t try. Each of those locations claim not just to have the best barbecue, but also have the right barbecue. But really, barbecue isn’t defined by whether you’re eating pork or beef, or whether your meat comes with or without sauce. Barbecue is a method, where fire cooks meat low and slow over indirect while imparting a smoky flavor. Even so, there are still prevailing notions about its history (it’s a French word, right?), culture (do competitions tell us who the best pitmasters are?) and preparation (are you actually barbecuing on that Weber gas grill?) that are myths worthy of puncturing.

We assembled a panel of experts to sort fact from fiction in the world of barbecue:

• John Shelton Reed is co-founder of the Campaign for Real Barbecue, where he advocates for preservation of wood-fired barbecue methods.
• Elizabeth Karmel, chef and owner of Carolina Cue To Go, which ships whole hog barbecue by the pound around the country.
• Michael Twitty is a culinary historian who studies the food of African Americans and the African diaspora. His latest book is The Cooking Gene. 
• Robert Moss is a food historian and author of the book Barbecue: The History of an American Institution.

Even among these august experts, they disagreed about barbecue. But many of them agreed that there are some myths embraced by the general public that need to be corrected.

By the very nature of barbecue competitions, a pitmaster has to modify the preparation of the food in order win based on narrow rules, so that what’s presented doesn’t bear much resemblance to what would be served outside of competition. A judge doesn’t eat barbecue in the way that you or I would. They’re trying a ton of ‘cue, and only eating a small sample from each contestant. “Competition barbecue is in a category all by itself because they create seasonings and methods, like injecting the meat, to perfect the one bite the judge is going to take out of the rack of ribs or whole hog,” Karmel says. “Nobody who wins these competitions uses those techniques when they open a restaurant.” So saying a barbecue champion is the best pitmaster around is like saying Chevrolet is the best carmaker because it wins so many Nascar races.

Additionally, great pitmasters generally cook their regional style, but that won’t cut it in a competition, where participants must prepare meats outside of what they’re accustomed to making. “Why would anyone in the Carolinas be cooking brisket?” Moss says. “Competitions are creating their own thing that’s divorced from regional style.”

Cut into a big slab of beef brisket and before someone even takes a bite, he or she may be judging the quality of the barbecue just by looking at the layer of pink around the edge. Aficionados call this the "smoke ring." Except it’s not actually smoke, and it may not be as important as you think. “That ring is formed not really by the smoke itself (smoke isn't pink, after all) but by a reaction between a substance called myoglobin in the meat, and nitric oxide and carbon dioxide gasses during the cooking process,” Moss says. “Burning wood and charcoal produces the nitric oxide, so you won't get a 'smoke' ring on, say, a propane grill. But you can undercook or overcook a piece of meat on a wood-fired pit and have a beautiful smoke ring but lousy barbecue.”

And, this ring can be faked, sans smoke altogether. When the team from Chef Steps cooked brisket sous vide and finished it the oven, they showed they could replicate a pretty convincing ring by adding curing salt toward the end of the brining process. So, Moss advises people to not get too fixated on it. “While good barbecue often has a beautiful pink or red or smoke ring, the ring itself isn't necessarily an indicator of whether the barbecue is good or bad.”

Fire up that Weber gas grill, toss on a few burgers and you’re barbecuing, right? No. “That’s not barbecuing, that’s grilling,” Reed says. And he’s not just being pedantic—it’s a distinction with a difference. The high-heat cooking method of grilling creates a hard sear and smoke while still preserving tenderness inside. However, with barbecue, you’re trying to impart tenderness through cooking low and slow. “It has to cook for a long period of time in order to cut those connective tissues in the meat in order to be chewed,” Karmel says. Cooking a brisket over direct heat on a backyard barbecue will burn it up long before it actually becomes tender.

A great brisket can take 12 hours to cook, and you may wait four hours in line for Franklin Barbecue. But barbecue was actually what you wanted on a road trip before burgers took over the market. “There were barbecue restaurants all over the country. It was a dominant food of the middle 20th century,” Moss says “This idea that barbecue is a slow food is something of a misconception. It’s slow to cook, but once you’ve cooked it and it’s pulled, prepped and ready to go, you can serve it lightning fast.” But just because you could serve it fast to motorists on a rest stop, didn’t mean that it could compete with low costs of McDonald’s hamburgers. So as what we think of as fast food grew, it displaced barbecue along America’s highways and byways. “Barbecue is a hard business. You can’t just hire a kid and have them doing it in an afternoon,” Moss says. “McDonald’s started out as a barbecue restaurant. They closed it down a turned it to a speedy service system. They weren’t making enough profit, so they focused on burgers, fries an milkshakes and that was it.”

“The idea that there are specific barbecue cuts of meats, that’s a very recent thing,” Moss says. “Barbecue started off as whole animal cookery. Well before refrigeration and well before you could call up a wholesaler and get brisket, barbecue was a free, outdoor community event. A farmer would donate a spare animal, then they slaughtered and butchered and barbecued it whole to serve to a large group of people.” Brisket and shoulder didn’t become common barbecue cuts until after the rise of refrigeration and meatpacking. In the meat markets, more expensive cuts like strip steaks and tenderloin were sold off, leaving behind cheaper cuts, like brisket, that were well suited to cooking low and slow. “Our lens is not very long historically speaking. I think still people today, they get set in their head what real barbecue is, and it’s usually whatever you learned about barbecue when you first ate it.”

“This myth seems to be from 1829, when the National Intelligencer newspaper called supporters of Andrew Jackson ‘Barbacues,’ because they were ‘going the whole hog, from the beard barbe to the queue tail.’” Reed says. “But that’s just not true. The word is not a mystery, we know where it came from.” And that’s not from 1820s American making some bastardized, Francophile portmanteau. Our word barbecue is a derivation of barbacoa, which originates from the Caribbean as a word that describes where “whole animals were put on a wooden frame and then cooked over a low fire.” 

While barbacoa may be a word with Caribbean origins, that doesn’t mean the indigenous people of the West Indies can take sole credit for having started barbecue. “When people say barbecue is Caribbean, they’re obfuscating the role of Africans,” Twitty says. “If you take the Fulani, the oldest cattlemen in Africa, they’ve long been roasting over fires with hot pepper salts and spices for a celebration.” Also, until Europeans and Africans brought domesticated animals to the West Indies, the indigenous population didn’t actually have the hogs and cattle to barbecue with. “Unless they put a whole damn manatee on top of a wooden framework and cooked it over fire, they weren’t barbecuing,” Twitty says. “It didn’t exist until white people and Africans showed up. It was a mixing of native and European and African cultures.”

“You would never marinate in barbecue sauce,” Karmel says. “It’s only for the end as a glaze or to serve with the meat on the side.” This isn’t some snobby argument about whether or not barbecue is authentic. The problem is that using barbecue sauce as a marinade just doesn’t work with the hours of cooking required to do barbecue right. “I see people soaking chicken in sauce and then barbecuing it, but all the sugar in that marinade will burn up before your chicken is actually cooked on the inside,” Karmel says. “If you’re grilling it, then that’s something different. But if you’re cooking for longer 20 minutes, as you do with barbecue, marinating with sauce obliterates all that time you’ve put in."