Joseph wrote:

Really? I've eaten at quite a few KC joints and not a one boils meat
prior to the pit. Which one boils their meat?

I was refering to the thick sweet sauce.

That's also not generically true of KC barbecue. Perhaps the most famous of
all KC joints, Bryant's, uses a thin vinegar and cayenne based sauce as
their primary (signature) sauce.

To more correctly characterize KC barbecue, its true you see more wet
barbecue around here, but not exclusively. Around here pitmasters try to
develop their cooking, rub seasonings, and sauces into a flavor "package",
where all those elements are complimentary and distinctive to the restaurant
in question. Whether you eat ribs from a local Q with or without sauce, you
can often still tell by the seasoning where they came from. This isn't true
of all the Q restaurants of course, but it is true of the most successful
and best appreciated. So its not that there is one thick gooey sweet sauce
smeared all over town, and in fact, some of them aren't so thick, or so
sweet, and may restaurants offer several versions of their sauce, while
still trying to retain a distinctive signature flavor.

So if you are going to try to duplicate KC style, that may be your greatest
challenge, because you need to develop your own set of comprehensive cooking
techniques, seasonings, and sauces that define a finished product. But just
cooking some meat over hickory and putting sweet sauce on it does not make
it KC style. You can get that in lots of places.

MartyB in KC