Barbecue spaghetti facts for kids
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| Place of origin | Memphis, Tennessee, US |
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| Created by | Brady Vincent |
| Main ingredients | Spaghetti, barbecue sauce, pulled or smoked pork |
| Ingredients generally used | green peppers, onions |
| Similar dishes | Cincinnati chili, Filipinio spaghetti |
Barbecue spaghetti is a unique and tasty dish from Memphis, Tennessee. It mixes regular spaghetti pasta with a special sauce. This sauce is made from shredded smoked pork or pulled pork, along with vegetables and barbecue sauce. People in Memphis often enjoy it as a side dish at barbecue restaurants. Some food experts have called it a very famous and unusual creation from the city.
Contents
How to Make Barbecue Spaghetti
This dish is made by combining cooked spaghetti with a special barbecue sauce.
Ingredients and Cooking
You can make barbecue spaghetti using either pulled pork or shredded smoked pork. The sauce is a mix of two types: half marinara (a tomato-based sauce) and half barbecue sauce. Sometimes, onions and peppers are added to the sauce for extra flavor.
The sauce is cooked slowly until it's thick, like regular barbecue sauce. After the sauce is ready, the pork is added. The spaghetti noodles are cooked until they are soft. Then, the hot sauce and pork are mixed in with the spaghetti.
Serving the Dish
Barbecue spaghetti is usually served as a side dish. This means it comes along with other main foods, like ribs or sandwiches. Sometimes, it can even be served as the main meal itself!
The Story of Barbecue Spaghetti
This special dish was invented by a man named Brady Vincent. He used to be a cook on a railroad.
Who Invented It?
Brady Vincent opened his own barbecue restaurant called Brady and Lil's. It was there that he created barbecue spaghetti.
How the Recipe Spread
In 1980, Frank and Hazel Vernon bought Brady's restaurant. They changed its name to The Bar-B-Q Shop. Brady Vincent also shared his recipe for barbecue spaghetti with another person named Jim Neely. Jim Neely opened his own restaurant, Interstate Bar-B-Q, in the late 1970s.
Interstate Bar-B-Q made a few changes to the sauce recipe. They added "extra back flap meat" from ribs and cooked it with peppers and onions. This made their version of the sauce unique.
Barbecue Spaghetti Beyond Memphis
You can even find a version of this dish outside of Memphis. For example, the State Park restaurant in Cambridge, Massachusetts, serves a "Memphis BBQ spaghetti." Their version uses pulled pork in a marinara sauce that has a barbecue sauce as its base.
Dishes Like Barbecue Spaghetti
Barbecue spaghetti is unique, but it has some distant cousins in the world of pasta dishes.
Comparing Flavors
Food expert John Shelton Reed once said that barbecue spaghetti is like a special Memphis version of spaghetti Bolognese. He also compared it to how Cincinnati chili is different from regular Tex-Mex chili. This means it's a unique take on a classic idea.
Filipino Spaghetti
Another interesting pasta dish is Filipino spaghetti. This dish uses spaghetti noodles with a sauce made from banana ketchup. It's often topped with hot dogs, which makes it very different from barbecue spaghetti!
