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Some Good Recipes

Customer Rating:
This book is a great place to start (for someone who's a beginner), like me...
I was looking for a series of books to give me ideas on how to use the
BBQ Equipment, as well as a good selection of recipes...

This book is one of the "must haves" in my kitchen...

Fine for Raichlen newbies, but don't rush to upgrade if you have it already

Customer Rating:
I want to get one thing out of the way right now: there is something odd about the Barbecue Bible franchise that has never quite sat right with me, and I've never been able to put my finger on exactly what it is. After seeing Raichlen's rise over the last ten years to become one of the US culinary scene's grilling gurus, I guess I was just flat out wrong. The Barbecue Bible is actually a pretty awesome book -- a whirlwind guide to live fire styles from around the world, all adapted as much as possible for the American kitchen. Like many successful franchises from the Edison light bulb to the iPod, Raichlen provides an end-to-end solution for barbecuing -- not just meat and seafood, but vegetables and breads that can be cooked on the grill, a huge selection of sauces and marinades, and even beverages and desserts. Though its layout is rather loud, the recipes combine with Raichlen's stories and technique articles to make a worthwhile purchase for anyone who spends a fair amount of time next to a grill.

Which brings me to the problems with the new edition. The 2nd edition has added significant amounts of color photography and how-to diagrams, drawing on Raichlen's 2001 How to Grill for stylistic inspiration. If you're a new griller, this will be a welcome improvement. However, if you've been buying Raichlen's books since the beginning, the revision presents a problem: if you already have the first edition, you probably don't need to bother with this one. The column-oriented layout, borrowed from later books in the series, looks cluttered and dense compared to the more discrete recipe-oriented layout in the original, and with How to Grill still very much in print there's far more useful visual information to be found in that than in this edition. So where does that leave us?

Well, I don't really know. I want to recommend it. If you don't have the first edition, you should certainly get this one; it's still an excellent book on the subject, and it does live up to its name. But the recipe revisions Raichlen has made in the new edition aren't really reason enough to upgrade, and if you already have either the first edition or How to Grill you don't need the instructional photos in the new edition anyway. If you grill or want to learn how, you should have one version, but unless you have an overly visual learning style and a limited budget, the second edition won't get you much that you can't get cheaper from a used copy of the first edition.

Too few photos

Customer Rating:
The text part is great, but I was very disappointed that there are so few photos in the book. I would not have bought if I had known that.

Excellent accurate easy recipies!

Customer Rating:
My husband picked this book up and we've had so much fun for the past 6 weekends or so trying out new things to put on the barbeque!
Can't wait to try the next one now!
It's worth every cent; I'm impressed with how closely authentic Steven's kept all the recipes!

I wasn't impressed, the book totally misses the point. Bible??? I think not! Where's the meat?

Customer Rating:
Where this book fails immediately is that Barbecue is not about the sauce it's about the meat. I know, I design sauces and own a BBQ Sauce Company. I'm always looking for good BBQ cookbooks. The author gives no information on preparation of meat or cooking it. He spent 13 pages on how to light different grills and I wasn't impressed much with that. I think the big headlines were used to waste space so that he could put out a big book. I could go on but here is one final thought. The book claims to be the Barbecue Bible, you'd expect it to cover the subject in every detail and with some degree of experience. This attempt at being the Barbecue Bible fails miserably. I bought the book online, if I saw the book in a book store and was able to go through it, I would not have bought it. Steven Raichlen is probably a food critic or cookbook editor, not a barbecue expert.