Fire & Smoke: A Pitmaster’s Secrets

When restaurateurs or chefs publish a cookbook, as a reviewer, I am wary. It’s not often they successfully translate their recipes and professional cooking styles into a home kitchen. Chris Lilly also failed in Fire & Smoke. Very few home cooks would enjoy following the recipes in this book. Mostly they are quite complicated with long lists of ingredients easily found in a professional kitchen but not so easy on your shopping trip (e.g. yuzu juice, Conecuh sausage, yuzu shrimp) and Lilly gives no alternate ingredients. His combination of ingredients is somewhat odd too (maple syrup in pizza dough). In his burgers, he calls for beef brisket points, short rib meat and oxtail meat. Some of his tips are good but some not practical (talk to a pig farmer about his breed of pigs). Lilly grills everything: watermelon, cocktail ingredients, peach pie, cobbler, even salt to smoke). The recipes are not easy to follow and their layout is poor—many times you need to turn pages back and forth following them. In many, you need to make various preparations (in some as many as five) before you can start. The photo illustrations are excellent but his index is unusable.