I agree Chris, I am not trying to be a food snob. I think if a person paid attention and cooked a butt well in a crock pot, it could be great. I have done pot roast that way and not on the pit and I love my pot roast.
But I think the Aux butt is overcooked till almost mush -- someone has somehow convinced them that overcooking certain food equates to public food safety. And the amount of sauce is just incredible. I don't know why a segment of society equates bbq to bbq sauce. And the way they reheat just cooks it even more. I just don't know why you would turn down pit smoked/cooked bbq that Bentley has said he would vac seal and reheat in boiling water in favor of the way you have always done it because -- well, that is the way you have always done it. Some traditions need to be broken!
Kristin, I think it's education - both in terms of what you're exposed to, and in terms of developing taste. I say that as someone who grew up thinking it was all about the sauce. My parents never even had a grill, let alone anything that produced smoke, when I was growing up. My dad's "BBQ" consisted of remnants from beef pot roasts that he'd shred, put in a pan with some BBQ sauce and a little leftover gravy, and cook it to death. It was all I knew, and I lapped it up. Even when we'd go out, the rare places that sold "BBQ" made sandwiches of the same kind of stuff. Especially the Dairy Queen and other ice cream stands like them.
We had a *real* BBQ place in town, down on the southside, but we rarely went out, and never specifically to get BBQ, so I didn't experience them until I was a young adult, when many of my friends were raving about it. When I tried them, I found that the meat was supposed to be the star. Even there, though, it was still with only one variety of sauce - the sweet, tomato based stuff you get in the midwest. The first time I tried anything different was on a vacation when we were driving through KC and we'd read about Arthur Bryant's in Calvin Trillin's books, so we stopped there. Just like our place back home, the meat was served unsauced, on plain white bread, but the sauce they had was a more watery, vinegar-based kind that I just didn't understand at all. Clearly I was in need of further education.
Cut to about 10 years ago, in my mid-50s, by which time I'd experienced BBQ in several other places around the country. Not only have they all centered on the meat and smoke, I've come to enjoy lots of different kinds of sauces. Still, most of the time I don't apply them to the meat directly, but keep them on the side for some occasional dipping. I'm still not quite a fan of AB's savory vinegar sauce, but I've come to love most North Carolina mustard-based ones. In fact, my favorite right now is a 50/50 mix of a sweet-but-mildly-hot tomato based sauce from a local sauce company called John-Tom's, and the mustard based sauce from City BBQ, or another like it. I haven't yet branched into making my own.
So I think it's what you've been exposed to, and what you've gone out looking for on your own. Unfortunately most people who weren't raised in BBQ homes will always think the oversauced mush is the way to go, at least until they happen on something better. As far as home cooking goes, I might have gone to my grave thinking restaurants were the only easy way to get great BBQ, had I not stumbled onto a Traeger infomercial a little over a year ago. I had no idea this technology even existed.
Sorry for the long-windedness.
