Mop For All Barbecue Meats (about 3 quarts) (note - these are half the quantities in the original recipe - Bruce)

Make the bone stock just the way you would start a soup - buy good stout beef bones from the butcher and boil them. Add all the other ingregients and let stand overnight before using. Use this to rub over meats or to baste them while they are cooking. Put it on with a little dish mop of the kind you see in the dime store. As you use it, the flavor will change and improve, for you are constantly transfering smoke and grease from the meat back to the mop concoction. If you have any left over, keep it in the refrigerator

Just as the recipe mentiones, I to have been told that it is not only the mop ingredients, it is the Returning flavors from the meat to the mop pan that livens up the mopping success. So, this brings up what to you use to mop with? It has to be something that can pick up not just distribute.. food for thought. Ideas?

Pork: I mop but not as convinced that it is as important as on brisket.

Chicken: Vip to mop....however I seldom do...maybe that's why my chicken is always last in my cookoff scores.

I have done 1st place chicken and have placed fairly well other times. However, I just can't do chicken like I remember as a kid in my home town. Anything less than that is just chicken.

I remember chicken that had smoke and bbq flavor Right Down To The Bone In Every Morsle Of The Birds Being. God it was good. The damn thing fell apart it was so tender. White meat, dark meat..it did not matter. It was wonderful. Can`t do it though. Shit it pisses me off. Sorry...very frustrating topic for me. I 've asked Smoky, Mike Scrutchfield, and others but I can't get it.

I think it is like my trying to duplicate the Old Mexican Ladies' tamales. I went on a hunt for that and have come close...but still no tamales. At least I think I found what the difference was. It was the absence of hog's head meat. I can't invest in a pot large enough to cook the damn thing in. I digress.

Back to Chicken and Mopping: When I did win 1st place I did sort of mop..I sprayed the chicken with a combination of apple juice, vinegar, and oil.