- It's all like a process. But you raise your eyebrows,
you make your eyes big, you flare your nostrils, you
frown, and you inhale, so. (breathes deep) Roll Tide. (rhythmic music) - [Dave] Alabama doesn't always get its due on the map of US barbecue. From the Carolinas to
Memphis, to Kansas City, and all of Texas,
pretty much everyone in Bama's neighborhood has a a bigger barbecue profile nationwide. But, Alabama does have one unassailable claim to barbecue fame, Northern Alabama White Sauce. It's a culinary oddity that could only have been born in this state's
underrated barbecue scene. So we're headed upstate to the place that invented it almost a century ago, and in doing so, gave all of Alabama a point of pride on the barbecue map. Big Bob Gibson. - [Chris] I'm Chris
Lilly, Vice President and pit master Big Bob Gibson Bar-B-Q. I've been here a long time, since 1992, But not nearly as long as this restaurant. We've been in Decatur, Alabama,
in business since 1925. Big Bob Gibson was an
all-in railroad worker, and he did that during the week, but on the weekends, he would invite friends and family over to his backyard, he had a hand-dug pit where
he specialized in two things: pulled pork shoulder,
and whole split chickens. And for his barbecue chicken, he invented the original
barbecue white sauce. It gave a tangy, peppery
flavor to his food, but also kept the chicken from drying out. We split the chickens, salt the bellies, put them on our hickory
fired brick coffin pits. Every chicken that comes off
the pit at Big Bob Gibson's, it's baptized in a vat
of white barbecue sauce, before it gets to our customers. - [Dave] You just dunk it right in there? - Dunk it right in, yeah. A lot of people think
that white barbecue sauce is like a ranch dressing,
it's absolutely not. It's a tangy, peppery flavor. The base is vinegar. Vinegar, mayonnaise, lemon juice, black pepper, and salt, and a few secrets. Our barbecue white sauce
is not only unique to Decatur, Alabama, it is uniquely Alabama. And that's what people associate
barbecue in Alabama with. It's something we can hang our hat on when you start talking
about the regions of barbecue, with the Carolinas and Memphis, and Kansas City, and Texas. Alabama, I like to think is
the fifth region of barbecue. - This is a crime, because I
just took a bite of it, my god. The chicken is incredible. - [Chris] Thank you, I appreciate it. - [Dave] It's fantastic. - [Chris] There's something
else that is uniquely Alabama, and that is
College Football, game day. In Tuscaloosa this
weekend, I will be there. You should drop by. - [Dave] Sounds like we gotta go. (crowd clapping in sequence) From Decatur we drove south west to The University of Alabama. For big games, Tuscaloosa's population jumps by hundreds of thousands of fans. Which means a lot of
Crimson Tide tailgates and whole lot of this. - Roll Tide Roll! - Roll Tide Roll! - Roll Tide, Roll! - [Dave] It takes an ambitious pit master to put white sauce on a tailgate menu. Enter Shane Hill, Alabama
native, U of A alumn, and Roll Tide tailgate pro. - Title of the cook book is
‘Alabama Tailgate Cookbook’. - You literally wrote the
Alabama tailgate cookbook, - [Shane] Yeah, Exactly. So today, we're playing Tennessee. So we're gonna do a bunch
of different smoked meats, we're doing some smoked chicken thighs. We're gonna do some
smoked and fried wings. We've got a 14-hour brisket
we've been runnin' all night. But, you know the white
sauce is kind of the thing, It's one of the things that just really, to me it identifies with Alabama. - [Dave] This is the homemade
white sauce you just made. - [Shane] Yep, exactly. - God damn. That is some good chicken. - Awesome, thank you. Thank you. - Wow. - [Man] Get some, Roll Tide. - [Jack] Game day really brings a lot of energy to the city. Half of the state always
tries to come up to Tuscaloosa for a good weekend. Especially a game like when we play a rival like Tennessee. - [Dave] Jack Blankenship
is a Tuscaloosa native and Alabama alumn, and
bit of a local celebrity. - Yeah, my freshman year of college, I decided to print out
a sign of my own face, and I would hold it up
during the free throws to distract the opposing team, and hopefully help
Alabama win a little bit. Personally, I prefer white barbecue sauce, because I'm a very like
messy barbecue eater. I've always felt like football
is definitely kind of like what beats through everyone's
heart in the state. And it's kind of cool to see that these two things can be
celebrated hand in hand. - The white sauce, you know
being here from Alabama and being kind of the one
thing, or the one food, especially on the barbecue
scene, that's ours. It's our identity. You didn't ask what barbecue sauce it was, you knew what barbecue sauce it was. If people are out discovering
it, that's awesome. But like you say, I don't want it to start being something that's taken away from us. You know, it's ours and we
wanna kind of hold on to it. (laughter) - Roll Tide! Roll! - [Dave] 60 miles east of
Tuscaloosa lies Birmingham. The state's biggest city
in culinary proving ground. Can chefs like Mauricio
Papapietro and Roscoe Hall, who both came up in the Magic
City's fine dining kitchens, innovate on white sauce
without diluting its legacy? We headed to Mauricio's restaurant
Brick & Tin to find out. - [Mauricio] So this is the
Brick & Tin brisket panini, It's our best seller. It's been the best seller
since the day that we opened. We brine and braise the brisket in-house. We caramelize onions, we
make our bread from scratch. Which is a French-style pain de mie dough. And then it has white barbecue sauce, which we make from scratch
with homemade mayo, black pepper, cider vinegar. We put a little bit of honey
in ours, and that's it. - [Dave] If you don't
ask him, you'd never know that Roscoe is Alabama barbecue royalty. His family started Dreamland Bar-B-Que, a beloved regional chain. But if you do ask him, well… - We make delicious sauce, possibly the best in the [omitted] country. (laughter) - Dreamland is much more from
a traditional standpoint. Like obviously, that's sort of where barbecue has come from in Alabama. - My Grandpa had a sauce house, which my dad did work in,
he just sit in the shed and just shake up like bottles of vinegar, and keep adding shit to it. - I learned how to cook in fine dining, and work for some of the same people. My approach to cooking brisket was something I brought from
my background in fine dining. These a community of us who are creating a new kind of restaurant. - And it is a young man's game. We are putting out heart into making food like you would get in a
Michelin Star restaurant, but making it like
affordable and approachable. - [Mauricio] And it is,
white barbecue sauce is kind of Alabama's claim on barbecue. - [Dave] Yeah. (laughs) Chef, this is incredible. - [Mauricio] Good, thank you. - [Dave] Really, really incredible. - [Mauricio] Thank you. We're innovating, or trying to be progressive as a restaurant
but really it's ironic, because really what
were doing is going back to traditions that have
been around forever. It was just like white
barbecue would be perfect. I was hoping that it would
kind of click with people, you know, it did. We're pulling Decatur, and
we're pulling from Texas, we're pulling from you
know France, for the bread, I mean it's like... - [Roscoe] Southern heritage food, thanks to a lot of great chefs. We have this huge buoyant, importance right now in the south
east through our food. So when I approach a sandwich like this, it's like, thank you. That makes total sense because I don't wanna eat smoked chicken right now. - [Dave] But that's sort
of the point, isn't it? Sometimes you want smoked chicken, sometimes you don't. But whatever you want, chances are the sauce Big
Bob built can go on top. It may have started in a single place, intended for a single purpose. But today white sauce contains multitudes. And Alabama? well, Alabama does too. (rhythmic beat)
