The food here is HORRIBLE. I should have been suspicious when the order arrived very fast--too fast to cook a meal. My girl and I ordered the Sampler Platter, knowing we could split all the dishes and still be full. It was delivered fast, about ten minutes sooner than promised, yet it all arrived lukewarm. Every last piece of meat was dry, dry, dry. No juiciness. None. I've had stuff out of the grocery cooler that was better. So here is a rundown of everything in it, from beginning to end:
CORNBREAD--it wasn't cornbread, it was a muffin. It was light, crumbly, moist, and SWEET. It came with honey butter but, because apparently honey butter isn't enough, they doctored it with cinnamon and nutmeg. Disgusting.
BANANA PUDDING: Underripe bananas and no wafers.
4-CHEESE MAC AND CHEESE: I don't know what cheeses they use for it, but I guarantee every one of them came out of a can. There was absolutely no difference between this mac and cheese and microwavable stuff you get in the meat cooler tucked in between the plastic tubs of meatloaf and mashed potatoes. It was gluey and there was no sense of a melding of four cheese flavors. It tasted like Kraft. No resemblance, NONE, to actual mac and cheese you get from a real barbecue joint.
GARLIC SKIN-ON MASHED POTATOES: Well, there were little white chunks that were ostensibly garlic, but the taste of it was so mild that I can guarantee you they were using jarred minced garlic in water. The consistency? Grainy and not very cohesive. It was nothing but potatoes, jarred garlic, and water. No butter, no cream or half and half. It didn't even have POTATO flavor. It was like grits with old jarred garlic.
SWEET SMOKEY MOLASSES BARBECUE SAUCE: Okay, they delivered five different meats in a dish that weighed a couple of pounds--and brought one, ONE, standard service cup of sauce. The flavor? YOU BETTER LIKE CUMIN AND LIKE IT A LOT. This sauce has no resemblance, NO resemblance, NONE, NONE, NONE, to any BBQ sauce that comes out of the Carolinas. It tastes like somebody made a bland, weak tomato sauce with corn syrup and "smoke flavor" and a bean counter said, "IT NEEDS TO TASTE SOUTHWESTERN!" So they added as much cumin to the sauce as possible.
PREFACE TO ALL THE MEAT DISHES: Every one of them, and we had pulled pork, pulled chicken, smoked wings, brisket, and ribs, were all REHEATED. They didn't just taste reheated, they tasted OLD. Every one of them tasted like it had been cooked at Company HQ, vacuum-packed, stored in bulk, and distributed to their stores nationwide over the next week. And done? Nope. Not cooked nearly enough. Some bean counter somewhere decided they could get the biggest profit by cooking it for the least amount of time while still making it edible. Smoke flavor? Forget it. It tastes like they cooked their meat in a massive mechanical oven the size of a mobile home and used a half-pound of the blandest wood pellets they could get. The wood smoke flavor isn't even identifiable--is it hickory? Alder? Apple? Pecan? Can't tell.
WINGS: These were actually the best because of the amount of spices used covered the reheated flavor and lack of smoke flavor. That doesn't mean they were good. They weren't.
PULLED CHICKEN: Or, NOT pulled chicken, but chicken mechanically separated from the bone. Big chunks of chicken do NOT equal pulled chicken. The flavor was horrible. I dislike reheated chicken to begin with, and it didn't just taste reheated, it tasted OLD. Very little chicken flavor, very little smoke flavor, and DRY.
PULLED PORK: Same as the chicken: very little meat flavor, very little smoke flavor, and DRY.
BRISKET: Not just dry, not just flavorless (I don't exaggerate--it had NO flavor except the thin smoke), but TOUGH. Brisket should be cooked fork-tender: the way to tell if your brisket is done is if you stick a fork in and twist it. If it turns, it's done. If it doesn't, it's not. This stuff? You'd have a problem getting the fork in it to begin with. No juiciness. No collagen breakdown. It had the consistency of underdone roast beef and the flavor of shoe leather.
LAST AND MOST DEFINITELY LEAST: THE RIBS. Same stuff: dry, reheated, and tough. I like my ribs to have a bit of chew to them, to have to be torn from the bone a little, but this meat was HARD. It was impossible to chew and the flavor was awful. We got three bones each. I ate one and a half and stopped. My girl ate one and stopped. We threw the rest out. It was inedible.
Listen. I'm no noob. I've been cooking since I was a teenager, and I am 59 years old now. I learned how to cook in restaurants, I've taught myself scores of techniques, and I learned barbecue at the feet of SERIOUS pitmasters. No barbecue cook I have ever met would even think of asking people to pay for the meat this company produces. It's garbage. The only good it had was that it filled my stomach. I could have gotten that by making myself a grilled cheese sandwich, AND IT WOULD HAVE TASTED BETTER.
Never trying again. read more