Meet the Chef - Hugh Mangum

Our Barbecue author (and former rock star drummer, no less) on why he thinks barbecue is a meditative force that crosses all cultures, how the death of his dad set him on the road to success, and why meat is more important than marinade.

Hugh Mangum grew up with the smell of barbecue smoke in the air. His dad, a stocky Texan who looked like Orson Welles, would spend weekends at the family home on Doheny Drive, West Hollywood, smoking meat, perfecting his own recipes. When Mangum senior died suddenly in 1999, Hugh took time off from a bourgeoning drumming career and enrolled in The French Culinary Institute in New York, partly in an attempt to meaningfully connect to his late father.

There he lit a fire that has seen him blaze through a career that includes big restaurant names such as Smorgasburg and Mighty Quinn’s along with numerous TV appearances.

In his new book Barbecue: Smoked & Grilled Recipes From Across the Globe, Hugh takes readers on a journey across the world in barbecue recipes. This doesn’t just mean Texas brisket or North Carolina pulled pork. It means char siu in China, lechon in the Philippines, barbacoa in Mexico and churrasco in South America.

“I think that one of the beauties of this book is that instead of just talking about the barbecue, it celebrates all of our different culture differences in our book,” Hugh tells us in our interview below.

“I think that there are so many similarities to who we are as people in the world, but I do think food is one of the many ways in which we can really celebrate differences versus pointing fingers at differences. In this day and age, we need to be looking for more good out there, with all of our neighbours.”

Barbecue: Smoked & Grilled Recipes From Across the Globe proves that barbecue isn't just America, it's everywhere, answering the question what is the celebratory food in all of these different places and what brings people together? Let's find out.

Ghanaian Goat Kabobs. Photography: Nico Schinco

What was the first thing you cooked as a kid and who inspired it? Apart from maybe scrambling some eggs, the first thing I remember vividly was a rib eye steak. I probably put every single seasoning in the cabinet on it, it was probably not good, but I probably thought it was freaking awesome. That was the cut that my dad always liked. The irony of it and I don't mean this as a knock, is that my son, Lucas, recently got into cooking steaks and probably did the exact same thing - although his was much better than mine.

I didn't start doing barbecue with a smoker in my backyard until my dad had already passed away. I went through his recipes, and I just learned through screwing up. So, I would just read and keep doing it and I made all the mistakes he made, and I just kept on doing it, and kept on trying to connect to my dad that way. The brisket and the black eye peas recipes in the book are the most connected to my father and the journey I went on to connect with him. If you want to taste my heart and soul, it's those two things.

Beer Bratwurst. Photography: Nico Schinco

In your intro, you write of the barbecue as 'a meditation that begins with tending a proper fire. Fire is a dance, and it requires attention.' It's a philosphical reminder of something primal. I started doing this pre-cell phone and pre-being connected, right? One of the beauties of barbecue is that it forces you to disconnect in that way. I'm sure that you can sit there on your phone while you’re doing barbecue but to me, that's antithetical. It's all about paying attention. It's nuance. In a day and age of all of this stuff that is so technical and social and invasive, it's something that is at its core, rudimentary.

So, for me it's a meditation in that I’ve spent many hours, thousands of hours, doing. Part of it for me was that it started on my own after my father had passed away. I went to culinary school and studied fine dining, and there were a lot of hours that I got to spend with my father, quote unquote, in this process of learning and looking through his notes and remembering him. Every single time I light the fire I have this moment where he's with me.

Cooking is the last primal thing we have as a species, really. I think it's just it's a really nice way to connect to the elements. So, it can mean whatever it means to anybody, even if it's a weekend warrior, someone who's living in a city wherever. and lighting up a barbecue on their balcony or patio.

Smoked Brisket. Photography: Nico Schinco

Cooking with fire is a universal theme around the world but what were the countries and dishes that surprised you in the research and writing of the book? That's a difficult one. I don't know that there were any countries that surprised me per se. I had delved into this concept knowing that we had as a country, the United States, co-opted barbecue as our national food. America's food is barbecue. What we fail to recognise as a country is that we don't own everything. So, it's not that barbecue is ours, it's that barbecue is our national food, but it comes from elsewhere.

The bigger revelation of the book is that, across the board, it's hard to find a culture that doesn't have some form of food, whether it's coal or live fire, that is primal, familial, and celebratory. That was that was the through line. The seed of the book was that everywhere has a version of it. They just don't necessarily call it barbecue. I think that across-the-board learning from all the cultures is the beauty of it.

Skillet Mocha Brownies. Photography: Nico Schinco

OK it’s time to put knowledge into practice. What's a good dish to begin with? In terms of the American classics, I'd say anything that is four hours and down. Spareribs are good. If people want to get into a big primal cut of meat, anything that revolves around pork and pork shoulder is great - there's longer cook times, but it's much more forgiving.

I'd say any of the poultry items and a lot of the pork items that are not ‘primal cuts’ - 10, 12 pounders - that are spareribs, baby back ribs, chicken, quail, lamb are all very easy to work with. The thing I love with lamb is that it's got a good fat content, So, it's fun to play with. Once you get into things that are beef and brisket, with those kinds of meat, if you screw them up, there's no going back.

Typically speaking, the bigger commitments in the book are going to be the suckling pigs, the whole shoulders, the briskets. The degree of difficulty is more in terms of time commitment and working with fire. Once you start, you have to maintain that temperature and you're working all the way through, whether it's 12 or 18 hours. So, there's no shortcuts on those.

But one of the beautiful things about barbecue is that so much of the preparation can be done ahead. There's a lot of sections in the book which have quicker cooking meats that take only an hour or two, where the preparation goes into the marinade, and into the seasoning, and then you've got a finish over fire and coal.

That's where I think that people who are a little bit intimidated by a 10-hour cook can find the beauty of this food which is either high heat quick cook or it has to do its time in marinade and or in seasoning, and that's when you're getting the benefit of it. There's a lot about learning in the book. Learning how to coax fire is critical, before you even start with the food itself.

Senegalese Lamb. Photography: Nico Schinco

What are the things that most people tend to make a mistake with? I'd say the most important thing to me, besides mastering fire, is the importance of sourcing the best quality ingredients, the meat itself. Always source the best quality meat you can. If you start off with not that a high-quality meat, then the sauce and the rub isn't going to matter. You're better off with a high-quality cut of meat and just using salt and pepper than you are getting a cheaper cut of meat and spending all your money on all these ingredients to make a rub or a sauce. Keep it simple and high quality. It really matters.

And just remember to keep in mind the beautiful show of it. If you have a group of people over for a Sunday dinner and you're cooking a couple of chunks of meat on a grill and you're moving it to indirect heat, there are smells that are happening that get people already salivating. By the time they're eating, they’ve probably had a couple of beers or a couple of glasses of wine and it’s going to taste good to them no matter what.

Argentinian Short Ribs. Photography: Nico Schinco

As a former drummer is there an analogy to be drawn between sitting behind the kit and standing behind a smoker? 100 percent! I think it has less to do with the pit and more to do with just cooking in general. The mood affects your food affects your music, right? When you cook dinner and you're preparing food, you'll put on some music, depending on your mood.

I think that musicality plays a huge part in cooking. I think cooking and music have a very symbiotic relationship that other forms of art don't. There are a few chefs I know that are painters, but I think that there's a big through line when it comes to musicians and cooking. There's something about performance; it's a collective team performance.

When I used to play professionally, I loved the weeks leading up to going on tour, being in the studio and just rehearsing all day. It's the same way I love prep sometimes more than I love the service, though I love service. Service is bombastic and explosive whereas prep is very symphonic.

Spanish Grilled Sardines. Photography: Nico Schinco

Tell us about one song that always goes well with food. Oh my God that's rough. So, if I'm on the smoker on a brisk morning, sometimes obviously it's very quiet, but then once I start getting going after that peaceful morning, depending on my mood, it could be Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue, or it could be John Coltrane’s Giant Steps, but then it can transition to Bob Marley or the Beastie Boys.

Actually there’s a song that whenever it comes on, I'm in a good mood. It has a swagger to it. The song has soul to it, it works for a bunch of different moods. My friend Troy Van Leeuwen is in the band, and I used to be in a band with him. So, if I have to give a one answer, it’s Make It Wit Chu from Queens of the Stone Age.

I took the family to a show last year, and we were backstage with the band, and they were making the set list. Josh (Homme singer) looked at my youngest son Henry and said, what do you want to hear? And Henry said Make It Wit Chu. Josh looked at him and said, aaah so, you're a lover!’ So, that song has a very special place in my heart.

Grilled Cabbage and Vegemite. Photography: Nico Schinco

What's your favourite dish in the book to create? The Thai grilled chicken and sweet chilli sauce just explodes with flavour and besides making the marinade is very easy to pull off. The smell that comes off the grill is incredible.

I will say my brisket recipe is the most important recipe in the book because that single solitary cut of meat is what made me who I am. It connected me the most to my father and it sent me on this route. Everything else was child's play until I tackled that. And if I hadn't spent all the hours doing that one cut of meat, then we wouldn't be having this conversation. So, that's the most important recipe in the book because without that recipe, the book doesn't happen.

Skillet Mocha Brownies. Photography: Nico Schinco

How did the varying regional methods and flavours come to you originally? Was it from living in those melting pot cities? I think the melting pot cities was it. My father had lived in various places, he lived in Japan for a while, he was from Texas, he lived in Los Angeles, he travelled through Peru for long stretches for work. When he would come home, he would cook, and we would frequent restaurants in Los Angeles. I was eating a lot of sushi as a kid. I was going to a lot of Thai restaurants, Vietnamese restaurants and I think that those flavours fell in my wheelhouse. When I met my wife, Laura she had just spent a lot of time traveling in Italy and in France, And I didn't have a ton of knowledge of that food.

I think that as I got into cooking and was living in New York at the time there was so much access to all of it. I started learning more and more, and the more you learn the more you want to learn. Getting to work with chefs like Michael Voltaggio, who's become a dear friend, was a big thing. He's one of those guys who rekindled a lot of love I have for it because he is at the top of the game, and yet he's still constantly studying. That's pretty incredible. It's inspirational to watch somebody who doesn't need to do it anymore. And yet they're constantly pushing it.

Georgian Sausages. Photography: Nico Schinco

We ask all our chefs this but for you it’s perhaps more pertinent: Have you ever set a kitchen on fire? Yes! A mobile kitchen. We were selling at a huge flea market in Brooklyn called Smorgasburg, and at the time we were in a very bad money situation. This was in 2008 when the crash had come full circle. I lost basically everything I had, and Smorgasburg and the launch of Mighty Quinn’s was what basically saved us financially. But every week I would spend money that we made at the market to buy more meat to increase production.

So, I was learning the ins and outs of this smoker I was using, it was a 17th foot, large catering rig with a trailer. I had used it a lot and I think I had used more than the Weekend Warriors it was built for. There was a leak going from the cooking chamber into the fire box. I had briskets on, and I was working through the night.

I'd been working on the smoker at this point, for probably 10, 16, 20 hours or ten hours, and I was doing the overnight shift. Then at four in the morning I’d pull the briskets off, and I would drive to Smorgasburg in Brooklyn from my house in New Jersey and sell them. Around midnight, I noticed a smell and I opened one of the doors of the cooking chamber and flames just shot out at me. Grease had trickled into the firebox and everything ignited.

And I'm like, fighting for my life to get all the briskets off - which I shouldn't have been doing because that's oxygen. But I needed to save them. Meanwhile, the comedy of this moment was that the fire marshal in our town, the head of the fire department, lived a few hours down from me, and he just happened to smell it and drove up to our house with his wife and literally in our driveway, asked, ‘Everything all right over there?’


That was the single most important almost life altering lesson I ever learned. You don't want to have a grease fire in your smoker because you lose everything in it, but you could also lose a lot more than that.

Berbere Ribs. Photography: Nico Schinco

Is there any kind of food you'd never eat? I'm generally open to always trying everything and I don't have anything that I dislike per se but I think that there may be a few game cuts that may cross a line for me. The thought of bear doesn't sound good to me. I just don't know that I would go there.

Growing up in Los Angeles, I didn't like tomatoes on my hamburger. I just never did. And so, when I moved to New Jersey and New York and had a peak season tomato on anything, it was revelatory. And that comes back to choosing good meat versus dusting it with tons of rub and softeners. Moving from California to the East Coast I really appreciate in season fruits and vegetables, versus year-round availability of less quality stuff.

Fire Chicken. Photography: Nico Schinco

What would your last meal be? I'm going to work backwards. For dessert there would be the cobbler I have in the book with vanilla ice cream. Depending on the day of the week, there would be a course that is sushi. There would most likely be a burger with sweet medallion onion in equal portion measure to the bun or to the patty. I love raw onions on a hamburger with perfect pommes frites, French fries. The sweet corn Agnolotti that I had from Wolfgang Puck’s Spago, about 20 years ago, was revelatory. So, I might have to have a bite of that.

When I was in Paris a couple of years ago, I had the best simple salad I've ever had in my life. It was just vinaigrette with greens, but in France they know how to dress greens. A perfectly warm baguette with salted butter is also on the list.

And the meal would start off with a perfect glass of red wine, or a top tier bourbon, neat. I generally can't sleep anymore after I have red wines, but the sleep is gonna be permanent, so I can drink the bottle. There are plenty of things that I would do over fire but if it's my last meal, I'm not cooking!

And if you if you could cook for any person living or dead, who would it be? I would say the Obamas or Jon Stewart. I just appreciate his political views. I appreciate his sense of humour and think that he would be a hoot. But actually, if I could go for anyone on the planet, it would be that my father could be alive to see that the influence he had on me was fully realised. I would have my father at a table with my wife and kids. Because they never got to meet him. Hopefully I would make his eyes roll back in his head with deliciousness.