The principle of blind testing

August 5, 2001
By JOE O'CONNELL, past president, cbbqa

Barbecue experts and cooks should know and apply the principle of blind testing to their cooking and tasting experiences.

The principle of blind testing states, simply, that many decisions are made and many rules⁽¹⁾ are made that would not be made if the outcome were subjected to a blind test.

In the area of barbecue, this translates into the principle that many barbecue decisions and many so-called rules are made without the benefit of blind testing.  As a result, much of what the barbecue community believes to be true is meaningless and even wrong.

An example with salt

Salt is one of dozens of such examples.  Barbecue experts learned that salt removes moisture from meat by the process of osmosis.  If a slice of meat is heavily salted and kept cool, the meat will dry out and be preserved.  This was the method used by older societies, including pre-Columbian Native Americans, to preserve meat. 

Unfortunately, some barbecue cooks have taken this fact and generalized the rule that raw meat will dry out if it is salted before it is cooked.  Some celebrity chefs have popularized this by stating that steaks should never be salted before grilling, because the salt will dry them out.

This is untrue, and a blind test would prove that it is untrue.  In fact, not one person on earth could taste the difference between two identical steaks, cooked exactly the same way, with the only difference being that one was salted before being grilled and the other was salted after being grilled.

This is but one example of so many "rules" which, when subjected to logic and/or blind testing, turn out to be incorrect "urban legends" of barbecue.

Applying the principle

Whenever a barbecue cook is told that such-and-such is a rule, the cook should spend a moment to think about the rule.  Does the rule sound like it would pass the blind testing principle?  Or is it likely that few if anyone could tell the difference, one way or the other?

Footnote:

1 - The word 'rule' is used here as in "a simple principle having wide application but not intended to be strictly accurate", not in the sense of a competition barbecue rule that was established by a sanctioning body, such as KCBS.