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Zach Parker was a few weeks shy of his twenty-second birthday, in 2013, when his father, Ricky Parker, passed away. Ricky was a legendary whole-hog pitmaster and the owner of B. E. Scott’s Bar-B-Que, in Lexington, Tennessee. Ricky bought the place in 1989 from Early Scott, who taught him how to cook whole hogs when he was fourteen. Zach began working for his father at thirteen. When his father died suddenly, he had the cooking knowledge, but was he ready to run a business? “I wasn’t, really,” he told me during my recent visit to one of West Tennessee’s few remaining whole-hog establishments. A decade later, things have changed. “I don’t think there’s anything in the whole-hog business that I don’t know,” Parker said. Now he’s…

The post This Pitmaster Is Preserving West Tennessee’s Whole-Hog Tradition appeared first on Texas Monthly.

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