MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
If you want to start a culinary food fight, get people from, say, Kansas City, North Carolina and Texas together and ask, who has got the best barbecue? Whether it features vinegar, a tomato base or just smoke, there are many flavors of American barbecue. As Frank Morris of member station KCUR reports, there is a new museum in Kansas City that puts regional rivalries aside to celebrate the magic of smoked meat and sauce.
FRANK MORRIS, BYLINE: The Museum of BBQ is in a mall. You walk through the gift shop to reach an 8-foot-tall, industrial-looking door with gauges, a big handle. Jonathan Bender is the founder.
JONATHAN BENDER: Our entrance to the museum is actually a replica of a large smoker door - a big commercial smoker door - the kind that you would cook hundreds of pounds of meat or barbecue on in order to kind of have that moment - right? - where you're leaving the world behind.
MORRIS: Inside, there's no actual smoke or any barbecue to eat, but lots of original art, illustrating the many ways of seasoning and smoking meat. There's a big hands-on pork puzzle, a spice smelling game and a jump-in vat of plastic baked beans. Megan Harrison's just getting out of it.
MEGAN HARRISON: Oh, it was super fun. I've never been in a bean pit before, only a ball pit. So I'm actually not a big bean person. I'm only a bean pit person.
MORRIS: If barbecue sauce is more your thing, there's a sauce immersion room with a squishy-looking floor.
BENDER: So these are - they're called lava tiles. So you can actually walk on them, and they mimic kind of that movement of sauce, right? It moves under your feet. So they're bright orange, but they have this red underneath. And yeah, it's super fun.
MORRIS: Not all barbecue sauce is reddish. It's all over the place, from Alabama white sauce to black dip in Kentucky. Bender's museum honors the complex geography, with special attention to the four kingdoms of Q.
BENDER: Carolinas, Memphis, Texas and Kansas City all lay claim to being kind of their own capital.
MORRIS: And they all have a backstory. In Kansas City, enormous stockyards and slaughterhouses kept pit masters of the 1920s stocked with beef. But that's not all they were smoking.
BENDER: Back then, they cooked raccoon and possum and woodchuck, right? And so to cook something for a long amount of time at a low temperature to make it tender or succulent, you got to tend it, you got to work it, you got to love it.
MORRIS: Bender clearly loves barbecue. He spent six years getting this museum off the ground. He says it's the first and only one devoted to barbecue, Kansas City's culinary calling card. For NPR News, I'm Frank Morris in Kansas City. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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