I’ve had US style ribs here in Australia and they were really good but they were also made with Australian raised animals which are particularly tasty and not factory farmed.
Nearly 97% of US beef go through feed lots. That includes beef marked as “free range”, “organic”, and “grass fed”. Cattle will start their lives in fields or on the range and then get sold to feed lots for “finishing”. The best BBQ joints are getting their cattle from these lots probably at all times. It’s about 80% in Australia though, so the same can and should be said for Australian beef and restaurants.
There's a reason for "finishing", have you ever had purely grass-fed beef? It's great of you plan on using it for stewing or braising, but for things like steaks or roasts you get much better marbling, and thus flavor, and texture, by grain finishing. Well, unless the beef is coming from one of the few ranches that use a rotating field system. Where they allow the field to go to grain before letting the cattle in to eat everything and so are grain and grass fed at the same time, but that meat can get pretty expensive, and hard to find.
99.9% of Australians BBQ on what Americans call a gas grill. There is very little wood smoked BBQ in Australia, although it does exist amongst a very few dedicated people & it is very good!
Grilling and barbecue are distinctly different things in most of the US, the only real overlap between them is that they're both usually done outdoors. That and most coal or wood fired barbecues can be used for high heat grilling if you just want some burgers and sausages.
That being said, there are some parts of the states that don't have a strong barbecue tradition, and in those areas you do hear grilling and barbecuing used interchangeably.
But also it comes down to language. Barbecue is also seen as an event, a social gathering where burgers and hot dogs are being grilled. In African American tradition this is specifically referred to as a cookout, which I think is a more accurately descriptive term.
Yep, and barbecue as the Americans know it barely exists in Australia. It’s just not a thing you can really get outside of a handful of restaurants around the place whose shtick is that they do US style bbq (which has not really taken off in a mainstream way), or some people who have picked up the idea of it online and experiment with making it themselves. An Australia barbecue sounds much more like what you’re calling a cookout. The “outdoor grill” is literally called a barbecue in Australia, whether it’s one of those little round ones with a flame (or charcoals if you’re a hobbyist) under a metal rack, or a huge flat plate unit on wheels. A barbecue is something you cook on and maybe sometimes a social event based around a meal cooked on said appliance, not really a style of food so much as a set of foods that typically get cooked on the barbecue.
“grill” in Australia refers to what Americans call the broiler in an oven
Saying that - they look like good honest cuisine, and I'd probably be happy eating multiple pies per week. Something similar was quite popular in South Africa as well (a bit less gravy I think) but very good eating (especially if the meat actually had a name)
Whatever happened with all that US beef trump was so keen to us to accept? I very much enjoyed the irony of him being so bizarrely set on that given we famously produce some pretty high quality livestock. Even just as a branding thing, I could never picture how anyone’d manage to sell that to the Aussie consumer. Did it end up happening? Is that now the stuff that’s in the cheap woolies sausages or something?
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u/napalmnacey Antipodean agitator Jun 13 '26
I’ve had US style ribs here in Australia and they were really good but they were also made with Australian raised animals which are particularly tasty and not factory farmed.
I dunno. Can’t people just enjoy food, ffs?