The Rib Masters : A Trip to Barbecue Dreamland

To some of us, a barbecue store is like an auto show room. We get a wild impulse to buy a dream machine way beyond our budget.

Say, the Pig Spit. Imagine a long, marbleized steel trough mounted with a muscular rotisserie. You could load it up with 50 or 60 pounds of charcoal and throw another pig on the barbie!

Or to dream the impossible dream, the Belson Porta-Grill Mobile 2. It’s a huge propane barbecue mounted on a trailer, complete with hitch, tires, tail lights and road permit. It’s a barbecue! It’s a vehicle! It’s a barbecue and it’s a vehicle!

Which to dream about, Pig Spit or Porta-Grill? It all depends on whether you can’t afford to spend $549 or $3,295.

Mitch Spann, manager of Barbecues Galore in Santa Fe Springs, sees people stare at these giants--really intended for caterers--all the time. Most customers, of course, end up buying a practical, family sedan sort of barbecue.

“The big tendency in recent years,” he says, “has been gas barbecues with porcelainized steel refractory plates, which were introduced in the Weber Genesis, in place of lava rocks. They have less flare-up and more even heating. You can also buy ceramic bricks, another replacement for lava rocks.

“In fact, there was a season when people wanted their whole barbecues to be black porcelainized steel. This season stainless steel is coming back as a material.

“The other big trend is for built-in barbecues. They’re becoming more common. And bigger.”

But there are also some new technological wrinkles. A vertical propane heater ($179) can be mounted with a hanging grill ($49), so that the food is cooked by radiation alone. There’s no flare-up, needless to say, and the juices, instead of going up in smoke, can be collected in a little pan.

“This is the first electric barbecue with good heat,” says Spann, pointing out the Thermos Electric ($249). With the lid down, it looks remarkably like R2D2 in “Star Wars.” The heating element is in the metal grill, giving a cooking quality somewhere between grilling and fatless frying. Its advantages are that it reaches cooking temperature (up to 500 degrees) in about a minute, and since it burns no fuel, it can safely be used indoors.

The truest novelty, says Spann proudly (Barbecues Galore is the only local distributor), is the Sterling Tec Infrared BBQ ($1,995). It runs on gas, but its burner resembles a patio bug-zapper, producing infra-red heat. As a result, it can put out temperatures up to 1,000 degrees. No lava rocks or refractory plate needed; if anything hits the burner, it’s vaporized immediately.

It’s awful tempting. If only they had one as big as a Pig Spit.