Best Barbecue Techniques

1. Mopping

Mopping is a technique that involves slathering sauce onto the cooking meat with a large basting brush, which adds flavor, makes skin crisp, and, when layered over the rub, creates a nice bar—the flavorsome crust that develops during the cooking process. According to Amy Mills Tunnicliffe, co-author of Peace, Love & Barbecue (Rodale, 2005), "Mopping adds surface flavor, it's not penetrating. But when you pull pork butt, you're mixing the bark with the internal meat, which is fabulous."

2. Crisping Chicken Skin

We learned this method of removing fat from chicken skin in order to produce a remarkably crisp result from competition barbecue champion George "Tuffy" Stone. "Peel the skin carefully from the thigh or breast, and use a knife to scrape most of the fat off the underside until the skin becomes somewhat translucent," instructs Stone. "Then drape the skin back over the thigh or breast, and tuck it under the meat. When it cooks, the skin will become crisp."

3. Spraying With Apple Juice

Tunnicliffe sometimes sprays meat with apple juice every hour or so while it cooks, to keep the surface moist and to add additional flavor. "Meat sweats when it cooks; it opens up and absorbs whatever's on top of it," she says. "That's a good time to spray."

4. Beer-Can Chicken

This technique for making succulent chicken entails stuffing the cavity of an upright bird with an open, half-full can of beer. The liquid evaporates during cooking, basting the flesh from the inside out. According to Elizabeth Karmel, executive chef at Hill Country Barbecue in New York City, "It infuses the meat with beer, which gives it a great depth of flavor, and roasting the chicken vertically allows the fat to render out in a consistent way, which gives a uniformly crispy skin."

5. The Texas Crutch

This is the term for wrapping meat in foil for its final hours of cooking, which keeps the meat moist and prevents it from absorbing excess smoke (some people add apple juice and honey inside the wrapper for extra moisture and flavor). "Wrap the meat when it has a nice color, and throw it back onto the pit," says Stone. "You can even finish cooking it in your oven."

6. The Rub

A rub is essentially a dry marinade: a blend of spices, salt, and sugar that's dusted onto meat, imparting surface flavor and an appealing crust, if cooked properly. Rubs work well with lean cuts that benefit from added flavor. "Once the meat starts to cook, the moisture blends with the rub and starts to marinate your meat immediately," says Tunnicliffe. "That rub, plus your wood, really determines the flavor of what you're cooking."

7. Adam Perry Lang's Microplane

Adam Perry Lang, the owner of Daisy May's BBQ USA in New York City, uses a Microplane grater to add a hint of fresh flavor as a finishing touch on his meats. "I grate items like garlic, onion, and green apple into a sauce or dressing that goes on the meat when it's ready to serve," says Lang. "Say I have a pork shoulder. I create a mountain of these flavors on top, and as I pull the meat, this stuff gets incorporated into it."

8. Brining/Injecting/Marinating

There are a few strategies for keeping meats, especially lean ones like chicken and pork tenderloin, moist when barbecuing. Marinating involves soaking meat in something acidic (fruit juice, citrus, buttermilk). The acid breaks down the muscle tissue of the meat and thus allows some moisture (and flavor) to penetrate. Brining—immersing meat in a salty solution—goes one step further: The salt actually alters the structure of the proteins in the meat so that they trap moisture inside. Or you can deliver moisture directly to the interior of the meat by injecting—plunging in a syringe filled with brine or other flavorful liquid. "You inject cuts—like a whole hog or a pork shoulder—that are too large to submerge," says Steven Raichlen, author of The Barbecue Bible(Workman Publishing, 1998).

Car service secrets revealed, unveiled

If you've ever felt you got a raw deal taking your car in for service at the dealer, our anonymous service manager says that may well be true. But he also cites a number of reasons to take your car to the dealer for work anyway — and tells how not to get the short end of the stick when you do. He should know. He's spent 23 years as a manager for brands as varied as Nissan, Ford and Mitsubishi, and has also served as a warranty administrator and customer relations manager for multiple dealerships.

Q: What's a good reason to take your car to the dealer for routine maintenance, rather than to the guy with two bays and a private shop?

A: Let's use Ford as an example. If you own a Ford vehicle, the Ford dealership will have Ford-trained technicians who work on Ford vehicles 95 to 100 percent of the time. During that time they will use Ford resources and Ford training to repair your vehicle correctly, and (ideally) they take Ford classes and attend Ford schools to keep up on their knowledge. With the other guy, it's a tossup — he may work on two Fords one week and not see another for a month. Also, on regular maintenance it can sometimes be cheaper, not more expensive. To get an oil change and tire rotation where I live, the Ford dealer is $38.95 plus tax, and Sears wants $75.

Q: So it's not necessarily more expensive, and they know more about your car. Any other reason?A: Often times at Jiffy Lube or wherever they're paid by the hour, and they're not necessarily trained to know your vehicle. And that can cost you your engine. If I could get half of what I've charged customers to replace engines that were screwed up by Jiffy Lube and Walmart, for such things as not enough oil, too much oil, the wrong weight of oil, wrong filter, loose filter or any combination of the above, I could have retired a long time ago. There's no point to spending $30,000 to $40,000 on a new vehicle and then trying to go cheap on the maintenance.Q: What's an example of a common tactic by dealers to pad the bill?A: So-called shop supplies. That is, and always has been, the biggest crock of crap I've ever seen, and it's been going on for years! It is essentially similar to going to a nice restaurant, getting your check and finding you've been billed for napkins and silverware, which are necessary costs of the food service business. Shop supplies include, but are not limited to, shop rags, lubricants — this isn't the motor oil, transmission fluid, brake fluid and steering fluid they might put in your car — and the cost of disposing of used oil. These are just some of the necessary costs of doing the auto repair business. Some dealers do not charge for them, but most do, and what is considered shop supplies is at the discretion of each individual dealer. I've seen a customer get billed for $30 in shop supplies—on top of their estimate — for the use of three shop rags! For that price, I can buy 20 rolls of shop towels at Auto Zone.Q: If you got a bill that had shop supplies on it, what would you do?A: Ask to see exactly what that means. Ask to see the precise items they actually used. Challenge them on it. You might not get them to knock it off your bill, but you should try.Q: You also said that dealer service departments too often recommend fluid flushes and replacements that aren't called for by the owner's manual. The dealers cite the "severe use" schedule that doesn't apply to the vast majority of us. Should drivers simply veto a service or fluid replacement that isn't recommended — in the owner's manual — under the normal or light-duty service requirements?A: Yes, you should go by what the owner's manual recommends for normal use. And, yes, this is a common practice, and I hate to admit that. When I was a customer relations manager, I had a service manager who would [bait people into buying the fluid changes] by showing new fluid versus used fluid. She made more than I did just in flush commissions, but had the worst customer satisfaction surveys. I have always stuck to the manufacturer recommendations, and my Escape has over 310,000 miles on it. Less than five percent of drivers operate their cars under conditions that would be deemed "severe." The ones who do are usually taxi or pizza-delivery drivers, or those who frequently take their SUV or truck off-road. Q: What's the single best piece of advice you'd offer to a friend about servicing his car at the dealer?A: A dealer won't come right out and say it, but if you have your regular service work done at the dealer... (because warranty work pays the dealer a lot less than service work), your value to the dealership increases. Here's an example: Suppose your vehicle goes out of warranty and a week later you have a catastrophic failure. If you have shown loyalty to the dealership by using them for regular service work, they will be more inclined to help you — as opposed to the person who buys a car there and takes it somewhere else for regular service, and only brings it in for warranty work. Q: So it's about building a relationship with the dealer?A: Yes. You need to know that dealers make very little on car sales. And warranty service doesn't pay as much as regular maintenance. But if they see that record that you've been loyal to them, they'll likely be loyal to you. Q: What's a sign that a dealership doesn't value that relationship?A: Constant turnover at the service desk. You should get the name of the person at the desk. You should ask for him or her. If that person's different every time, it's not a good sign. Good auto service work starts with a relationship between the advisor and the customer, and that cannot be obtained when the customer sees a new advisor every time he comes in. I always knew the person's car, I pulled up its history, and that's something people appreciate. But if that person is new or is always changing, they don't know you or your car — stuff gets missed, and that's typically not good for you or your car. Q: How come a dealer might charge you 30 percent more for a part than you can find it for at AutoZone?A: It's one of the hang-ups I've always had about domestic automakers. You can often buy their parts cheaper at the auto parts store than you can at the dealership parts counter. And the dealer knows this, but he can't do anything about it. The problem is that even though that's true, the dealer doesn't want to install a part that he didn't source, because if it fails, how does he warranty it? Q: So what do you do as the customer?A: There's not a lot you can do. They can install the part if you went out and bought it, but most won't. Q: Speaking of AutoZone, you can take your car there to have them read what a Check Engine light means. How accurate will that reading be?A: Check Engine lights are big moneymakers for dealers and also the bane of a service manager's existence. Anyone can use a code reader. But what does the code mean? For every code there need to be additional diagnostics. I've had customers come in and tell me to swap some part, because they're sure it's the problem. But all that is is a really expensive guess. They might be right 10 to 20 percent of the time, close 20 percent of the time, and dead wrong 60 percent of the time. I had a customer go through six oxygen sensors when all it was was a shorted wire. Q: What's the smartest thing you can buy from the dealer?A: A brand-name extended service contract. So if you're buying a Ford, get a Ford contract. If it's a Toyota, buy the Toyota contract. The opposite is also true. Never buy the extended service contract that's generically offered through the dealer but isn't backed by the brand of car they sell.Q: How come?A: Because the people who fulfill the generic contracts are paid by how little service they have to do. So they fight the dealer on every penny. They'll want to see the entire labor record on the car. They won't want to pay for parts. They'll fight on the cost of the labor. In the end, the customer is going to have to eat some of that cost, even though the contract supposedly covers the car. Q: What's the worst day of the week to get your car serviced?A: Friday afternoon after lunch, because the service department is trying to push out as many vehicles as possible. Maybe a car has been there since Monday waiting on parts. Maybe there are a few cars like that. Then people pour in around lunchtime wanting oil changes. And there are the cars there already with appointments, and everyone's in a rush to get it all done. Make an appointment for a Monday morning as early as possible. It's a lot more orderly, and they'll do a better job.

Fire goes out of Aga son's marriage

When a beautiful blonde college graduate was swept off her feet by a handsome prince, their subsequent wedding was described as ‘fairytale’.

Held at the 14th-century French chateau which was used as a backdrop for the James Bond film A View To A Kill, the lavish ceremony made a five-page spread in Hello! with photographs supplied by the groom’s father, billionaire racehorse owner the Aga Khan.

But just five years later and the magic has sadly evaporated from the marriage of the Aga’s second son, Prince Hussain, 38, and his bride, Kristin, the 36-year-old daughter of a university professor from New York.

Although she changed her religion to marry Hussain, adopting the Islamic name Khaliya, I understand the couple have parted and there is talk of divorce.

Their separation is the latest in a string of marital breakdowns that have blighted the family of the leader of the world’s 12 million Ismaili Muslims. The Aga Khan has been married twice — his first wife and Hussain’s mother is the former English model Sally Croker-Poole.

As I disclosed, he has been separated from his second wife Princess Gabriele for almost eight years, but they are not divorced. The German-born beauty is based in Switzerland. The Aga’s daughter, Princess Zahra, 41, wed Dorset farmer’s son and former male model Mark Boyden, but that union ended in 2005 after seven years and two children.

Perhaps fortunately, Prince Hussain and his wife do not have children.

They met when both were studying at New York’s Columbia University, from where they graduated with masters degrees. The Princess’s father Professor Norman White is an IT specialist, and his wife, Dr Margaret White, is a psychologist.

After living with Hussain in France, Kristin now rents an apartment. She has also been seen alone at a number of social events in Europe this summer.

It is thought she will return to America to live. But her father tells me: ‘Whether she does or not is up to her. I am not making any comment.’ A spokesman for the Aga declined to comment.

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