Miss Myra’s Pit Bar-B-Q

Regional BBQ Is Unique Like DNA

BBQ throughout the South and Midwest varies from place to plate. Depending on the location, you’ll find brisket, pork, even mutton. Many elements differentiate regional BBQ. Everything from the sides that are served to the wood being used can provoke endless debates. Among the issues, sauce matters, big time. Some prefer a thick opaque red sauce or a thin marinade of vinegar and pepper. Others consider it an atrocity to serve smoked meat with any sauce at all. Alabama white sauce is in a class of its own.

For a BBQ experience unique to Northern Alabama, go to Miss Myra’s just outside of Birmingham. Happy pig figurines greet customers when they enter. Order at the counter. When the meal is ready, bring it to any of the available tables in two separate rooms.

White Sauce!

Miss Myra’s, like most Alabama BBQ parlors, serves pork, ribs, brisket, and sausage. Hickory smoke-cooked chicken stars. You have the option of ordering a quarter or half a bird. Light appetites can get it as a sandwich. Squirt bottles of traditional red sauce are readily available at the table. But Miss Myra’s Alabama white sauce sets this chicken apart. It’s a mayo-based marinade with vinegary undertones. Tearing into my smoked bird, the taut, crisp skin yielded to a juicy explosion of smoky flavor so wonderfully enhanced by the creamy sauce.

It’s All (Very, Very) Good

Sides include slaw, potato salad and chips. Baked beans, thick and creamy, remind me of Boston style baked beans, but without sweet molasses flavor. Unique to many Alabama BBQ shacks, the deviled eggs would make any southern mamaw proud.

Don’t forget dessert. Cool lemon ice box pie perfectly concludes a meal of smoke-cooked meats. Better yet, creamy and custardy banana pudding sets a benchmark. It comes loaded with chunks of banana and vanilla wafers whose consistency is more cake than cookie. This very well could be the best banana pudding I’ve ever had.

Several BBQs between Huntsville and Birmingham offer smoked chicken with white sauce. Miss Myra’s je ne sais quoi (and her banana pudding) put this restaurant at the top of the list. *Original Post by Dale Fine*