A sandwich 5 years in the making

One of my favorite shows on Food Network is "Best Thing I Ever Ate."  Each week has a theme and it just has a bunch of talking head interviews with celebrity chefs or food personalities who wax poetic (is that how I use that term?) about their favorite dish spliced with footage of the dish/restaurant/whatever.  I dig how everyone is just so passionate about what they'r eating. Cat Cora mentioned this sandwich here at about the 3 minute mark at a place in Santa Maria that looked really good.  I always wanted to go to Santa Maria to try their barbeque back when I lived in Santa Barbara 5 years ago, which is just about 1 1/2 hours south of there.  Supposedly it's one of these great traditional barbeque enclaves like Kansas City or Memphis with their own unique culinary specialties you can't find done well anywhere else.  I never made the trip there but maybe one of these days when I'm traveling up and down California.  Anyway, the traditional cut of meat of Santa Maria is tri-tip, and I saw a smaller 2 1/2 pound roast for sale wandering the meat aisle at S-Mart after checking out the discount produce.  I figured I'd finally try making it myself during the long Easter break.  I probably spent like 4 hours going to 3-4 stores collecting the right things, like going to OSH to get wood for smoking, Safeway to get bread, another grocery store which I knew had a wider variety of barbeque sauces, balsamic vinegar, etc.

Preparing the Santa Maria style salsa and tri tip was pretty simple.  I followed most of this recipe for the salsa.  Most of the traditional recipes for Santa Maria tri tip uses like a dry rub consisting of garlic powder, garlic salt, pepper, and dried parsley.  I don't have garlic salt and just used garlic powder and salt and  added in fresh garlic and parsley for more flavor (I apparently forgot at the time that fresh garlic and herbs burn on the grill).  I used some hickory chips for smoking and cooked it on a gas grill over high heat for a few minutes and then over indirect heat until a digital thermometer read around 132 ish.  Not sure if anyone knows what a digital thermometer is but you leave a metal probe inside the meat and a coated wire comes out from it, and I ended up burning my finger trying to take the probe out after cooking.  Sort of sucked. 

The sandwich was really good overall, probably one of my better dishes I've cooked in a while.