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Judgment day for the pit zealots

Last month, in a back parking lot in a nondescript Tacoma neighbourhood, the faithful gathered to seek perfection

By G.D. Maxwell

"There is food... and then there is barbeque," according to Walt. Walt, who prefers to use only one name, should know. He is a zealot, a crusader on a quest for perfection. Perfection in Walt’s world – as it should be with all things – is an ephemeral goal seldom glimpsed, only rarely achieved, and probably not even capable of definition. It’s like art; it’s like pornography. It’s just one of those things you’ll know when you see, or in the case of barbeque, taste.

If you’re a zealot, a convert, you’ll rave on and on about your quest. You’ll bore friends to tears and they’ll wonder what’s gotten into you, whether you’re playing with a full deck. Many will begin to avoid you, relegating you to the waste bin of friendship peopled by Amway sales reps, high pressure life insurance sellers and born-again fundamentalists. Others will seemingly enjoy your single-minded eccentricity, if only in smaller and less frequent doses.

Over time, your circle of friends will change, morph into a new collection of like-minded individuals. People who can hold forth for hours at a time on the unique characteristics of pecan smoke and its superiority over hickory, mesquite or apple. People who will enthusiastically and authoritatively tell you the only way you’ll ever reach the next level of perfection is by learning how to weld and build your own pit. People who will drive 200 miles on the rumour of an old-fashioned butcher who knows how to age meat to perfection. People who start cooking tomorrow’s dinner the night before because, well, because it just takes that long to do it right. Zealots. Crazies. Barbequers.

I stumbled into the suburbs of this fringe neighbourhood a little over a year ago while doing some background research for the In Search of the Holy Grill road trip. I knew competitive barbecuing existed. I knew leprosy existed. I just never expected to get too close to either one.

But every boy – gender inclusive – needs a hobby. Why do some people go gaga over orchids? What drives grown men to give their basement over to model trains? Or taxidermy? Or philately? Why not barbeque? At worst, all your clothes get smoky and your eyes sting; at best... Ahh, at best, you create a carnivore’s dream, a medley of spice, smoke and sauce – the holy trinity – and melt-in-your-mouth tenderness unique on the world of culinary creation.

By all rights, barbeque shouldn’t even be edible. You start with bad cuts of meat. You overspice them with a "rub" you’ve concocted like some mad scientist, blending sugars and salts, herbs and spices and "secret" ingredients. You then not only cook this outsized hunk of meat and connective tissue, you cook it for hours and hours and hours, up to 18 or more in some cases, and you cook it over smoke.

Smoke is a complex chemical brew. There are in excess of 200 components in smoke: alcohols, acids, phenolic compounds, and various toxic, sometimes carcinogenic substances. The toxic substances inhibit the growth of microbes in the low heat – 200°-230°F – barbeque is cooked over; the phenolics retard fat oxidation, and the whole process imparts the characteristic flavour of burning wood to the meat.

This can be heaven or this can be hell, as anyone who’s ever made the mistake of using wood from most conifers, green mesquite or any number of other trees can attest to. There are "Q’ers" who devote an extraordinary amount of their time and effort blending smokes as they blend spices. They experiment with nearly anything that will burn to come up with their own signature flavour, something to give them an edge over the competition.

Little do they know.

After mailing in their entry fee, loading up their smoker, thermometers, wood, charcoal, starter, tents and awnings, mop, tongs, cutting boards, knives, rub and coveted cuts of meat, driving hours if not days to get to the competition site, choosing a spot and setting up shop and slaving over their "creation" for the better part of a 24 hour day/night, it all comes down to the decision of a panel of judges.

And that’s where I come in. Here come da judge.

It was Paul Street’s idea but it didn’t take much convincing. Paul, Dusty’s manager and impresario of all things barbeque in Whistler, has been angling to bring the Canadian Barbeque Championships to town this August. If a number of hurdles can be overcome – like how to manage the local bear population, some percentage of whom will be driven into a frenzy by several dozen teams laying down a pall of sweet-smelling, meaty smoke – some of the best competitive barbequers will trundle up the valley later this summer hoping to win glory and an automatic ticket to the American Royals, the pinnacle of their passion.

"And we’ll need to have some local judges," Paul explained.

"I’m in," I said after considering it for about a second. After all, barbeque judges get to eat the best barbeque in the world. And that is no exaggeration. No restaurateur could prepare barbeque the way competitors do and stand any chance of staying in business. They couldn’t spend the cooking – nursing – time or be as persnickety about which cuts of meat they choose to present. And they certainly wouldn’t lovingly cook five or six racks of ribs in order to cut out the best six bones to lay in front of you, carefully weighing appearance and tenderness, discarding any with a single blemish or flaw, as though they were making an offering to... to a god.

Bob Lyon, grand poobah of the Pacific Northwest Barbeque Association, was going to conduct a judging school in Tacoma, Washington, early in April in conjunction with Paul Kirk’s barbeque pitmaster class. This was good news and bad news. It meant the barbeque I’d be learning to judge would be a blend of first-timers, hopefully gifted neophytes, and old hands who show up every year to cook some meat and chew the fat with the Kansas City Baron of Barbeque. The absurd and the sublime all rolled into one.

The schools were held in the back parking lot of Pete’s Original BBQ and Steak House in a ramshackle neighbourhood in southeast Tacoma, populated with Dollar stores, Salvation Army thrift shops and cheque-cashing outlets. Pete’s itself had seen better days, no doubt under the guiding hand of Pete, who was no longer around. The new owner, Steve Reyes, was riding on past glory, serving indifferent barbeque that didn’t live up to the accolades lining the restaurant’s entryway.

In the early dawn of an overcast, chilly Saturday morning, Team Dusty’s staked out its spot. The cooking team – Kathy Monk and Mike McCrea – had to fire up at six-o-freakin clock and for reasons still unknown, the judging team, Paul, Tony Wayland, John Cryan and I, who didn’t have to do anything until the civilized hour of 1 p.m., were right there with them instead of in bed, gently letting our blood-alcohol levels slowly subside towards normal.

Over the next hour, upwards of a dozen and a half teams hauled in equipment and set up their field kitchens. Pits ranged from upright Weber bullets – the portable pit of choice – to fancy, trailer-mounted rigs with shiny mag wheels and $20,000 price tags. At least one homemade pit was welded from a 200 gallon, stainless steel dairy tank. Several looked suspiciously like they’d started life as oil drums.

At the low end of the food chain, Matt and Michael, friends from Seattle, were there with a Weber Matt had received as a wedding present, a cutting board, a knife and damn little else. "We thought we’d stretch our repertoire to something other than hot dogs," they said, explaining what possessed them to enrol.

In stark juxtaposition, Greg from Renton, who was set up right next to them, brought enough equipment with him to start a restaurant. There were two bullets, a smallish trailer-mounted pit, a large prep table, a converted street vendor’s taco cart complete with water and electric hookups, a double burner space heater mounted on a four foot propane tank, a portable stove to boil water(?), enough cutlery to open a retail store, several coolers full of "odds and ends", and the biggest popup marquee I’d ever seen outside of a traveling evangelist show.

This display of opulence was made all the more amazing considering Greg had only been "into" barbequing for about a year. Some people wade in; some jump.

By 7:30, briskets were starting to smoke. It would be the last cut we’d judge, late in the afternoon, and the teams would have to "rush" the briskets to have any hope of having them cooked 10 hours later. Boned pork butts – shoulders – were next to be put on the fire. Paul Kirk provided the meat, gave a quick tour of bovine and porcine anatomy, discussed the finer points of muscle tone, fat and cooking strategy, and had the participants use his award-winning rub to get things going and save some time.

With the big cuts cooking and a couple of hours before ribs and chicken would take their turns in the spotlight, the class had time to delve into the more esoteric subjects of concocting rubs and sauces. While sauce generally isn’t part of a competition, barbeque without sauce is like politics without corruption – workable but not nearly as interesting.

Finally, with everything cooking, it was time for Bob Lyon to hold forth on the finer points of judging. Like any endeavour, competitive barbeque has its rules and regs, its form and style. While not as arcane as, say, judging ice dancing, it is, in the final analysis, very subjective.

"Judges," Bob explained, "have to strive to get away from some of that subjectivity. Even though the meat may not be spiced or smoked the way you’d prefer it, you have to see through your own prejudice to appreciate and evaluate how well the cook has accomplished what he set out to do."

Entries are generally arrayed in a Styrofoam, take-out container, bedded on lettuce with no other adornment. A double-blind identification system makes it impossible for judges to guess whose entry they’re tasting. Six portions are presented in each container, one each for the six judges per table.

All the samples are opened and lined up on a table and each judge evaluates every entry first on its appearance. Skills brought to bear here have nothing to do with actually cooking. They involve very, very sharp knives, clean cuts, no ragged edges, uniform colour and visual texture, and artful display.

In an ironic way, appearance constitutes the short strokes of barbeque. The best competitors, the winners, seem to spend almost no time and waste no attention on their meat while it cooks. But come time to slice and arrange, they’re models of concentration and talent. One slip of the knife, one blade less than razor sharp and the whole effort is for naught. They primp their lettuce like groomers preparing show poodles. They spray their slices with mists of apple juice or other glazes the way beauty contestants lick their lips to a fine sheen.

All evaluations happen on a scale from 9 – the best – to 1, disqualified. Every entry starts off with a 9 and has points deducted for each flaw. Tear the chicken skin when you’re slicing, lose a point. Miss the meat and cut into bone on rib, lose a point. The object is to grade the entry against the scale, not the other entries.

With appearance scores recorded, the boxes are closed and one is randomly placed before each seated judge. Now comes the fun part. Opening the container in front of me, I have to judge each one first on texture and tenderness and ultimately on taste, the score worth twice the other categories. Technique is everything at this point. You don’t taste chicken the same way you taste ribs. You bite chicken; you pull ribs. Oh the detail – oh the humanity. How’s a guy supposed to keep this all straight when all he wants to do is lay waste to his portion of whatever’s in front of him? Restraint, grasshopper.

The chicken’s a mixed bag. Obviously some of the neophytes just don’t get it. There’s a fine line between moist and jerky and some of them are dancing on the wrong side of the line. Most people submit slices of breast. Some, knowing where the tender meat hides, array six boned thighs, tinged red with smoke and spicy-sweet rub. Proceed gently; there are six portions times four categories, 24 entries to taste. And this ain’t no girly-man taste ’n’ spit wine festival.

Ribs are next. I feel like Homer Simpson, drooling and awestruck, surrounded by beautiful mahogany coloured ribs, most cooked to near perfection. Rib meat should pull cleanly off the bone but neither fall off nor stick. It needs tooth but shouldn’t be at all tough. It should be pretty close to what food in heaven will taste like, as close as some of us will ever come. One of the competitors presents double bones, a two-fer. It’s a gutsy move and I reward whomever played to my weakness for quantity with a high score.

Professional judges drink water and maybe nibble on saltines or bread to "cleanse" their palate. Sitting next to a bar, I feel compelled to drink beer and just to live on the edge, chew a little Juicy Fruit to set the stage for butt.

A well-cooked pork butt is a thing of complex beauty. Six or seven muscles, a convoluted bone, lots of connective tissue, the chances of screwing up with butt are ample. That’s why contestants have a choice – or sometimes not, depending on their skills – they can present slices or they can "pull" the pork.

Pulled pork is an art probably taught in Home Ec classes in the Carolinas and deep South but virtually unknown otherwise. The general idea is to shred the muscle fibre, lose whatever fat remains, spice the whole mess with additional rub and slap it between halves of a fresh bun. It is the best sandwich on the menu at any good barbeque restaurant and a far more fitting end for that particular cut of meat than the "picnic" ham many of them become.

I was dreading the end. Brisket was last and, in my humble opinion, hardly worth the effort. Brisket is a mean cut of meat to begin with. It’s the cow’s chest muscle – its pec – and most of it winds up as flank steak or corned beef, except in Montreal where it becomes smoked meat. The fatty cap, the deckle, may or may not be attached and part of the presentation.

There are several hundred ways to screw up brisket and wind up with your mama’s worst pot roast. There are very few ways to do it right. Tasting six different attempts to find the right way, attempts by people who 12 hours ago had never been up close and personal with a brisket, was not a pleasant experience.

In the end though, it still came down to knoshing my way through 24 samples of barbeque ranging from sublime to awful. Most were very good, some were veggie-inspiring, a couple were nearly religious experiences.

Of the various degrees and designations I can lay claim to, I can now add one more, perhaps the most useful, certainly the tastiest. Should you find yourself in need of a professional opinion on your barbeque skills this summer, just call Pique Newsmagazine . They’ll know where to find me. I work cheap.



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