The competition is heated at the Great Lenexa Barbecue Battle. Even the best
efforts can go up in smoke -- and raw rookies can succeed.
By Eric
Slater Times Staff Writer
July 4, 2003
LENEXA, Kan. — In a
cloud of apple-wood smoke, the air swirling with the smells of top-secret spice
mixtures, Donna McClure was running out of time and patience. Finally, she
pointed a spray bottle at her minions and leapt the line between urgent request
and angry order.
"I need a rib," she snarled. "Get me a rib —
now!"
"Runners" were already hustling the barbecued pork ribs of her
competitors to the judges. One of McClure's teammates rushed forward and laid a
slab of ribs onto a square of foil. She gave it a spritz from the spray bottle.
Then she cried out in frustration.
"The foil is coming out of the box
crooked. My ribs are wrapped crooked. Arghhh. Take it anyway. Go!"
The
Great Lenexa Barbecue Battle is precisely what the name implies, a meat war,
prosecuted last weekend by 178 teams with names such as Pig Bang Theory, Squeal
of Approval and McClure's PDT, or Pretty Damn Tasty.
Lenexa is an early,
important skirmish in the greater competitive barbecue conflict, one of the
first events in an annual summer-long drive to the world championship contests.
The prize money, $2,000 to the grand champion, is important here, though often
secondary to oven-mitt trophies and ribbons and far behind the ultimate goal of
high scores that will bring invitations to the two most prestigious
events.
Sometimes fun sneaks in among the heaps of slaughtered hogs and
pseudo-scientific experiments such as the effectiveness of Rolling Rock beer as
a palatable moisturizer for alligator meat. Fun is allowed among serious
competitors, so long as it doesn't get in the way.
"We're going to Plan
B," McClure, 64, PDT's head chef, called when a smoker began to lose heat in the
crucial final minutes of her brisket work. "We got problems, we got storm
clouds. Move 'em to the other smoker. Let's go."
Slaves in the South
began to develop the current notion of barbecuing when, having only the
grisliest scraps of meat, they learned to slowly tenderize them over coal-filled
pits. Smokehouses followed, then barrels and finally modern
grills.
Somewhere along the line, apron-clad men with spatulas began
expressing their masculinity by proclaiming their burgers superior to their
neighbor's. This led first to informal beer-fueled grill-offs and, in the late
1970s, the first large, organized contest.
Since then, competitive
barbecuing has grown to include tens of thousands of chefs and grill-minders,
usually in teams of six to 10, thousands of certified judges, hundreds of
events, dozens of associations and a handful of newsletters such as the Kansas
City Barbecue Society's Bullsheet, the July issue of which contains a think
piece titled "Meat Ethics, Politics and Economics."
Although there are
numerous barbecue championships, the two considered most prestigious by KCBS —
the largest sanctioning body — are the American Royal, held in Kansas City, Mo.,
and the Jack Daniels World Championships, held in Lynchburg, Tenn. Both take
place in the fall and offer as much as $10,000 to the grand champion. (The
pork-only Memphis in May event also is a highlight.)
To compete for the
world championships, a team must win either a sanctioned contest or a state
championship. Lenexa, this year, was both.
As the sport, as some call it,
has grown, enterprising welders have taken to building $20,000 custom smokers,
complete with baffles, convection systems and delicate thermometers. Some
full-kitchen mobile barbecue trailers go for $200,000.
Dedicated
contestants such as McClure, a part-time caterer from Lenexa in her 22nd year of
competition, spend years developing their spice rubs, deciding whether pecan or
black-cherry wood smoke is best for pork shoulder, if a brush of lemon-lime
Gatorade might lift their quail breast into the finals. Since judges' palates
differ from region to region, traveling contestants must alter their recipes and
grilling process, typically going for heavier mesquite-smoke in Texas,
vinegar-based sauces in the Carolinas, sweet tomatoes and often fruitwoods for
Kansas City-style barbecue.
'Fat Equals Flavor'
"The beauty
of competitive barbecue is you take a crummy piece of meat and turn it into
art," said Carolyn Wells of the Kansas City Barbecue Society, wearing a necklace
of dried, treated pork ribs.
Of course, Wells noted, serious competitors
avoid truly crummy meat. They buy hogs specially fed for maximum fat content —
"fat equals flavor" being a culinary maxim. They buddy up to the best
meat-cutters in town. One contestant at a recent competition spent hundreds of
dollars on a brisket of Kobe beef, and still didn't win.
"OK, chicken's
ready," McClure, the 1999 Lenexa grand champion and holder of dozens of other
awards, said as she slid a final sprig of homegrown parsley between the six
golden legs.
The 22nd annual Great Lenexa Barbecue Battle began in
earnest the night before at a park in the Kansas City suburb of 41,000, the
sweet smells of barbecue luring thousands from across the city. The eve of the
fight is party time for visitors, who sample the offerings and do their best to
dance off the calories. For contestants, it is a time to dial in their smokers
and gird themselves for a long night.
The first thing competitive cookers
learn is that high heat makes for low scores. Most avoid grilling the meat
directly above the flames, preferring smokers with a separate firebox. Gas
grills are not only scoffed at but banned at most events.
Barbecuing a
brisket properly in such a smoker takes 14 to 20 hours, a pork butt or shoulder
12 to 16 hours, with constant attention to heat and moisture. Some competitors
monitor ambient humidity levels. Some baste their meat occasionally with apple
juice or spray it with an apricot/water/oil/whatever solution; some wrap them
intermittently in foil or special plastic.
Poultry was the first item on
this recent day's judging schedule, and by the time McClure had chosen the six
best of 18 legs, PDT had been grilling for more than 20 hours.
McClure's
son Mike was the runner, and he headed swiftly but cautiously toward the judges'
tent. Entries must be delivered within a 10-minute span — judges hate cold meat
— with a new category every half an hour. Once the judging begins, the contest
moves to race speed and stays there for three hot hours, tempers and tension
rising.
"The runner has to move fast and stay away from the crowd," Mike,
a 42-year-old auto parts manager, said during a brief break. "I move quick but
steady, watching for holes, watching for obstacles."
He'd delivered the
chicken in a regulation white Styrofoam takeout container marked with a number,
the chicken legs lying on a bed of leaf lettuce and garnished with the parsley —
the sum total of allowed garnishments. He handed the box to a judging
supervisor, who then took it to a table of six judges.
Judges score each
entry in three areas. They consider presentation, looking at the depth and
uniformity of the all-important smoke ring, a dark band that penetrates meats of
different densities to different levels. They rate texture and tenderness, and
finally taste, a category weighted to carry the most points.
The Task
of Tasting
Judges can drink only noncarbonated water and eat only
soda crackers to cleanse their palates. By the end of the day, the average judge
will have eaten two to three pounds of meat.
"The rookies start eating
everything of everything; you can spot 'em," said veteran judge Wayne Kelpin,
61, who wears a straw cowboy hat covered with barbecue contest pins. "Then they
throw up or quit. I go slow. I eat all of my favorite and sometimes all of my
second-favorite. The rest are just bites."
Some of the judges were
clearly rookies this day. By the end, they were pallid and sweaty, nibbling at
the final entries with their front teeth like children ordered to eat their
rutabaga or lose their Nintendo rights.
The heavy-hitters of competitive
barbecue, many of them retirees and professional or semiprofessional cooks,
secure sponsors. The choice meats, modified cookers, specialty woods and other
essentials are prohibitively costly for most.
PDT, like most teams a
changing squad of family members and friends, got their meat for free, their
beer for free, and some of their dozen tricked-out smokers at cut rates or
gratis. In return, the sponsors get to hang banners, and occasionally see a
direct payoff for their investment. After McClure won the 1999 battle on a
smoker called The Good One, its small Burns, Kan.-based manufacturer enjoyed a
notable spike in sales.
Twenty feet away, a two-family team of second-year competitors
called "You Don't Win Friends with Salad" — a named borrowed from an episode of
"The Simpsons" — had gotten just two things free: beer and their own portable
toilet.
Having placed 150th last year, the team was semi-serious about its grilling, if
a bit hung over from the free suds, as they moisturized their brisket with a finely
tuned spray that included water, vegetable oil, cayenne pepper and Guinness beer.
Still, they were less interested in the giant purple flag that is the trophy of
the Lenexa grand champion than having a fine summer time.
"We're here to eat, cook and hang out with friends," said Dan Coleman, 30, a librarian
from Kansas City. "We're in it for the fun. Some people are way serious."
Back at camp PDT,
at midafternoon in the full heat of meat battle, McClure said: "I'm focused when
I cook, serious."
"She's serious," teammate and family friend Jim Corwin,
56, said a few feet away in a hushed voice.
"Serious," said McClure's
husband Ted, 66, a retired professor of neural science who, like Corwin, stokes
the smokers, minds the temperature and generally handles the dirty work. "We're
the grunts, she's the chef. You can't have two chefs."
"How we looking,
how we looking?" Donna McClure called to no one in particular.
After
poultry, Mike McClure rushed off with the team's rib entry. They had smoked six
whole racks and decided on the two best. Donna McClure had spread more brown
sugar and honey on the chosen racks, some Parkay margarine, and then given them
a wash with her ever-present spray bottle, before carefully cutting away six
pieces. If one piece is not completely separated from another, one judge will
not taste the entry and must automatically disqualify it.
After the ribs,
McClure sent off her pork butt, then her brisket, flawless both, everyone
agreed, a passerby even offering, "Wow, nice smoke rings."
There were
three more categories: whole animal, sausage and miscellaneous, the last
bringing alligator, emu, skate, pheasant and other barbecue quirks to judges
with already addled palates. These categories came with modest prize money and
ribbons but did not count toward the grand championship. They were for fun, and
McClure was here for battle. She did not enter.
At 5 p.m. the bedraggled
barbecuers gathered to hear Lenexa Mayor Michael Boehm announce the
results.
Down the list Boehm went, heralding the top 10 finishers in each
category. Seventy times he called out team names as whoops and hollers rose from
the crowd, now just a few hundred team members and judges. Not once did he say
"PDT."
A team consisting in part of professional chefs took
first in the overall. The fun-focused "You Don't Win Friends with Salad" came
in 39th. PDT finished 71st. McClure and her team returned to their cooking site,
packed, cleaned and loaded their trailer in silence.
McClure sat down, popped
open a beer, and lamented the free-for-all nature of the Great Lenexa Barbecue
Battle, the newbies and hacks who skewed the scores and made it impossible, she
said, for the judges — many of them once-a-year types — to separate the
fun-seekers from the pros.
"I never even heard of most of these teams,"
she said. "Our ribs were good, our pork was outstanding. We've cooked in Kansas,
Arkansas, Indiana, everywhere. We know what people like. I worked more than a
week on this one, and phffft— nothing."
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