Best Food Writing 2013 (29 page)

We made it to Danville in the nick of time and rolled down Vermilion Street, Danville's main drag, with “No Vaseline” playing loudly. Ice Cube is a musician that announces your presence with authority. We were here to brook no guff from the locals. We had come to compete. To win. To take the prize away from some bumpkin and his Weber kettles and swagger out of town with a couple of local girls staring sadly as our trailer grew smaller in the distance. We quoted Bill Murray often . . . “Cinderella story . . . outta nowhere . . .”

This was my stated goal. In truth, of the seventeen teams, my best-case goal was to finish anything other than dead last.

The team next to us had an RV complete with sponsorship banners and a smoker larger than our trailer. The team across from us had a display of trophies, several of which were taller than the shortest of us. This was unnerving. The chimney-box they used merely to start their charcoal fires was nicer than all of our equipment combined and their smokers may have cost as much as the Honda Pilot in which we had arrived to the competition. We began to consider the possibility that we were overmatched. We parked with some difficulty—parallel
parking a fifteen-foot two-wheel flatbed trailer is a difficult proposition even with a hand not unsteady with nerve—and rushed quickly to the cooks' meeting, a gathering of the grim-faced men and women who comprised our competition. I had attended these meetings before, but always in the service of journalism. Today I was no journalist. Today I was a
participant.
We were addressed by Danville's mayor, who smiled a great deal and reminded me of the actor Troy McClure. He welcomed us to Danville and was very nice. The contest's organizer spoke. We were humming with adrenaline at this point, and impatient while she went on about quiet times and KCBS rules and souvenir t-shirts. We had not come for t-shirts. We had come for
trophies.
I signed a piece of paper agreeing to abide by all the rules and took away the four white-foam clamshell boxes that marked us as serious competitors. “Beer & Smoking in Las Vegas” was emblazoned on our entry form. I swelled with pride. A name is important. A name announces to the other teams that you are not someone to be trifled with. You are no backyard nebbish who brags to the nearest lawnmowers and gutter-cleaners that you make the finest ribs on the block. You are a
serious competitor.
You deserve
respect.

We took our clamshells back to our cooksite and began to plot. It was crucial to the success of our plan that the brisket go on around 9 p.m. The pork butts could wait until midnight. We opened the first round of drinks and lit cigars; an important step in the preparation of quality competition barbecue. We scurried around our cooksite, unpacking and assessing our circumstances. It had grown dark, and we realized we were hungry. We rooted through the coolers for dinner, but found only a bag of pretzels and some Combos left from the trip down. In our haste to pack all the things we needed to dominate the competition, it had slipped our minds that we would require a meal or two before our meat was ready to feast upon. Thus it was that, at nine p.m. and surrounded by fine barbecue cooks from all around the Midwest, I found myself on the telephone in an argument with a sour employee of Papa John's about delivering pizza to a parking space on Vermilion Street. He insisted that a physical address was necessary, and that I was not making a reasonable request in urging him to deliver to “the green Honda Pilot parked two hundred feet north of Main Street.” I saw the strategic need to concede to this rigid corporate policy and pretended I was a late-working drone at the law firm
across the street. The driver arrived forty-three minutes later, and I intercepted his dogged effort to deliver pizza to a closed law firm by vigorously explaining the complexities of the situation until he fled.

We began preparing the brisket. I had visited a meat-cutter in Chicago, and we were well-supplied with animal flesh. One whole untrimmed brisket, two monstrous pork butts, four slabs of fine St. Louis cut spare ribs, and sixteen pale chicken thighs on the bone. We stripped the brisket from its Cryovac packaging and rubbed it with yellow mustard. The mustard is flavorless, but ensures the spices adhere. We expertly covered the brisket in a spice mixture of my own devising. I had packed enough brown sugar and kosher salt to rub a dozen briskets, and to the salt and sugar were added seasonings of a dozen types. When rubbing something that will be smoked for more than twelve hours, there is no room for subtlety. You need
bold flavor.
There were chiles of several types, a large hit of garlic and black pepper, and several exotic paprikas. We viciously punctured the meatslab with the Jaccard tenderizer. The Jaccard is a savage thing; brass knuckles with steel teeth. It chewed the brisket a hundred times before we wrapped the thing in plastic and left it to absorb the flavors of the rub.

The temperature was dropping, chilling everything. I fired the first of the two smokers, to warm the inside in advance of the brisket. The fire was a welcome presence, adding the light smell of pecan smoke to the air and warming those with the fortitude to stand close enough. We felt the need for more beer before repeating the rubbing process with the butts. The butts received much the same physical treatment, but we adjusted the ingredients. You cannot just shake a few spices over competition barbecue meat. You have to
season
it. You have to
build
a
flavor profile.
Salt is a critical aid to the osmosis of flavor, but pigmeat has an affinity for sweetness. We accounted for this by adding pomegranate molasses to the mustard and increasing the sugar in the rub as we invented. Pomegranate molasses! I felt clever for having thought of this exotic component. We crusted the pigmeat heavily with seasoning before rolling it in plastic and setting it aside to wallow in its flavor-mud.

We had some downtime now while the smoker heated and the meat absorbed. I seized this opportunity to visit with our neighbor. The banner on the RV next to us read “82's BBQ” and I stepped next door to watch the captain prepare his own meat, bearing an extra beer
as a gift to our neighbor. Jasen and his wife Leslie talked barbecue with my team for hours that weekend, speaking of other competitions they had seen, helping us acclimate to the rigors of competition, and even sharing a secret or two. Leslie led us to the nearest grocery around eleven when we ran out of whiskey and paper towels. They were so kind to us that we grew suspicious. If they hoped to become close to us and steal our barbecue secrets, they were in for a nasty surprise. If they had malevolent intention it would be much effort for nothing, because, like a great knuckleballer, our secret weapon was that we didn't know what we were going to do either.

No matter. High time to chamber the brisket and prepare the ribs. The brisket slid cleanly from the eleven feet of plastic-wrap it had taken to contain the thing into the chamber of the Pitmaster, where it would rest and cook for the next thirteen hours. Jasen and I were drinking beers and discussing high adventure when we began to wear the uncomfortable facial expressions of men when each thinks the other has farted. Eventually the smell grew powerful enough that we confessed our repulsion, and, each denying the deed, began to seek the source of the stink. A terrible realization dawned: My team members had opened the first Cryovac package of ribs and unleashed a hellish stench.

Stay calm.
Maintain.
This is no crisis. This is a speed-bump. Competition does not always go as planned. It is those who can overcome setbacks that succeed. You are prepared for this. You built in redundancy. Open the other package of ribs.

Stench! From the second package!
Now
we have a crisis.
Now
the men will be truly separated from the boys! It is midnight in Danville, and we have
no ribs.
Failure to compete in all four categories is both a disgrace and a disqualification. This cannot stand. I ran at top speed toward the stark lights of the all-night grocer two blocks away. The twenty-four-hour grocery is often a depressing place at midnight, filled with whores and thieves and dopers desperate for cookie dough and Cool Whip. I forgave the place all of it tonight, for there were four half-frozen slabs of “baby back ribs” remaining in the meat section.

Baby back ribs are the choice of no true barbecue competitor. They are small and dry out easily and provide little meat compared to the true American masculinity of spare ribs. Tonight they would
be pressed into service. Bad ribs are better than none at all, and those of us casting about for pork ribs at midnight in Danville could not afford to be choosy about the cut.

My ribs and I—and a pint of rum I felt necessary to treat the oncoming chill—raced back to our competition site, where I found my team giggling like children about the meat's disposal in a trash bin a thousand feet downwind of us. “You fools!” I shouted, “stop this. We have a
crisis to avert.”
We unpacked my treasure and prepared it, peeling membranes by feel and coating the ribs with the same rub-mixture with which we had encrusted the butts. By this time we were coming to realize that it would have been wise to bring a construction lamp, but we forged through the darkness in the knowledge that what were were doing was right, that we were the undiscovered gem of the contest. We were totally confident in our methods. We
believed.
We had no special secret or revealed wisdom. We were rolling on the high of rookie hubris, the stories in our heads full of “Rookie Team Shocks Danville Competition” headlines and shining trophies.

It was around this time that Jasen told us that, of the seventeen teams in the contest, eleven were nationally ranked.

This put a small dent in our swagger, and we pressed him for details.

“Those guys over there,” he said, indicating a camper-trailer that had a smokestack emerging from the back of the trailer, “are ranked number two in Brisket nationwide.”

“The one on the end,” he said, pointing at a mobile kitchen that looked like something a wealthy oilman would tow to tailgate at a college football home game at his alma mater, “was the number-four ranked barbecue team in America for the whole of last year.”

I considered this. He continued to reel off a lavish list of honors accumulated by the eleven major players at the contest. We began passing the bottle of whiskey from man to man as the situation came to look less and less hopeful for the four of us. I began to despair. We needed an infusion of confidence.

“So what you're saying,” I asked, “is that this competition is as though the local community college decided to hold a basketball tournament and eight members of the ACC showed up?”

He agreed that this was a fair comparison.

“So there are really two competitions here,” I said. “There is the
one among the top eleven teams, and then a lesser competition for spots twelve through seventeen?”

It was so.

It was one thirty in the morning, when the soul is hibernating, and the cold is breaking over you like waves, and the darkness swallows hope and motivation in equal measure. This called for a motivational speech. For a man in charge of a team to draw the best from them, to move them with his words, to restore their merit and motive with fine strong words. Time to speak. Time to
rally the troops.

Unfortunately, one of our number had already rolled himself in blankets and passed out in a lawn chair. He was not just asleep, he was a
goddamn vegetable.
This was ultimately a good thing, though because it allowed the two of us still awake to focus on the cigars and whiskey and to use the bravado those provide in men to talk ourselves back into the idea of staying up all night in pursuit of victory.

The temperature had dropped below the point of bearable, and I realized that it would have been wise to bring blankets or a tent. Too late for creature comforts! We had
work
to do. We moved the two smokers closer together, putting the fireboxes a few feet apart to maximize warmth. We then lit the second smoker; we needed the hot boxes prepared by 3am to smoke the pork butts properly. It was forty-three degrees on-site, and we needed the smokers to hold 225 degrees if we were to maintain hope. We loaded them with charcoal and pecan and opened the airvents wide to facilitate the combustion process. The warmth the two fireboxes provided was enough to sustain us. We put the butts on around 3am. My second teammate elected to attempt a so-called disco nap, and climbed into the Pilot for warmth. Within moments his snoring caused the green SUV to shake as if a bear had become trapped inside and gone into a panic.

Usable smokers start around $150 and go up to prices you might see paid for a fine Thoroughbred racehorse. The primary difference among the type we used, the offset-firebox type, is in the amount of effort and attention required to maintain a constant temperature: The more money you pay
for
the smoker, the less attention you have to pay
to
the smoker. Our two smokers each retailed for around $150. A good general leads his men by example. If my team needed sleep; their captain could not. I opened a small vial of electric dynamite called “Five-Hour Energy” and sent the contents sizzling into my nervous system.

And then because we had another of the little grenades, I sent it after the first, hoping to burn through the cold and the dark.

I vibrated my way through the next three hours with my heart pounding a John Bonham drum solo while I monitored the readouts of the twin probe thermometers that kept me in tune with the atmosphere inside the black barrels. Add a little wood, open the vents, watch the heat soar, trim the airflow, watch it slowly drop, repeat. I would wave in quiet solidarity to my fellow night-tenders as we rode together in the starlight. How I envied those with the means to sleep indoors, secure in the knowledge that their rich-man's smokers would hold temperature through the hours only beasts and long-haul truck drivers should see.