Best Food Writing 2013 (30 page)

At some point the beer was gone.

The sky lightened around 6am and a friendly woman with an enormous smile walked down Vermilion Street inviting the teams to breakfast. I kicked my team from their slumbers to prep the chicken thighs. I stripped the skin from the sixteen thighs and slashed the fat out from underneath while my teammates mixed a brine. The ratio of salt to sugar to water in a brine is critical. A miscalculation in the ratios can ruin everything. We had to be careful. Brining requires absolute goddamn
precision.
We would be making two gallons of powerful chicken brine, and one of the things we had forgotten was a measuring cup.

Don't panic. All is well. We just have to
convert.
We may have omitted the measuring cup, yes, but stop worrying! We have a
teaspoon.
All we need to do is some goddamn
math.
Twenty-four teaspoons of kosher salt and thirty-six of brown sugar per gallon of water. This mathematical calculation made us feel like scientists. Then to get the salt and sugar to dissolve into the gallon of cold water quickly, we had to mix it with our fingers. If not for the whiskey and the beer and the coffee and the Five-Hour Energy and the cold medicine someone had bought during the night to ward off mucus, we would have been miserable with cold. But we forged ahead, dropping the skinned thighs into the brine while saving the skins to wrap back around the juicier thighs after the brining process was complete. This was
primal.
Is there another undertaking in which you would save the flayed skin of a creature to rewrap around its dead flesh after soaking it in chemicals to improve the flavor? We were twisted enough to
rejoice in such savagery, and call ourselves brilliant for it. I was not ashamed of us then; we were in the grip of competition. No advantage was too grotesque.

Those of us who had been up all night were in the mood for coffee and donuts. The competition provided weak coffee, but I needed a strong drink. I walked across the street to the “Java Hut” for a large red-eye. A red-eye is a roiling broth of caffeine comprised of near-equal parts brewed coffee and espresso. The potion gives a king-hell rush on a normal morning but was just enough to keep me upright today. A donut also. I had had enough of cold pizza and raw meat; warm pastry and sugar soothed the stomach I had angered with alcohol and stimulants.

The rubbed and seasoned emergency ribs went into the smokers next, which required a game of Meat Tetris. We had to fit all of the meat into the two smokers while ensuring even heating; a challenge in the best of times. We were buzzing now, moving as one, with a single purpose:
Adhere to the schedule.
The schedule rules barbecue competitions like a cruel Nazi dominatrix with a whip and a stopwatch. There is no quarter from the clock. Many teams will appease this vicious goddess by posting the schedule outside near the smoker, like Texas farmers hanging coyotes from fenceposts. We had nothing to hang a schedule from, and relied on cellphone alarms and focus. 8am: Ribs go on. The next will be the chicken, at 10:30. We return our focus on the coffee, and begin preparing our clamshells. This is easy: Beds of greenleaf lettuce. I will have no truck with chopping a million sprigs of parsley.

The cold wet chicken comes out of the brine at 9:30, and we begin patting it dry. I pause in my Hannibal-Lecterish wrapping of the meat in its own scraped skin to demand music. A cold September morning in central Illinois calls for plenty of pounding bass to get the blood flowing. We load up a playlist filled with references to shaking booties and capping asses and the city of Compton in California and get to business on the birds. We season the thighs with flavored salts only, relying on the molasses and sauce to flavor the sole bite most judges will take. Outside of a bloody bite of rare birdflesh, there is little more off-putting on a chicken thigh than the grit of dry seasoning on moist dark meat. We are careful and attentive. That's something we have lasered in on by this point: attention to detail. We have
no other choice: In our current state, which combines serious sleep deprivation with advanced caffeination and mild hangovers, we have only two settings, Seriously Hyperfocused and Off. We must choose the former as we cannot allow the latter. Vigilance.

Okay. All the meat is in. The boxes are ready. The knives are sharp. The tables are sparkling clean. You could
lick
our tables safely, even after the gory horrors of the chicken. We are
ready. Poised.
The team is moving as one now. We are
in the zone.
We have an hour before the first turn-in. Desperate to not lose momentum, we light fresh cigars and add rum to the coffee. We are loose and ready. We are anxious as dogs to have a shot at the meat.

We are also unnerved, for the brisket has been hanging at 145 degrees for many hours. We had been warned this would happen, that brisket “plateaus” before rocketing up to the 195 degrees at which we pull it off and rest it. I pull out my cellphone and text the Big Woodie team, who affirm this phenomenon. My pulse quickens: We are
out on the edge
now. “Timing is critical!” I shout at a passing family. If our brisket is not complete by one-fifteen, we will be submitting
undercooked brisket.
I did not stay up all night, jangling from the double-shot of Five-Hour Energy, to submit an undercooked brisket. I monitor the temperature in the smoke chamber closely and rail at God and physics.

The chicken is due in at noon. Six pieces, one for each of the American citizens with a judge's certification from KCBS. We choose to submit eight. Let them pick from a box of plenty. This is goddamn
America,
after all. Gluttony matters. Overstuffing the box is a sign of
prosperity.
The judges will respect prosperity; it makes them think we had so much magnificent product to submit that we could not bear to choose only six. We choose from the sixteen candidates the eight pieces most pleasing to the critic's eye and arrange it in the box. Artfully, artfully; it would not
do
to give away our nervous inexperience with a sloppy arrangement. The box is away, run into the judging area on feet floating on hope. We seize the opportunity, in the down time, to taste the chicken.

Shock. Awe. This is goddamn
staggering.
These chicken thighs have outpaced not just anything I thought we could make, but anything I thought could be made of chicken thighs at all. They are juicy and tender and so flavorful I begin to wonder if I am hallucinating, if I
will look up from a bite of this extraordinary birdflesh to see a lizard lumbering toward me from Jasen and Leslie's RV, a dead chicken of its own hanging from slavering jaws.
Maintain.

The ribs are next. We begin to slice them apart with a sharp folding knife and are foiled. The goddamn cheap factory-farm ribs, the ones that replaced the spoiled mess, are themselves awful. They are crosshatched with chunks of knuckle and cartilage, and tough as shoes. What edible meat there is is delicious, but it is like eating the meat from a rabbit's foot—all tiny bones and morsels.

Nothing to be done. While these ribs are a sure last place, no ribs at all is a disqualification. We man up, determined to own our mistake like adults. Like proud
Americans.
We retouch the veneer of sauce with an artist's paintbrush of molasses, and stack them prettily in the box. Presentation counts, and we may do well aesthetically with these hideous cartilaginous fingers until someone bites into them.

The brisket is rising again. 178 degrees. It has one hour to go.

Pork is next. We pull off the butts from the smokers to rest before pulling, and begin to strip the bark from the swine to test the flavor profile. Holy god. The flavor of the butts' outside is astonishing.
How did we make this black magic?
It is dark and rich and smoky and sweet and piggy all at once. My head swims. I cannot begin to imagine how we did this, though I could recount every step from slicing open the Cryovac to tasting this bit of pigskin.

“Sorcery!” I shout to a child staring hungrily at my cutting board. He flees.

We pull the butts into shreds with two savage torture-forks, season the pulled meat, and pile twelve ounces of it majestically in the foam container. We are salivating like starving mongrels at the sight of this meat. The judges cannot help but do the same, we reason. They are flesh and blood and appetite. They are human. They will swoon. They will be entranced. They will
lust for our butts.

That last notion causes us, so tired that everything is much funnier than it should be, to have to sit down. “Lust for our butts!” we shout, laughing maniacally, like men who have been sniffing ether for hours rather than pecan-wood smoke.

The brisket is a photo finish. We watch the temperature climb and the clock tick the way that men strapped into Old Sparky watch the clock and the phone with equal trepidation. Finally the governor
calls—195 degrees! We have ten minutes. We gently separate the flat from the point with a machete sharpened for the purpose. One of the team bought the machete from a fat Samoan, which is a good sign. The flat of the brisket is sliced to the thickness of a Camel cigarette, while the point is returned to the grill to sear before we chop it into burnt ends. We taste the brisket, and we are turned to gods.

We did this. Humans. Men. Those of us who stayed up all night made the chest-muscle of an ordinary cow into this slice. We have created something otherworldly. We chop and taste the burnt ends, and we realize that if we do not rush this entry to the judges at highway speeds, we will consume it all in minutes, like hungry wolves shredding the carcass of a jackrabbit.

We slice the brisket with care, arranging six slices of tender flesh around the six handsome succulent chunks of burnt ends. It pains us to give up so much delicious brisket. We begin to discuss how anyone could possibly have made a superior brisket that day, or ever. But I have been up for more than thirty hours, and the job is done. I collapse in a chair, head lolling, and find involuntary oblivion for two hours.

The sun stabs me in the eyes so painfully I briefly wonder if I have been assaulted by a deranged cook wielding the Jaccard tenderizer. I force myself awake. I have slept two hours to little effect. I am exhausted. The team has organized us somewhat, but we still have a lot of packing and cleanup to do. I rise from the chair, joints screaming, and begin restocking the trailer.

Good god, there are a lot of empty bottles.

We scrape the hot coals from the smokers and drain the grease as best we can. The coolers are lightened considerably, but we again make use of their rectangular bulk to block the smokers in place as we strap them to the trailer rails. The wood and charcoal are gone. The cooked meat is packed in coolers with ice. We hitch the trailer to the Pilot and walk stiffly to Temple Plaza, a tiny park on Vermilion Street that serves as the awards site. Local worthies in suits are speaking, but I ignore their jabbering. I am thinking about our trophies. Our meat, save the ribs, was magnificent. We had triumphed. We had
barbecued.
We
surpassed expectations.
I was proud as could be already, and this made me believe we could compete with the big boys. Seventeen teams. Surely we were in the top ten. I had tasted
our barbecue, and it was better than anything I had ever had. I believed it better than anyone had ever had.

The woman who organized the contest began to call out winners. She would call out the top ten finishers in each category. As fine a job as we had done with our meat, I prepared myself for how I would react when she called out “
Beer and Smoking in Las Vegas
!” I would walk up, accept the envelope and the trophy, and nod modestly at the photographers from the local newspaper and the teams who stared enviously at my prize. There will be no hooting and waving. Act like you've been there before.
Dignity.

She never called us.

All of that sublime,
ambrosial
meat, and not a single top-ten finish in
any
category? I began to fume. Some Nazi swine had rigged the contest. This was predetermined, like professional wrestling or Nixon's election. We had been robbed of a rightful prize. I was jabbering like an ape when I received the complete rankings and final scoresheet.

NOT LAST! NOT LAST! HOLY SHIT! NOT LAST! SIXTEENTH OF SEVENTEEN! HOLY SHIT! NOT LAST!

“Beer and Smoking in Las Vegas” has a future here. I have refining to do. Practice.
Analysis.
My team needs to be strengthened with specialists. I need to improve the equipment and the planning. I must practice. I have
work
to do. But it can be done. I was dehydrated and exhausted and hungover, and just sick enough to be totally confident.

 

 

C
HICKEN OF THE
T
REES

By Mike Sula

From
Chicago Reader