ROAD TRIP 2006: WESTWARD, DAYS 2 – 4

Note: this is a slightly under-edited version, and I still need to add some photos, but I thought I’d update while I have an internet connection.

Day 2 (6/9): D.C. to Asheville

Hoh boy, the trip begins in earnest, with many changes to the routine. Change the first: I have company, a certain Dave Ticehurst, fellow Eph, former astrophysicist, certified KCBS BBQ judge, and high school teacher at the Christ School for boys in Asheville, NC. As has become my road trip habit, I turned on This American Life to ward off boredom, and not ten minutes in Dave exclaimed, “Fucking liberal asshole!” Oh Dave.

I’m currently in Dave’s apartment, just after having returned from Perry’s BBQ, a favorite of Dave’s in Black Mountain. Had some excellent pulled pork that far exceeded any bbq I’ve had since the last time I was in this state, so make that change the second. Changes the third through infinity involved the clientele. Minutes after Dave and I sat down to feast, a large group of kids began to swarm outside. Dave wondered alloud if they were a church group or something. Eventually cottoning to his silent but intoned “nudge nudge,” I turned around and saw 40 fourteen-year-olds and their chaperones holding hands and praying in a large circle. Then they piled in, made their orders, and filled the remainder of the tiny place.

Since they hadn’t had any ribs ready when we ordered, we got back in line behind the God mob for a second order. One of the waitresses emerges with three plates of chicken tenders. The chaperone informed his mob that there were only three servings of this apparently popular dish. “Now, we don’t have the miracle of the fish and the loaves here kids, so you’ll have to decide amongst yourselves.” To this, one of the students replied, “I think Brittany should get one, because she said the blessing.”

I should note that these all seemed like normal kids, and their chaperones were friendly people, it’s just they all seemed to believe that Jesus was their best friend, which I always find deeply disturbing. Also, who orders tenders in a bbq joint?! That’s sacrilege.

Day 3 & 4 (6/10 & 11): Blue Ridge BBQ Festival

By far one of the most anticipated stops on my trip was the Blue Ridge BBQ Festival, not only for the chance to witness Dave practice his true vocation as a certified KCBS BBQ judge, but also because Dave claimed that there is no better BBQ made than the kind produced in competition. However, only a handful of competitors make food for the public. The rest cook small batches for the judges only. To taste this rare fare, one must either be a competitor, a friend of a competitor, a judge, or a volunteer (volunteers get to eat the leftovers). Dave insisted that I volunteer to gain access to the holy “grazing table,” so I procrastinated, naturally, and finally signed up about a week ago. When I tried to register Saturday morning, my name was on no lists, and I was told that they did receive my registration, but they had no idea what to do with a California address. One would imagine that a California address is much like any other address, insofar as you can write it on an envelope much as you could one from, say, Tryon, NC, and expect your package to arrive at said address in a timely fashion. Nevertheless, I wasn’t even in California when they would have mailed it, and I frankly wasn’t that keen on volunteering anyway, so no loss. Uh, except for the meat, WHICH I ended up sampling anyway. Suckers!

But back to Friday. We arrived in the early evening with parking pass that read “Judge” and a cooler full of beer. I can drink about 4 bottles of beer in sequence, and we had 12, which suggested that in a few hours, Dave would be hollering and breaking things and I would be severely depressed (not because of Dave, mind you. That’s just my normal drunken state). The beer, however, was to serve a different purpose. Dave vaguely knew several of the competitors, and the beer, it turns out, was intended to transcend the vagueness. All the competitors were getting their smokers up to temperature and getting ready to put the pork, ribs, and brisket on around 11 to serve up to the judges the next day starting around 11:30 AM.

Here’s what we would do: Dave with sidle up to a group of Southern guys with a perfectly sufficient beer supply, I would follow him, and eventually one of the guys whose back had been turned at the time of the sidling would turn around and say, “Hey, howya doin’?” Dave would refresh their memory regarding his name, introduce me as his college buddy from California who ventured across the country to taste the sweet smoked meats of the South, offer all the guys some beer, which they would politely refuse. Then Dave and his one contact would natter about temperatures, rubs, sauce injection, etc., while I would listen attentively at a distance carefully chosen to maximize awkwardness. Choosing this distance is a talent I have developed over the years, and if you like, I can teach it to you, your friends, or perhaps your social club, for a mere $200 a head.

It actually wasn’t quite that awkward, and as hilarious as sauce injection might sound, I was enthralled. Each competitor we spoke to, despite claims of “just doing it for the fun,” take their meat very, very seriously. They are all meticulous in choice of sauce, rub, cooking temperatures, cooking times, types of smokers, types of wood. And let me tell you, when you combine a Southerner’s love of talk with a BBQ aficionado’s obsession, you get some serious ramblin’.

We ended up spending some time with one team, whose topic of ultimate amusement seemed to center on whether their sandals were gay or not. Cool guys, actually. We first encountered them talking to their neighbors. As Dave talked and I stood at my Awkward Distance^TM, I kept glancing nervously at this guy in a lawn chair sitting under the awning of his camper, honing a very large carving knife and (I think), eyeing us. After we eventually went over their and started talking, another, far less intimidating guy was sharpening a single knife over the course of a whole hour. I was amazed there was any knife left.

They showed us their fancy pellet-fed smoking cabinets that apparently require very little supervision, told us a bit about the circuit. One guy asked us if we’d gotten any funnel cakes yet, to which Dave replied in the negative and I in the confused, to which the assembled universally replied in the disbelieving. Never had a funnel cake? What sad little life have you been living? A funnel cake, apparently, is just particularly crinkly fried dough, and represents standard fare at carnivals and festivals, which would explain why I’ve never had one. Dave and I departed to rectify the situation. As Dave describes it, the funnel cake is like a donut, except with much more surface area to hold the grease. I would add that it is like 3 such donuts. We split one, and it was magnificently evil.

After fireworks and one last beer, we pitched a tent in the field where we parked, and fell asleep to the sweet and jarringly intermittent sounds of several massive generators powering the refrigerated trucks nearby. The next morning, after realizing that I was not wanted as a volunteer, Dave went off to judge, and I thought I’d drop by on some more of Dave’s associates who had told me I could lend a hand the day before. Paul, his wife, and his friend turned out to be incredibly friendly and generous people, and they let me hang around and help out during the competition crunch time, when the meat comes out of the smokers, onto the serving trays, and hustled over to the judging area. The cooks have only a ten minute window in which to deliver their wares in each category. Keep in mind that barbecue means slow cooking over low heat, and that these folks started cooking the previous night just before midnight, and you, like me, might think that delivering perfectly cooked meat to a 10 minutes window after 12 hours of cooking would require a team of NASA’s nerdiest. And the meat doesn’t just have to be done. It has to be perfect. The KCBS judging manual has very specific things to say on what qualifies as good bbq:

When eating a properly cooked rib, the meat should come off the bone with very little effort and only where you bit into it should the meat be removed. If the meat falls off the entire bone while biting, it is a good indication it is overcooked. . . . Rubs should be moist, have a good flavor and can be presented with or without sauce. They may be turned in with double bones, single bones, heavy meat on both sides of a single bone and some cases a touch of loin meat attached to the rib bone.

And that’s just for the ribs. Since I’m in a quoting mood, let me also recite the KCBS Official Oath for Judge Certification,

I do solemnly swear
to objectively and subjectively evaluate
each barbecue meat
that is presented.
to my eyes, my nose, my hands and my palate.
I accept my duty
to be an Official KCBS Certified Judge,
so that truth,
justice,
excellence in barbecue
and the American Way of Life
may be strengthened and preserved
forever.

I’m fairly confident this is self-conscious absurdity, but dude, objectively and subjectively? Duty? The American Way of Life?

Anyway, Paul and his wife taught me all sorts of things about competitive BBQ. Some people use gigantic and elaborate smoking rigs, others use the aforementioned cabinets, but they use much smaller and simpler Webber kettles. Coals go in the bottom, a pan of flavorful liquid goes above them for temperature stability and flavor, and above that are two racks of meat. Pork (butt or shoulder), ribs, and brisket go in the night before, but the chicken cook much quicker and go in later. When the meats miraculously finish cooking about 10 minutes before hand in, they get removed and meticulously arranged atop a bed of meticulously selected lettuce, garnished with parsley, and delivered to the judging area. This is a stressful time for the team. Is the meat done? The right color? The right flavor? Perfect pieces of chicken must be selected, of uniform size, shape, and color. Delicate racks of ribs must move from grill to tray without breaking. Pork must be pulled into shreds of just the right size, and interior and bark pieces (the bark being the darkened crispy exterior) must present themselves in just the right proportion. With meat done, arranged, and packaged, it still must make the journey through a jungle of other competitors, hoses and extension cords strewn haphazardly across the ground, through throngs of milling spectators, other runners with white styrofoam meat ordinance, across a bridged creek, and finally to the judges, where a woman silently takes the offering.

The competitors seems to get a bit anxious over their submissions, what the judges will be looking for, but, as you may have gleaned from the quote judging criteria above, the process is phenomenally subjective. With about 70 teams not every judge can judge every team, so scoring is largely a matter of a judge’s individual tastes. This all made the anxiety seem somewhat ridiculous to me, but I suppose its no worse than Olympic figure skating, which, I imagine, is barbecue’s antipodes on the globe of competition. This, of course, means that we must combine the two. Yes, you and me. Can you pull pork in the middle of a triple lutz? I think, with practice, you could.

In addition to letting me deliver their precious entries, help out around their smokers, and even season a little, Paul and his wife let me taste their wares, which were undoubtedly the finest barbecue I have ever tasted. Dave, of course, was quite right. These cooks obsess over their meat. They take better care of it than most people do their children. They live and breath this stuff. Of course their meat is better. But still, unbelievable moist and tender chicken (if you’ve ever grilled chicken you know how tough that is for mortals), rib meat that, amazingly, did exactly what you read in those KCBS judging criteria, and pork that just defied human cogitation. I may have blacked out. So moist and flavorful that extra sauce was completely unnecessary, but with real texture. Most of the restaurant pork I’ve had has been good, tasty, but not nearly so flavorful, and usually a bit mushy. Man, amazing.

Anyway, I just need to thank Paul and his wife for letting a dorky Yankee hang out under their canopies, absorb a fraction of their knowledge, witness their expertise, and taste their fantastic meats. They gave me a real and unique perspective on barbecue and BBQ competitions that I never would have had otherwise. If you ever need to BBQ caterer in eastern Tennessee or western North Carolina, look up Paul Glavanits and Home on the Range BBQ (email).

Some other notes on the festival and the South:

BBQ team names are an art form unto themselves. Dave claims this festival’s crop of names were somewhat disappointing, but I thought Butt’s and Breasts [and several others I have now forgotten — Ed.] was pretty good. BBQ teams also have the unsettling habit of incorporating a human figure with a pig’s head in their insignia or cooking area. I found this unspeakably unsettling. Aside from the shock of glancing at a human figure only to find it is some kind of nightmarish pigman, what are we to think of people who conflate their own bodies with those of their chosen foodstuff? I think we are to think that we think too much.

Also, after a hot sunny day at a crowded festival, it is very clear to me that Southerners do not seem to have the same body image problems as the rest of us. Fat folk aplenty, as in the rest of the nation, but with bikinis, gut-hugging wife-beaters, tight muscle shirts that they tuck in under the lowest roll. My mind BSODs trying to resolve the dual impulses to a) goggle in awe and revulsion, and b) applaud their forward-thinking rejection of a false conception of beauty imposed upon us by the popular media. This metaphor, of course, implies that my brain runs Windows. Perhaps it spinning-pinwheels-of-dooms? Kernel panics? Agh, can’t – find – appropriate – computational metaphor!! *BSODs*

After decompressing reading a book under a tree by the car, I finished off the day watching an awkward alt-country duo attempting to joke about vegetarianism between songs, and the actual BBQ awards, of which Paul won two! For ribs and pork, I believe.

Although I can’t say festivals are quite my scene (people!), I had some fantastic meat and got to experience a very, very alien world first hand. Excellent experience.