This Saturday, August 11, competitors will face off in Manchester’s 1st Annual BBQ Cookoff. As in any competitive event, the staff at HippoPress wanted to get an inside track on who would dominate the contest, in order to clean up in any betting. Accordingly, we consulted the top barbecue experts in the country to find out what makes a true champion.
The first thing you have to realize is that there is a world of difference between grilling and barbecuing. Any yahoo can pull a couple of steaks out of the freezer and throw them on the grill. Barbecuing is something much more spiritual.
The barbecue community is one of the segments of the population who are seldom seen, like “horse people” or “beauty pageant people”-made up of otherwise rational people who share a hobby or interest that has grown to take over their lives.
You particularly see this in the South. Barbecue is primarily a southern tradition.
Throughout the South, barbecue pits and barbecue competitions are a way of life. Grown men (and it’s an almost universally male phenomenon) devote their lives to achieving the ideal barbecue-a piece of meat that has been slow-cooked to perfection with exactly the right combination of smoke and marinade, spicy but substantial, incredibly tender but chewy at the same time. Perfect barbecue is something of a Holy Grail south of the Mason-Dixon line.
“William Byrd, in his eighteenth century book, The Secret History of the Dividing Line Betwixt Virginia and North Carolina has some pretty snippy things to say about some Southerners’ predilection for pork. He writes that hog meat was, ‘the staple commodity of North Carolina and with pitch and tar makes up the whole of their traffic these people live so much upon swine’s flesh that it don’t only incline them to the yaws and consequently to the [loss] of their noses, but makes them likewise extremely hoggish in their temper and many of them seem to grunt rather than speak in their ordinary conversation.’
‘Yaws,’ of course is an infectious tropical disease closely related to syphilis. Perhaps because of natives like Byrd, Virginia is frequently considered beyond the parameters of the ‘barbecue belt.’”
Nobody’s sure precisely where the term “barbecue” actually came from. It might be a Creole phrase from French -“barbe a queue” meaning “from head to tail, or it could come from a Caribbean word “barbacoa,” which describes a particular method for cooking meat. We do know that it first came to prominence in the South.
Barbecue as a social institution has been a tradition there for over two centuries. George Washington’s first political fund-raiser was a barbecue. Barbecue is something like a religion for southern men. Talk to any southern pit-man and he will talk to you in the same cadence as a fire-and-brimstone preacher, almost singing as he talks about peachwood fires and dry rubs, his eyes glowing with fanaticism.
This begs a question - is it even possible to do proper barbecue in New Hampshire? There aren’t many hard-and-fast rules about barbecue, but there are a few: 1) It must be slow-cooked over indirect heat. 2) It should be pork - Texans are considered to be something of heretics in this regard because of their propensity for using beef. 3) It should be cooked over a wood or charcoal fire-never gas. And most importantly, it has to be cooked in the South. Is attempting it in Manchester a fool’s errand?
According to Dianne Hampton, it is. Hampton is the Marketing Director of the May in Memphis Festival, which hosts the Barbecue World Championship each year in Memphis, Tennessee. She has strong opinions about barbecue.
“There is no such thing as Northern barbecue,” Hampton said in a telephone interview with HippoPress. “It was invented here, refined here and perfected here. How it’s even served north of the Mason-Dixon, we’re not even sure.”
Barry Pelts was more diplomatic, but agreed. Pelts is the President of Corky’s Ribs & BBQ, a chain of Memphis rib-joints. The key to great barbecue, Pelts said, is patience, which he sees as a primarily southern virtue.
“We cook some of our meat for 24 hours,” he said from Memphis. “Nobody but a Southerner is going to cook a piece of meat for 24 hours. There is too much going on in the North to devote that kind of time. It’s a matter of focus.”
HippoPress reached Steven Raichlen on his cell phone on a TV set in Seattle, where he was promoting his new book, “How To Grill,” which is currently the best-selling cookbook in the U.S. His previous book, “The Barbecue Bible,” is considered a modern classic in barbecue circles. He is less pessimistic about the possibility of good Yankee barbecue.
“Real barbecue is a matter of technique and state of mind,” he said, “not geography. The essence of the whole experience is woodsmoke and attitude.”
The final authority on the subject may be Myron Mixon, the Grand Champion from this year’s Barbecue World Championship. He told HippoPress that cooking great barbecue is a matter of dedication and backbone. He knows what he’s talking about. Mixon and his team from Vienna (pronounced “Vye-enna-like the sausage”), Georgia compete in more than 30 barbecue competitions a year. Since 1996, they have carried home over 400 trophies. Last year, Mixon cooked over 8,000 pounds of meat in competition. He has-and this, frankly clinches the matter -a representative at the slaughterhouse who scouts pigs for his team before they make their last great sacrifice.
According to Mixon, the seeds of barbecue greatness lie in overcoming adversity. The greater a cook’s suffering, the better his barbecue. Obviously, this does not rule out credible barbecue in Manchester. The important thing, he says is to get your head on straight by investing in proper equipment -proper smokers and cookers capable of handling 200 pound hogs in one piece.
“And you have to learn to use this equipment,” Mixon said, “and that means really using it-not hauling it out once a week or so.”
What makes great barbecue, he said, is learning to turn defeat into victory. “Anyone can cook good barbecue when everything is going right,” he said, “when your wood lights and the weather is good and the meat cooks evenly. What separates the men from the boys is who can operate when things aren’t optimal.”
