B
BrooklynQ
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I found this on Slashfood.com. It's an interesting take on competitions from the same author who reviewed NYC/Long Island BBQ for Newsday.
http://www.bbq-brethren.com/forum/showthread.php?t=15110&highlight=newsday
http://www.nynewsday.com/impulse/barsandclubs/nyc-barstory0607,0,1411082.story?coll=nyc-music-utility
Torpid Smoke
Posted Aug 23rd 2005 3:06PM by Josh Ozersky
http://slashfood.com/category/barbecuing/
The Glutton Who Got Too Much of a Good Thing was, you may remember, a favorite theme of anthology TV shows back in the day. A gambler would find himself in a hellish casino where every slot machine pull was a jackpot; a promiscuous cad was surrounded by willing bimbos, and felt only repulsion. Evenually, some such figure as Mr. Roarke or Rod Serling would come in at the end to underline the moral. But I never bought it. How could anyone get sick of a good thing? The shows struck me, sitting there stoned and alone, as tendentious – as if they were trying to reassure audiences who were likely never to see any such a surfeit of pleasure. Sitting there with my bong and a box of Old English Garlic Rounds, I was sure I had a bottomless appetite for pleasure, if only I could prove it.
I gamely tried recently at the Grill Kings New York State BBQ Championship, held at Heckscher State Park in East Islip. But I failed. Maybe the moralists were right. I smell like smoke, taste of smoke, am bloated and diseased from smoke: if they were to cut a slice of me, I'm convinced that I would have a pink ring. And that’s not a good thing: like power or pudding, barbecue is a dynamic, orgiastic pleasure. It yields all of its massive pleasure at the first bite. Satisfiedly grunting, forehead veins athrob, the barbecue enthusiast is a morlock, a throwback, a creature of the primordial past. So when you start eating barbecue in purse-lipped tastes, accepting amuse-bouche samples, you’re in trouble. Add in much magisterial nodding, and the mincing, specialized vocabulary of recipe development, and I never want to eat barbecue again.
Isn’t that sad? And it’s not just the fact that my team, Big Island Barbecue of Rego Park, lost. Sure, the judging is an idiotic process, with almost no allowance given to the prejudices and misperceptions of the judges – usually unfortunates harvested from city drunk tanks. No, it wasn’t losing that leeched the pleasure of barbecue but the whole overload. (This past weekend, at the Hudson Valley Rib Off, we won Grand Champion, and the event was still a buzz-kill.) By the standards of competition bbq, both New York State contests were only medium-sized. A small city of tents was erected, each with its own external hearth, a bomb-shaped entity with smoke coming out of one end. Some were long black B-52 blockbusters, the kind with "Dear John" written on one end; others were squat plutonium reactors, sealed with multipe O-rings. "I can cook for three thousand people on my rig," one venerable competitor told me. But why would you want to? Another team passed the time watching a 40" plasma TV set – precisely the kind of hillbilly opulence to which barbecue is supposedly the antidote. Everything at the contest seemed decadent.And I, too, had caught the contagion. I was caught up in competition, and the racing rationalization that is market culture. I was caught up in the competition nexus; barbecue was the means to an end. Was this then the thing that had chased away so much shame and solititude in my childhood? Though it had cost me at least a week’s respite from the sustaining love of barbecue, I knew I had learned some kind of lesson.
Barbecue – low-tech, unteachable, obtainable only through the slow rhythms of agricultural life – was never meant to be amplified like this. What was this place, some some kind of strategic hamlet? Or what? At contests like this across the country, an arms race has already begun, as the competitors seek more exotic spices, more unnatural chemical tenderizers, more technologically elaborate means of cooking. Chef Adam Perry Lang of Daisy May USA, a classically-trained cook with intellectual energy to burn, has upped the ante, winning the Iowa Barbquelossal with a perfect 180 score for his pork ribs and their peach-nectar accented sauce. Peach nectar? I’ll admit the sauce is out of this world. But sauce should be an afterthought to barbecue, like the reverse-cowgirl position in copulation. Slowly-smoked barbecue, exquisitely moist and pungent and fragrant with the perfume of melting fat and hardwood smoke, is all I never needed to transport me away from the pain of consciousness. And now it isn’t enough.
I don’t think I’m alone in this quandry. There was a lot of unhappiness going around at Grill Kings. For one thing, guys are losing money. The entire competitve barbcue circuit is based on the love and mystique of slow-smoking. Almost none of the competitors here – Dirty Dick’s Legless Wonders, the Pit Posse, the Grills Gone Wild, the Two Fat Polocks, Ma’s Q Crew, or the aburdly named Sir Sauce a Lot – even broke even. They all spent two days frying on an asphalt parking lot on one of the summer’s hottest days, tending fires – fires! – and keeping watch over hundreds of pounds of meticulously fabricated, trimmed, rubbed, injected, and massaged meat. And then their final product was judged in secret by a bunch of anonymous yokels. "Look, you can’t control the judging," said my friend Robbie Richter, of Big Island, philosophically. "I can only control my ribs. But there must be a reason why the same names keep coming out on top in every contest."
Really? I was unconvinced. But then I wasn’t going broke, or straining my marriage, to get it done. Still, as long as I could wander around all day, nibbling on Adam Perry Lang’s korubuta pork chops, or the crusty outer surface of Dirty Dick’s vibrant pork butt, I felt everything would be OK. Though unnaturally sated, I enjoyed talking to Dirty Dick’s stoner niece, or chatting through the night with friendly, heavy-set Ray Lampe, aka Dr. BBQ. Lampe, a former Chicago truck driver, was receiving a huge amount of publicity these days, and told me that he was beginning to be oppressed by spectators. "This one guy asked while I was boxing up [preparing his entry] if he could take pictures of me slicing brisket. I said, ‘will you get the hell out of here?’ I had three minutes until turn-in time." Lampe was appalled, as most of the barbecuers are, by the effrontery of spectators, who invariably show up with their hands out just as the weekend-long process is being compressed into its descisive final seconds.
But say this for the spectators: at least they still loved barbecue. They had been spared the endless, talmudic discourse on flavor profiles, the comparison shopping of different smokers, and the interminable debate about the effect of wrapping in tinfoil – the so-called "texas crutch" mocked by Kansas City "baron of barbecue" Paul Kirk. No, they didn’t know anything but barbecue – but then neither did the judges. And they the tablespoon of shredded pork butt they managed to steal was all the barbecue they would taste today, and they would savor it accordingly. It was Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, the communal pit vs the food court. Barbecue, now as always, favored the former. But there I was, trapped in the latter, sitting out on Long Island with a digital stopwatch and a taped photocopy of the Kansas City Barbecue Society garniture rules. I was a Hollow Man, fit only to pour commodified barbecue sauce into; but enough of me remained to mourn the loss.
http://www.bbq-brethren.com/forum/showthread.php?t=15110&highlight=newsday
http://www.nynewsday.com/impulse/barsandclubs/nyc-barstory0607,0,1411082.story?coll=nyc-music-utility
Torpid Smoke
Posted Aug 23rd 2005 3:06PM by Josh Ozersky
http://slashfood.com/category/barbecuing/
I gamely tried recently at the Grill Kings New York State BBQ Championship, held at Heckscher State Park in East Islip. But I failed. Maybe the moralists were right. I smell like smoke, taste of smoke, am bloated and diseased from smoke: if they were to cut a slice of me, I'm convinced that I would have a pink ring. And that’s not a good thing: like power or pudding, barbecue is a dynamic, orgiastic pleasure. It yields all of its massive pleasure at the first bite. Satisfiedly grunting, forehead veins athrob, the barbecue enthusiast is a morlock, a throwback, a creature of the primordial past. So when you start eating barbecue in purse-lipped tastes, accepting amuse-bouche samples, you’re in trouble. Add in much magisterial nodding, and the mincing, specialized vocabulary of recipe development, and I never want to eat barbecue again.
Isn’t that sad? And it’s not just the fact that my team, Big Island Barbecue of Rego Park, lost. Sure, the judging is an idiotic process, with almost no allowance given to the prejudices and misperceptions of the judges – usually unfortunates harvested from city drunk tanks. No, it wasn’t losing that leeched the pleasure of barbecue but the whole overload. (This past weekend, at the Hudson Valley Rib Off, we won Grand Champion, and the event was still a buzz-kill.) By the standards of competition bbq, both New York State contests were only medium-sized. A small city of tents was erected, each with its own external hearth, a bomb-shaped entity with smoke coming out of one end. Some were long black B-52 blockbusters, the kind with "Dear John" written on one end; others were squat plutonium reactors, sealed with multipe O-rings. "I can cook for three thousand people on my rig," one venerable competitor told me. But why would you want to? Another team passed the time watching a 40" plasma TV set – precisely the kind of hillbilly opulence to which barbecue is supposedly the antidote. Everything at the contest seemed decadent.And I, too, had caught the contagion. I was caught up in competition, and the racing rationalization that is market culture. I was caught up in the competition nexus; barbecue was the means to an end. Was this then the thing that had chased away so much shame and solititude in my childhood? Though it had cost me at least a week’s respite from the sustaining love of barbecue, I knew I had learned some kind of lesson.
Barbecue – low-tech, unteachable, obtainable only through the slow rhythms of agricultural life – was never meant to be amplified like this. What was this place, some some kind of strategic hamlet? Or what? At contests like this across the country, an arms race has already begun, as the competitors seek more exotic spices, more unnatural chemical tenderizers, more technologically elaborate means of cooking. Chef Adam Perry Lang of Daisy May USA, a classically-trained cook with intellectual energy to burn, has upped the ante, winning the Iowa Barbquelossal with a perfect 180 score for his pork ribs and their peach-nectar accented sauce. Peach nectar? I’ll admit the sauce is out of this world. But sauce should be an afterthought to barbecue, like the reverse-cowgirl position in copulation. Slowly-smoked barbecue, exquisitely moist and pungent and fragrant with the perfume of melting fat and hardwood smoke, is all I never needed to transport me away from the pain of consciousness. And now it isn’t enough.
I don’t think I’m alone in this quandry. There was a lot of unhappiness going around at Grill Kings. For one thing, guys are losing money. The entire competitve barbcue circuit is based on the love and mystique of slow-smoking. Almost none of the competitors here – Dirty Dick’s Legless Wonders, the Pit Posse, the Grills Gone Wild, the Two Fat Polocks, Ma’s Q Crew, or the aburdly named Sir Sauce a Lot – even broke even. They all spent two days frying on an asphalt parking lot on one of the summer’s hottest days, tending fires – fires! – and keeping watch over hundreds of pounds of meticulously fabricated, trimmed, rubbed, injected, and massaged meat. And then their final product was judged in secret by a bunch of anonymous yokels. "Look, you can’t control the judging," said my friend Robbie Richter, of Big Island, philosophically. "I can only control my ribs. But there must be a reason why the same names keep coming out on top in every contest."
Really? I was unconvinced. But then I wasn’t going broke, or straining my marriage, to get it done. Still, as long as I could wander around all day, nibbling on Adam Perry Lang’s korubuta pork chops, or the crusty outer surface of Dirty Dick’s vibrant pork butt, I felt everything would be OK. Though unnaturally sated, I enjoyed talking to Dirty Dick’s stoner niece, or chatting through the night with friendly, heavy-set Ray Lampe, aka Dr. BBQ. Lampe, a former Chicago truck driver, was receiving a huge amount of publicity these days, and told me that he was beginning to be oppressed by spectators. "This one guy asked while I was boxing up [preparing his entry] if he could take pictures of me slicing brisket. I said, ‘will you get the hell out of here?’ I had three minutes until turn-in time." Lampe was appalled, as most of the barbecuers are, by the effrontery of spectators, who invariably show up with their hands out just as the weekend-long process is being compressed into its descisive final seconds.
But say this for the spectators: at least they still loved barbecue. They had been spared the endless, talmudic discourse on flavor profiles, the comparison shopping of different smokers, and the interminable debate about the effect of wrapping in tinfoil – the so-called "texas crutch" mocked by Kansas City "baron of barbecue" Paul Kirk. No, they didn’t know anything but barbecue – but then neither did the judges. And they the tablespoon of shredded pork butt they managed to steal was all the barbecue they would taste today, and they would savor it accordingly. It was Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, the communal pit vs the food court. Barbecue, now as always, favored the former. But there I was, trapped in the latter, sitting out on Long Island with a digital stopwatch and a taped photocopy of the Kansas City Barbecue Society garniture rules. I was a Hollow Man, fit only to pour commodified barbecue sauce into; but enough of me remained to mourn the loss.
