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[size=+1]GOTTA GRILL: Dirty Dick goes for the gold as he competes to be the Master[/size]
From left, Rick Westhaver, 11, Jean Brown and Richard Westhaver compete together as part of “Dirty Dick and the Legless Wonders,” a team of family and friends going to the barbecue equivalent of the Olympics. (JEFF LOUGHLIN/The Patriot Ledger) By LINDSAY TAUB
The Patriot Ledger
By day, Richard Westhaver of Norwell is a plant man, with his own interior landscaping company, Mister Green Jeans. By night, he’s a barbecue chef extraordinaire, who has won more than 15 state championships since 1991 - including top honors in Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Maine, and as the reserve grand champion (second place) in New York. This weekend he’s taking his talents all the way to the barbecue equivalent of the Olympics: The Jack Daniel’s International Invitational Barbecue.
With a long line of food fanatics in his family - his parents owned and ran Rogers Restaurant in Boston and the Charcoal House in Foxboro, and his brother, Roger, is a chef for Bare Cove Gourmet, a high-end catering service in Hingham - cooking became Westhaver’s hobby.
In 1989, after attending a barbecue festival in Memphis, Westhaver took his hobby up a notch.
He started building grills (he now has 12 in his back yard). He built a smoker, started trying different types of wood to infuse their flavors into his meats, and built a 120-gallon stainless steel tank that he now takes with him on the road as his grill pit at various barbecue competitions.
Westhaver, 50, who has a degree in machinery from Quincy Vocational Technical School, transformed a 1950s-era Zarex coffee drum that he found at a stainless steel junkyard on Cape
Cod into the enormous grilling contraption it is now, with the help of a welder.
The process took about three years, and in the meantime, Westhaver experimented with various spices for rubs, tested cooking times and temperatures for ultimate tenderness, and tried new sauce recipes, all on a tiny Mecco water smoker and Weber grill, to find the perfect marriage between the elements that make him one the country’s best, if relatively unknown, barbecue phenoms.
This week, Westhaver and his barbecue team - Dirty Dick and the Legless Wonders - along with hundreds of other grilling gurus, will converge on the tiny town of Lynchburg, Tenn.
With a population of just 361, the town will be transformed into a grilling haven composed of 51 award-winning barbecue teams from across the country and international teams from Australia, Austria, Bulgaria, Canada, Croatia, Germany, Puerto Rico, Serbia and Montenegro, Slovenia, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.
There, Dirty Dick and the Legless Wonders will be one of three teams from the Boston area - including I Que of Hopkinton and I Smell Smoke!!! of Salem - to compete in the Jack Daniel’s World Championship Invitational Barbecue on Saturday.
Winners of ‘‘The Jack,’’ recognized worldwide as the end-all, be-all barbecue event, where the best of the best compete, swagger home with the coveted title of Grand Champion, are dubbed ‘‘Master of the Grill,’’ and share more than $20,000 in cash and prizes.
This is the fifth time Westhaver will be competing in the exclusive event. Even with such a memorable team name - derived from Westhaver’s nickname ‘‘Dirty Dick’’ and his firefighter friends, who he joked, ‘‘partied so heavily that by midnight on Friday, they’d be swaying back and forth and I’d call them the ‘legless wonders’’’ - they will not be alone.
‘‘All the teams have quirky, silly names, like the Paddle Wheel Porkers and the Rib Doctors,’’ he said. ‘‘It’s part of the barbecue culture.’’
To even have the chance to be invited to ‘‘The Jack,’’ a U.S. team must have won a competition in which 50 or more teams participated, or a competition of 25 teams that has been designated a state championship.
But just winning does not guarantee an invitation - with the sheer number of competitions held around the country, most teams are selected via a lottery held at the Jack Daniel’s Visitors’ Center every September.
‘‘I’m going down there to win, and I think I’ve got a great chance this time,’’ he said. The team twice has won second and third place honors in the brisket and ribs category.
Teams will compete in eight categories: Ribs, Pork Shoulder, Beef Brisket, Whole Hog, Chicken, Dessert, Cook’s Choice and Jack Daniel’s Sauce.
Six judges will rate them on appearance, taste and tenderness on a scale from 1 to 9.
All entrants put at least six pieces of meat in a 9-inch by 9-inch styrofoam box, trying to make it look as good as possible, with the only garnish allowed being green leaf lettuce and parsley. Each team is assigned a random number to ensure identities are protected and the rest is up to the discretion of the judges’ taste buds.
Westhaver packed up his trailer last weekend with the tank, tools, meat, seasonings, sauces, wood and all. Some of his team members will be along for the two-day drive to Tennessee, others will meet them there.
The team includes Westhaver’s wife, Korene; their son, Richard Tyler, 11; his in-laws, Russell and Jean Brown of Stockbridge, Vt.; his niece, Nicole Duncan, 25; his friend George Noone, a licensed electrician from Quincy; and his friends, Christina and Andy Hudena, who own a horse farm in Paoli, Pa. The two couples met on St. Bart’s 20 years ago and still go on vacation together.
‘‘The key is the preparation,’’ Westhaver said. ‘‘We’ll take two weeks to get ready, prepare all the rubs and sauces, but the rest is all done in one night.’’
The week before, Westhaver gets the meat - the beef brisket is from a rancher in Montana - Montana Legends, at $20 per pound - and the rest is purchased at the wholesale market in Boston.
At noon the day before the contest, the meat is inspected to ensure it is fresh and unseasoned. After that, Westhaver and his team won’t rest. They’ll season the meat, set up the charcoal and wood chips (he uses a combination of apple, cherry and grape), and starting at 8 p.m., the meat will begin slowly cooking. For the next 18 hours, they will check the temperature every three hours to ensure it remains constant.
While he won’t give away all his secrets, you can get a little taste. Westhaver sells Dirty Dick’s Hot Pepper Sauce at Bo-Tes Imports and Market Place on Main Street in Norwell.
‘‘It’s not the sauce we use in the competition, but it’s how we pay to get us there,’’ he said.
How he does it
Here’s how Westhaver prepares meat for championship barbecue. He describes the process for brisket:
‘‘First, I rub it with oil, then heavily season the whole thing, upside, underneath, every crevice.
‘‘I’ll let it sit out two to three hours to warm up a bit and soak up the rub, then I’ll usually start cooking at 8 p.m. at 50 degrees. The cooker heats with smoke, that has all the wood flavors, and about every three hours or if it gets dry, I spray it with apple juice.
‘‘By 8 the next morning, it’s cooked for 12 hours, so I wrap it in a double layer of foil - you don’t want it too smoky. And then right around noon, when it starts to get tender, I put a fork in it, stab it from the top. If it slides off the fork, then you know it’s ready, if it sticks on the fork, it needs more time.
‘‘When it’s done, I let it rest for a bit, cut it, then paint sauce on whole brisket and each piece. And that’s it.’’
Dick’s tricks
Dirty Dick’s Barbecue Spice
6 tablespoons kosher salt
6 tablespoons light brown sugar
2 tablespoons black pepper
1 tablespoon lemon pepper
1½ tablespoons garlic powder
1 tablespoon thyme
4 tablespoons paprika
3 tablespoons chili powder
1 tablespoon tarragon
1 teaspoon onion powder
1 teaspoon cumin
Mix ingredients together thoroughly and sift through a strainer twice. Rub into meat and refrigerate overnight.
Dirty Dick’s Barbecue Sauce
4 tablespoons butter
1 medium onion, chopped fine
½ red bell pepper, diced
2 tablespoons minced fresh garlic
3 cups ketchup
½ cup molasses
2 tablespoons hot sauce
¼ cup grainy mustard
3 tablespoons balsamic vinegar
½ cup brown sugar
3 tablespoons Worcestershire sauce
juice of 1 lemon
2 tablespoons Dirty Dick’s Barbecue spice (see recipe above)
salt and pepper to taste
Melt butter in saucepan, and add onion, garlic and peppers. Saute until onions are soft. Add remaining ingredients and simmer one to two hours. Add salt and pepper to taste.
Dirty Dick’s Barbecued Ribs
2 slabs pork spare ribs
4 tablespoons Dirty Dick’s Barbecue Spice
2 cups Dirty Dick’s Barbecue Sauce
The night before serving, skin the ribs by removing the thin membrane on the bone side of the ribs.
Rub each side of ribs with one tablespoon barbecue spice. Wrap ribs and refrigerate.
Using a Weber grill, heat 50 briquets on one side of the grill. Once the coals are ready, throw on two handfuls of wood chips. Place cooking rack over the fire and put ribs on the opposite side of the fire. Cover with lid.
Adjust top and bottom vents on the grill to two-thirds open. Place a candy thermometer in the top vent to regulate temperature. The ideal temperature for cooking the ribs is 350 degrees.
After an hour, open the upper and lower vents to maintain the temperature. Turn the ribs at that time, and spray with apple juice.
After two hours, when the ribs are done, they will be flexible and the end of the bone will be exposed ½ inch or so.
Take ribs off grill and coat both sides with barbecue sauce, ½ cup per side. Then wrap ribs in aluminum foil and seal tight. Place in a draft-free spot for 30 minutes. Unwrap and apply more sauce if desired. Enjoy!
Recipes from Richard Westhaver of Norwell, a.k.a. barbecue champion ‘‘Dirty Dick.’’
From left, Rick Westhaver, 11, Jean Brown and Richard Westhaver compete together as part of “Dirty Dick and the Legless Wonders,” a team of family and friends going to the barbecue equivalent of the Olympics. (JEFF LOUGHLIN/The Patriot Ledger) By LINDSAY TAUB
The Patriot Ledger
By day, Richard Westhaver of Norwell is a plant man, with his own interior landscaping company, Mister Green Jeans. By night, he’s a barbecue chef extraordinaire, who has won more than 15 state championships since 1991 - including top honors in Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Maine, and as the reserve grand champion (second place) in New York. This weekend he’s taking his talents all the way to the barbecue equivalent of the Olympics: The Jack Daniel’s International Invitational Barbecue.
With a long line of food fanatics in his family - his parents owned and ran Rogers Restaurant in Boston and the Charcoal House in Foxboro, and his brother, Roger, is a chef for Bare Cove Gourmet, a high-end catering service in Hingham - cooking became Westhaver’s hobby.
In 1989, after attending a barbecue festival in Memphis, Westhaver took his hobby up a notch.
He started building grills (he now has 12 in his back yard). He built a smoker, started trying different types of wood to infuse their flavors into his meats, and built a 120-gallon stainless steel tank that he now takes with him on the road as his grill pit at various barbecue competitions.
Westhaver, 50, who has a degree in machinery from Quincy Vocational Technical School, transformed a 1950s-era Zarex coffee drum that he found at a stainless steel junkyard on Cape
Cod into the enormous grilling contraption it is now, with the help of a welder.
The process took about three years, and in the meantime, Westhaver experimented with various spices for rubs, tested cooking times and temperatures for ultimate tenderness, and tried new sauce recipes, all on a tiny Mecco water smoker and Weber grill, to find the perfect marriage between the elements that make him one the country’s best, if relatively unknown, barbecue phenoms.
This week, Westhaver and his barbecue team - Dirty Dick and the Legless Wonders - along with hundreds of other grilling gurus, will converge on the tiny town of Lynchburg, Tenn.
With a population of just 361, the town will be transformed into a grilling haven composed of 51 award-winning barbecue teams from across the country and international teams from Australia, Austria, Bulgaria, Canada, Croatia, Germany, Puerto Rico, Serbia and Montenegro, Slovenia, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.
There, Dirty Dick and the Legless Wonders will be one of three teams from the Boston area - including I Que of Hopkinton and I Smell Smoke!!! of Salem - to compete in the Jack Daniel’s World Championship Invitational Barbecue on Saturday.
Winners of ‘‘The Jack,’’ recognized worldwide as the end-all, be-all barbecue event, where the best of the best compete, swagger home with the coveted title of Grand Champion, are dubbed ‘‘Master of the Grill,’’ and share more than $20,000 in cash and prizes.
This is the fifth time Westhaver will be competing in the exclusive event. Even with such a memorable team name - derived from Westhaver’s nickname ‘‘Dirty Dick’’ and his firefighter friends, who he joked, ‘‘partied so heavily that by midnight on Friday, they’d be swaying back and forth and I’d call them the ‘legless wonders’’’ - they will not be alone.
‘‘All the teams have quirky, silly names, like the Paddle Wheel Porkers and the Rib Doctors,’’ he said. ‘‘It’s part of the barbecue culture.’’
To even have the chance to be invited to ‘‘The Jack,’’ a U.S. team must have won a competition in which 50 or more teams participated, or a competition of 25 teams that has been designated a state championship.
But just winning does not guarantee an invitation - with the sheer number of competitions held around the country, most teams are selected via a lottery held at the Jack Daniel’s Visitors’ Center every September.
‘‘I’m going down there to win, and I think I’ve got a great chance this time,’’ he said. The team twice has won second and third place honors in the brisket and ribs category.
Teams will compete in eight categories: Ribs, Pork Shoulder, Beef Brisket, Whole Hog, Chicken, Dessert, Cook’s Choice and Jack Daniel’s Sauce.
Six judges will rate them on appearance, taste and tenderness on a scale from 1 to 9.
All entrants put at least six pieces of meat in a 9-inch by 9-inch styrofoam box, trying to make it look as good as possible, with the only garnish allowed being green leaf lettuce and parsley. Each team is assigned a random number to ensure identities are protected and the rest is up to the discretion of the judges’ taste buds.
Westhaver packed up his trailer last weekend with the tank, tools, meat, seasonings, sauces, wood and all. Some of his team members will be along for the two-day drive to Tennessee, others will meet them there.
The team includes Westhaver’s wife, Korene; their son, Richard Tyler, 11; his in-laws, Russell and Jean Brown of Stockbridge, Vt.; his niece, Nicole Duncan, 25; his friend George Noone, a licensed electrician from Quincy; and his friends, Christina and Andy Hudena, who own a horse farm in Paoli, Pa. The two couples met on St. Bart’s 20 years ago and still go on vacation together.
‘‘The key is the preparation,’’ Westhaver said. ‘‘We’ll take two weeks to get ready, prepare all the rubs and sauces, but the rest is all done in one night.’’
The week before, Westhaver gets the meat - the beef brisket is from a rancher in Montana - Montana Legends, at $20 per pound - and the rest is purchased at the wholesale market in Boston.
At noon the day before the contest, the meat is inspected to ensure it is fresh and unseasoned. After that, Westhaver and his team won’t rest. They’ll season the meat, set up the charcoal and wood chips (he uses a combination of apple, cherry and grape), and starting at 8 p.m., the meat will begin slowly cooking. For the next 18 hours, they will check the temperature every three hours to ensure it remains constant.
While he won’t give away all his secrets, you can get a little taste. Westhaver sells Dirty Dick’s Hot Pepper Sauce at Bo-Tes Imports and Market Place on Main Street in Norwell.
‘‘It’s not the sauce we use in the competition, but it’s how we pay to get us there,’’ he said.
How he does it
Here’s how Westhaver prepares meat for championship barbecue. He describes the process for brisket:
‘‘First, I rub it with oil, then heavily season the whole thing, upside, underneath, every crevice.
‘‘I’ll let it sit out two to three hours to warm up a bit and soak up the rub, then I’ll usually start cooking at 8 p.m. at 50 degrees. The cooker heats with smoke, that has all the wood flavors, and about every three hours or if it gets dry, I spray it with apple juice.
‘‘By 8 the next morning, it’s cooked for 12 hours, so I wrap it in a double layer of foil - you don’t want it too smoky. And then right around noon, when it starts to get tender, I put a fork in it, stab it from the top. If it slides off the fork, then you know it’s ready, if it sticks on the fork, it needs more time.
‘‘When it’s done, I let it rest for a bit, cut it, then paint sauce on whole brisket and each piece. And that’s it.’’
Dick’s tricks
Dirty Dick’s Barbecue Spice
6 tablespoons kosher salt
6 tablespoons light brown sugar
2 tablespoons black pepper
1 tablespoon lemon pepper
1½ tablespoons garlic powder
1 tablespoon thyme
4 tablespoons paprika
3 tablespoons chili powder
1 tablespoon tarragon
1 teaspoon onion powder
1 teaspoon cumin
Mix ingredients together thoroughly and sift through a strainer twice. Rub into meat and refrigerate overnight.
Dirty Dick’s Barbecue Sauce
4 tablespoons butter
1 medium onion, chopped fine
½ red bell pepper, diced
2 tablespoons minced fresh garlic
3 cups ketchup
½ cup molasses
2 tablespoons hot sauce
¼ cup grainy mustard
3 tablespoons balsamic vinegar
½ cup brown sugar
3 tablespoons Worcestershire sauce
juice of 1 lemon
2 tablespoons Dirty Dick’s Barbecue spice (see recipe above)
salt and pepper to taste
Melt butter in saucepan, and add onion, garlic and peppers. Saute until onions are soft. Add remaining ingredients and simmer one to two hours. Add salt and pepper to taste.
Dirty Dick’s Barbecued Ribs
2 slabs pork spare ribs
4 tablespoons Dirty Dick’s Barbecue Spice
2 cups Dirty Dick’s Barbecue Sauce
The night before serving, skin the ribs by removing the thin membrane on the bone side of the ribs.
Rub each side of ribs with one tablespoon barbecue spice. Wrap ribs and refrigerate.
Using a Weber grill, heat 50 briquets on one side of the grill. Once the coals are ready, throw on two handfuls of wood chips. Place cooking rack over the fire and put ribs on the opposite side of the fire. Cover with lid.
Adjust top and bottom vents on the grill to two-thirds open. Place a candy thermometer in the top vent to regulate temperature. The ideal temperature for cooking the ribs is 350 degrees.
After an hour, open the upper and lower vents to maintain the temperature. Turn the ribs at that time, and spray with apple juice.
After two hours, when the ribs are done, they will be flexible and the end of the bone will be exposed ½ inch or so.
Take ribs off grill and coat both sides with barbecue sauce, ½ cup per side. Then wrap ribs in aluminum foil and seal tight. Place in a draft-free spot for 30 minutes. Unwrap and apply more sauce if desired. Enjoy!
Recipes from Richard Westhaver of Norwell, a.k.a. barbecue champion ‘‘Dirty Dick.’’
Meat temp I presume???
