The Fat Chef
Chesapeake Cooking with Andrew Evans
My All-Consuming Passion—BBQ!
Barbecue is one of my consuming passions. I was fortunate enough to be asked to judge at the Jack Daniels World Invitational BBQ competition in Lynchburg, TN, and I was stunned with how good competition-quality barbecue tasted. I got goose bumps eating the stuff—no lie. The quest began right then and there to recreate that barbecue myself.
The first step was purchasing a smoker. I swear barbecue will bring the most celebrated chef buckling to his knees in frustration and humility. If Thomas Keller himself tried to cook barbecue, he would be forever shattered by a bunch of 400-pound men, standing around a smoker, Buds in hand, who have never even heard of the French Laundry. It took me four years of cooking, experimenting, and generally forcing my kids to eat really bad barbecue until I could produce something worth eating. They have no problem voicing their opinions—I can’t slip anything past those little devils!
The problem lies in the fact there is really no good information out there on how to cook competition-quality barbecue. The top teams keep all their secrets locked up like the Coca-Cola recipe. Yes, sure, go to a billion blogs and team home pages for barbecue and the information is so general and vague you would be lucky enough to make just edible barbecue, let alone competition-quality. You’re probably thinking that I’m going to spill the beans and give away two notebooks worth of notes and recipes. Ha! Not in your life. I worked way too hard to just give that stuff away. And that’s the point really: The process of learning how to cook competition-quality barbecue is like earning a Doctorate degree; no one can really just read the dissertation you wrote and have the same amount of knowledge as it took to acquire the info. It’s a process, a pilgrimage that makes cooking at the James Beard House seem like cooking family meal in your restaurant.
The competitions are a hoot too. Staying up all night through the twilight zone tending your smoker along with dozens of others teams tending theirs—everyone with a common goal of producing fat-dripping, tender, tasty meat. A thick haze of sweet smelling smoke lingers overhead, creating a mystic feel to the sea of campers, pop-up tents and smokers. The whole deal is about as ungreen as can be—a true holocaust for vegans. My girlfriend and team partner (the only person who agreed to form a team with me) once thought we should ask advice from a neighboring team headed by a 500-pound man covered with enough hair to practically conceal his wife beater T-shirt. How could we go wrong? This guy looked like he invented barbecue! He talked like it too—telling us all about the competitions and awards he’d won. “Wow, what luck!” we thought “and right next door to us, too.” We presented our sauces to him and he stuck his swollen, sausage-like fingers in each sauce, and then sucked the sauce off each finger as if he were tasting a rare wine. He then spent several minutes wistfully staring off into the sky before speaking. We looked up at him in awe, hanging on every piece of advice that could potentially catapult us into BBQ nirvana. He said “I taste cinnamon.” We sort of looked at each other, puzzled, and said, “No…” Then he said “Nutmeg?” “No,” we replied. On and on it went with not much accuracy on his part. But we had already drunk the Kool Aid and this gorilla of a man was a barbecue god to us and whatever he did or said was gold. On the other side of us was a skinny man who looked more like a high school math teacher than a barbecue guru. We exchanged pleasantries but didn’t think it was worth asking this seemingly out of place man words of barbecue wisdom. Dang, if we didn’t beat the ape in the overall score, but the professor won first place in ribs!
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