The Man Who Ate Everything (41 page)

Some teams skin their ribs, and some do not; all of them argue about which is the best policy. The tough membrane lining the underside of the bones may hold in moisture, but it prevents the penetration of smoke and spice. When any cut of pork is exposed at length to hardwood smoke, its outer layer takes on a rich pinkish tint, sometimes as much as an inch into the meat. In Texas, entries are judged on the depth and color of this “smoke ring.” In Memphis it is simply a harbinger of deeply flavored meat. For some odd and unaccountable reason, the tasty, crunchy part of a barbecued rib does not matter. “It may taste great,” the head judge explained to me, “but it’s not Memphis barbecue.”

As pork is barbecued, it goes from tough to tender to mushy, and it can dry out if it is not cooked in moist surroundings. Competition cooks often use a thick glaze to mask a mushy or dry entry. On the barbecue pit, ribs pass through the perfect state of doneness for only fifteen minutes. If the bones slip right out of
the slab, the ribs are mushy; if the meat refuses to separate from the bones, it is tough. As with all pork barbecue, the meat must have body but separate easily from itself with a gentle pull. Most teams throw on a fresh slab of ribs every twenty minutes for two hours early in the morning so that one slab will be perfectly done six hours later for each of the three judges. An hour or two afterward, perhaps on an auxiliary grill, they begin again—just in case the team reaches the finals and needs some fresh slabs for the second round.

A whole hog must weigh at least eighty-five pounds (suckling pigs do not count in Memphis) and is cooked either whole or halved down the spine, on its back or on its belly, for twenty to twenty-six hours, with or without its head and feet, skinned or unskinned. (The skin of a mature pig is too thick and tough to eat.) Whole Hog teams stay up all night before judgment day, basting and fussing and adjusting the heat. The challenge of barbecuing a whole hog is to get the huge, thick shoulder (the mass of muscle above the front leg) and the ham (above the hind leg) done at the same time as the delicate central portions of loin and rib—while making sure that the flavor of spices and smoke penetrates deep inside the hog. Accordingly, a Whole Hog judge must sample, at the very least, pieces of the shoulder, the ham, and the loin. He or she is also allowed to taste the delightful bacon and the amusing rib section, but these cuts do not count.

A pork shoulder can weigh fourteen to twenty pounds and in its raw state is riddled with fat. The trick is to cook it long and slow, without drying out the meat, until every bit of fat disappears and the cooking flavors permeate every morsel. This is even more difficult under Memphis rules than elsewhere, because an official shoulder must include both the picnic shoulder and the Boston butt, which together make up a vast quantity of meat and bones. An on-site judge should ignore how easily the leg bone slips from the meat; the team may have cut it out earlier and replaced it. Instead, he or she should sample one piece of meat from the very center and another from the crispy, flavorful
coating known as bark. Blind judges cannot determine whether a shoulder was properly cooked, because a team with an underdone shoulder can pack into their Styrofoam box only the ten-derest pieces.

Just after noon, judging in the Ribs division began. The first team to which I was assigned was the Sporty Porkers from Vienna, Georgia (pronounced “Vy-anna” and home of the Big Pig Jig, Georgia’s official championship event), sponsored by the Pitts Gin Company. Its area in the park was carpeted with Astroturf and surrounded by a wooden rail fence. Captain Danny Cape greeted me at the gate, introducing himself and the other members of the team, all trim and immaculate in their snappy Day-Glo yellow T-shirts with black inscriptions. “Deep in my heart,” Cape told me as he led me to their huge black cooker, “we feel that the rib we’ll serve you today is a top-notch rib. It’s got an excellent chance to win the world championship.” Sporty Porkers won third place in Ribs in 1991, nothing last year.

Cape explained that their loin back ribs had been bought from a local farmer in Georgia. The underside ribs had been skinned with a wide and toothy catfish skinner; rubbed with secret spices (a combination of Cajun seasonings, lemon pepper, and a pinch of garlic salt); then put on the grill. The Sporty Porkers’ fuel is Natural Glow hickory charcoal and blocks of hickory wood, their temperature is 200 to 225 degrees, their fire is started at four in the morning, and their total cooking time is nine or ten hours. For the first eight hours, the ribs are placed on their long edge in an angled rack thirty-three inches from the coals. As the cooker has no exhaust, the steam created when the juices drip from the meat down onto the coals keeps the atmosphere moist. For the last hour of cooking, a light coat of finishing sauce is brushed on.

“We feel really good about these ribs,” Cape told me as he opened the cooker to reveal a perfect slab of ribs. (Under Memphis rules, a judge’s first view of a sample of rib, shoulder, or hog must be right there on the grill.) Then Cape led me to a striped
tent decorated with hanging ferns and two pots of yellow daisies. In the center was a small table set just for one. He placed a single rib on my plate next to a little bowl of sauce—the result, he explained, of six years’ experimentation with Hunt’s ketchup, red and black pepper, chili powder, and French’s mustard, plus cayenne, brown sugar, and apple-cider vinegar. “We feel they’re the best ribs we ever cooked,” Cape continued. He offered me juice, tea, beer, wine, or cold water. Soberly, I chose water.

I took a bite out of the rib meat. It had been carved in “competition cut,” one bone flanked by wide strips of meat. If a team is especially confident about the tenderness of its product, it will serve you what is called “two bones with big meat on either side” and invite you to separate the bones yourself. With perfectly cooked ribs, the meat between the bones should separate down the center and not from the bones. Competition cut denies you that opportunity; it is the conservative choice, but it is less revealing.

I had rarely tasted ribs as good as Sporty Porkers’—sweet and succulent, juicy and tender; the meat was still well attached to the bone but pulled off easily. If they had any flaws at all, the ribs may have been just slightly too white and fatty, a sign of under-doneness; a perfectly cooked rib would have been drier and more thoroughly penetrated by smoke. Surrounded by all six members of the team, I tried to convey my admiration without violating judicial decorum. They remained anxious. But I was not to decide precisely how many points to award to the Sporty Porkers on each of the six criteria until I had visited the two other teams to which I had been assigned. I remembered a warning from one of the contest officials. “Northerners are too easily impressed by so-so barbecue when they come down here,” she told me, “because they can’t get any decent stuff up there where they live.”

I sat under the Sporty Porkers’ tent, eating ribs and drinking water in a stuporous reverie until my assistant stepped in to tell me that a full fifteen minutes had passed. I had five minutes to walk to the next team, Ol’ Hawg’s Breath of Memphis, sponsored
by Schering-Plough. And then on to M & M Cooker of Francisco, Indiana.

“Great barbecue makes you want to slap your granny up the side of her head,” the southern saying goes. Only Sporty Porkers made me feel quite that way. M & M cooked up a very fine rib, but not quite equal to the artistry of Sporty Porkers. Walking back I to the judges’ tent with my assistant, I filled out the three score- cards, awarding mostly 10s to the Sporty Porkers, 9s and 10s to M & M, and 8s to Ol’ Hawg’s Breath.

At the end of the day, after the final round of judging, as the sun swooped low over the mighty river and burnished the teeming masses like so many tiny bronzed trophies, the winners were announced. A team called Apple City BBQ from Murphysboro, Illinois, placed first in Ribs; Delta Smokers from Cleveland, Mississippi, came in second; and Backwoods Boys BBQ of Trenton, Tennessee, was third. The grand champion of the entire event and winner in the Shoulder category was the Other Side, from Poplar Bluff, Missouri; the team was named after Captain Mike Clark’s business, the Other Side Dental and Medical Supply. The Whole Hog prize was won by the very visible and dedicated Paddlewheel Porkers.

My first reaction was to feel depressed for the Sporty Porkers, I who had placed only eighth in Ribs. They had spent seven thousand dollars to participate in the Big One.

My second reaction was to swoon at the thought that within I walking distance there existed multiple slabs of barbecued ribs superior to any I had ever tasted.

My third reaction was to grab a map of Tom Lee Park and I hurry over to Apple City BBQ to get me a taste of a world championship rib. Apple City’s red-and-white-striped tent was surrounded by a white picket fence and carpeted with Astroturf, an immaculate oasis among the dust and smoke that stretched for hundreds of yards around it. In contrast, the Apple City cooker looked like a charred hydrogen bomb—a huge, bulging black cylinder resting on its side with great spherical ends and twostubby smokestacks rising from the top. In the chaos and press of the congratulatory crowds, I did not even get near an Apple City rib. My wife tried to interest me in a display of country line dancing. But all I could think about was what the future would bring.

Three days later I was back in New York and on the telephone to Mike Mills, Apple City’s congenial captain, who was back in Murphysboro. I was in luck. While most competition barbecue teams cook only ten to twenty times a year in contests across the Deep and mid-South, Mills cooks barbecue nearly every day at his own 17th Street Bar and Grill. Soon three slabs of ribs were heading my way by Federal Express overnight delivery.

Apple City BBQ cooks its loin and baby back ribs skinned and bone down for six to six and a half hours on a Ferris wheel that revolves in its menacing cooker amidst indirect heat from the sides and direct heat from underneath, both generated by Holland-brand pure hickory briquettes made in Crossville, Tennessee, site of the largest hickory grove in the nation. Southern Illinois is apple-orchard country, and right before every contest, Apple City cuts green applewood prunings that will produce an aromatic smoke in its cooker. The team believes that taking dry applewood and soaking it in water would remove its aroma; fully grown applewood logs contain too many harsh tars and resins.

Before they go into the cooker, the ribs are rubbed with a secret mixture of eighteen spices. Sometimes Mills claims that each of the six team members knows only three ingredients; no two team members are allowed in the kitchen at the same time. Other times Mills says he’d be happy to tell me all the ingredients, but then he’d have to shoot me.

“We go on the theory of low, slow, and long,” Mills explained. For the first couple of hours, the temperature in the cooker is kept down near 100 degrees so that the pores of the meat open up and take in the smoke and spices “like Mother Nature would take in a seed in the springtime.” Then fuel is added and the heat rises to 180 or 200 degrees, where it is maintained until the last hour and then boosted again, this time to
250
degrees, hot enough to form a crispy bark on the outside of the slab and render out that last bit of fat. A rib will go through at least two sweats, as the surface opens up and the natural juices break through, and that’s when the Apple City team sprinkles on its spices. After two or three hours have passed, the ribs are basted with freshly pressed apple juice whenever they look dry, usually about every half hour. And in the final thirty minutes, Mills and his teammates apply two light coats of finishing sauce, which they dry up with more of the spice rub and a little salt. The result is known as a wet dry rib.

Apple City won first prize in Ribs and the overall grand championship in both 1990 and 1992. “Nineteen ninety-one just wasn’t our day,” Mills says. Last year Apple City won thirteen of the seventeen contests it entered.

Early the next morning, before I had dressed, a crisply uniformed man from Federal Express arrived with a cardboard box enclosing a Styrofoam cooler in which lay three slabs of Apple City world championship ribs. Mills’s instructions were to microwave each slab on low, just until the ribs were hot, but not to cook them further. This went without incident. Then, still in my bathrobe, I sat down at the kitchen table, a roll of paper towels on the left and a tall glass of water on the right. In front of me sat the highest expression of America’s proudest vernacular cooking tradition. I recalled the late Jane Grigson’s claim that all of civilization was founded on the pig. Giving muted thanks to the entire species, I took a bite.

Apple City’s were unlike anything I have ever tasted. I grasped two bones and pulled them apart. The firm flesh instantly separated, sending up a puff of steam with the aroma of a clean-burning wood fire and the ineffable, God-given sweetness of pork. The meat was nearly red throughout, moist and entirely free of fat, and deeply flavored with spices and smoke. (Its color and texture resembled pastrami or long-smoked fish as much as it did pork.) And it was profoundly delicious, satisfying every need that the human body and soul have for food, unless you consider cold and slimy greens to be food.

In the blink of an eye, a completely bare bone lay on my plate, then three completely bare bones, and soon a dozen. I considered microwaving another slab or maybe both, but then remembered my wife, who had already left for work. For a girl, she has a remarkably healthy appetite for real pork barbecue, fixed according to Memphis rules.