Pasadena buzzes like a kicked-over beehive in the days before the New Year. The preparation for its two big annual events climaxes with the Rose Parade and the Rose Bowl, the de facto national college football championship game. Being neither a parade fan nor a college football fan, I completely forgot about these preparations as I drove up to the Rose Bowl arena for the barbecue contest held by the California Barbeque Assocation (the CBBQA). Call me singleminded: unlike thousands of people who came to see the finishing touches on the parade floats, I just came up to see the barbecuers at work.

The twenty two contestants ran the gamut from backyard hobbyists to catering pros who’ve won numerous championships over many years. I photographed Team QN4U’s barbecue: a curvy swimsuit model among anorexic ingenues. This table drew a crowd, and the team walked away with the grand champion title for this contest. Big Lu has some podium photos on his site, BBQ Junkie. Check it out.

There are several sanctioning bodies in competitive barbecue, the two biggies being the Memphis Barbecue Association, which puts on the Memphis in May World BBQ Championships, and the Kansas City Barbecue Society (KCBS). This contest was held under KCBS rules, which specifies everything from the cooking equipment allowed to the way in which entries are presented to judges for blind tasting and evaluation on appearance, tenderness / texture, and taste. The rules state that each entrant must submit at least six portions, one for each of six judges to taste. One contestant I spoke to forgot about that rule and was disqualified because he only included five ribs in his sample box.

These bone in pork shoulders are chopped and dressed with a tomato based barbecue sauce. Savvy cooks prepare very sweet sauces for Kansas City sanctioned contests, because that’s the unwritten expectation for that style.

Brisket: the trickiest cut of beef to cook well. Team QN4U prepared three briskets for this contest. Each slab of brisket can cook very differently than the next, some needing several more hours of cooking than another similarly sized sample.

Over 40 pounds of brisket were cooked and sliced, all to present the six best slices for judging.

Working on presentation.

Just about finished

Contestants compete over two days of preparation and cooking. These photographs show the last hours of their hard work, the crunch time just before judging. For spectators, there’s not much to do except stand back and watch, as teams can not sell their product directly to the general public. Instead, teams send their leftover meat to the CBBQA tent, which sells it off in sample sized cups for $1 each. (I do mean sample sized, like the little paper cups you get at the doctor’s office). Because competitors’ leftovers are pooled together, it’s impossible to know whose product you’re tasting when you buy from the samples tent.

Both the KCBS and Memphis Barbecue Association hold classes across the country for cooks and judges. See their websites for updates. Gene Goycochea of the CBBQA mentioned several California seminars on their 2006 calendar like the March event taught by the legendary Baron of Barbecue, Paul Kirk. These are hands-on classes where you’re provided with the raw ingredients, assemble your own blend of spice rub, cook them and compare results with the other students. If you have your own smoker, you’re encouraged to bring it, and if you don’t, you’ll share space in someone else’s cooker. This is an all day event that can take up to 18 hours or more, as real barbecue is a long, slow, distance affair, not a sprinter’s race. Goycochea suggested these classes can take years off of the home cook’s trajectory toward masterfully smoked meats, and I intend to take one of them next year.

All contestants want to win. Some take themselves a little less seriously than others.

Large custom smokers easily cost six figures or more. Handcrafted flourishes are popular, even on more affordable cookers. This is a cast iron pig on a Traeger cooker.

Despite Texans’ preoccupation with beef, barbecue in many parts of the South means pig. I wonder if Joey’s Texas Thunder Cooking Team came up to see their boys play in the Rose Bowl?

This is my last post for 2005. Happy New Year, everyone!

Hello to my readers in Iceland, which shot up to fifth place of countries that visited this blog in December. I don’t even know you, but thank you for stopping by. The top ten visting “nations” this month are: USA, Canada, EU, Iceland, Netherlands, Australia, Spain, China, Switzerland, and Singapore. Shame on me for not having picked up around the house before the world came by.

Since I’ve moved this blog to a Wordpress platform, I’ve had to learn how to manage a web server. Every webserver logs very non-specific data about their visitors, like which countries they live in. It’s fascinating to see where you all come from, and reminds me to write with a more global audience in mind.

For those of you who have a food blog in other countries, please leave me a comment with a link to your blog. Show me what’s good to eat where you live.

I’m told the title of this post means “where are you from?” in Icelandic. Some other useful Icelandic phrases include:

All of which might lead to these other useful sayings:

Happy holidays, everyone, wherever your are. Eat well and be good to each other.

I’ll be a better baker in 2006. Some people resolve to lose weight over the New Year, or clean out the garage, or be more financially responsible. I’m going to bake good bagels.

I’m also going to bake good baguettes, croissants, and maybe even pastries. The sweets don’t interest me as much as the bread side of the baking world, but I’ll dabble with it here and there. I’ve been making a pretty mean pizza for ten years now, and I’m overdue for learning about other kinds of breads. So I’ll be baking something three or four times a week, over the course of next year. If practice doesn’t make perfect, at least the family won’t starve.

The home made pizzas came about because I got sick of eating half assed pizza in California. My definition of good pizza, like everyone else’s, goes back to the pizza of my youth. If you’re from Chicago or New Haven, you have certain criteria that defines good from dreck. I grew up near New York City. That also explains my bagel mission. I’m not gonna be an East coast bagel whiner. I will control my own bagel destiny, mwaaa ha ha ha….. ha!!

[Insert sound of crickets chirping]

Sooo… that’s a really high bar to set for myself. But I’m off to a decent start. I’ve been using Peter Reinhart’s Crust and Crumb for guidance. The crust didn’t come out as crisp as I wanted, nor did I get thousands of tiny blisters on the surface. I shaped these too tall to start with, but that’s an easy problem to fix. The interior had a nice, toothy pull and chewed with a firm resistance from the high gluten flour I used. This was an ok first attempt, but can I ever nail it, with no stand mixer, and a crappy gas oven in a rental home? It might never happen, but I’m gonna keep tilting at windmills.

Call me Don Quixote de la Bagel.

Salt bagel

Onion and sesame bagels

I interviewed barbecue legend Mike Mills today over the phone for an upcoming review of his book, and I’m playing back the recording to Gurlfren. Mike and I are talking about liquid smoke flavoring in barbecue sauce.

She: “What’s liquid smoke made from?”

Me: “It’s wood smoke filtered through water, like distilling smoke through a water column.”

She: “So, it’s like…bong water?”

Me: “Um, yeah. Zactly.”