Championship barbecue
Published 12:01 am Monday, May 2, 2011
MONROE — Smoky, sweet, spicy, savory.
What makes barbecue great might be a matter of personal taste — at least it seemed that way at the Sky Valley BBQ Championship held at the Evergreen State Fairgrounds Sunday.
Memphis transplant Lisa Wasser, who now lives in Lake Stevens, came rea
dy for a taste of home.
“Most times it’s difficult to get up here,” Wasser said.
She described great barbecue as tender pork with a visible smoke ring. It tastes like it’s cooked in a pit, not in an oven.
People came to sample barbecue from three dozen teams with names like Rub My Butt BBQ and Fat Dads Barbeque from as far away as Canada. Each team brought their own secrets. While nobody wanted to give up all their tricks, cooks at the competition did share a little bit about what makes barbecue competition worthy.
“It’s the rubbing sauce,” said Rick Alsip of White Rock, B.C., part of the Helluva “Q” team.
His team partner Larry Boudreau wandered over and added this advice: rub spices on pork ribs, let them set up and roast at 225 degrees for six hours. When he’s at home, he adds a brewski to his belly.
“If you’re not drinking beer when you’re barbecuing, you’re just cooking,” Boudreau said.
For Smokey’s Bar-b-que cook Ken Wachter of Snohomish, it’s the people that makes barbecue great. He’s talking about teamwork, not meat choice.
At competitions like this one, teams of people work together to get results, he said. For maximum flavor they use traditional charcoal made of burnt wood instead of briquettes, and fruit woods.
Smokey’s also injects their secret sauce into the pork, he said. He declined to share what’s in the sauce.
“It’s not just a single thing,” explained Thomas Wallin, a pit master who calls his Issaquah-based team Dances with Smoke.
The meat, the wood source, the spices, the smoke, the sauce — all of it makes a particular barbecue special.
Most rubs have the same ingredients, he said. Here they are: salt, sugar, black pepper, white pepper, garlic, onion, paprika and chili powder.
Some rubs have other special ingredients such as cumin, celery or thyme but some of those flavors can get lost in the longer smoking process, he said.
Wallin, like many of the competitors at the event, has a day job. He’s a commercial real estate agent. But there’s something about barbecue that has him hooked on fire and meat.
“I’ve just always had a love for barbecue,” he said.
Debra Smith: 425-339-3197; dsmith@heraldnet.com.
