The Man Who Ate Everything - Jeffrey Steingarten [142]
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 soso barbecue when they come down here,