The Barbecue Diary – part 8
Ricky Ginsburg (former head cook of The Boca Boys)
There’s a period of time after the brisket is turned in and before the awards are presented that lasts for either hours or minutes depending on your level of exhaustion. I usually split the time into three segments.
The first segment is about 15 minutes long. It begins with the walk back from the turn-in table and ends with the realization that there is cleanup to get to and that you are going to have to do it. However, during that 15 minute stretch your mind is racing with a million “what ifs” and “why didn’t I” and “we shoulda” that all will have to wait until the next contest. Your body is running on automatic which is fortunate for you otherwise you would have stumbled into that Porta-Potty twice on your way back to the cook site. I heard NASCAR drivers express this same feeling at the very end of the race when the car finally comes to a stop in the pits and drunks just before they pass out.
Of course the next segment of time is a bit longer and by now all the automatic functions have long since shutdown. There’s cleanup to be tended to and your hands and back are needed. I always try to get everything as clean as possible before we stow it in the truck. I know there’s a three hour drive ahead of us and then unloading and storing of everything once we get home. We used to clean as we went but I always ended up cleaning and putting something away that we needed later. There are prep trays and pans to wash along with the knife that has hopefully cut winning pieces for us. The table that I will one day get the leg extensions for is washed and dried and loaded into the back of the pickup first. The hot coals from the Backwoods get doused with the hose and dumped into a garbage bag. The drippings and water in the pan are fed to a large tree. The cooker loads in next to the table. We have reached a good pace of clean and load. Fortunately it’s a cloudy afternoon so we can take down the pop-up and load it along with the top and sides without worrying about a sunburn. Slowly but surely the entire cook site starts to return to grass as The Boca Boys load up.
The last bag of unused charcoal is squeezed into the last remaining corner of the pickup’s bed so I start tying everything down with bungee cords and waterproof tarp. My assistant is packing our coolers full of extra barbecue into the space behind the seats. The entire truck will smell like ribs for the trip home. I leave out two of the folding canvas chairs so that we can sit with friends and try to discuss anything but barbecue. This, of course proves futile since that’s about all we really want to talk about anyhow! The final segment begins with the foosh of a pop-top on a can of frosty cold soda pop for me, I’m the designated driver. I look at my cell phone for the time and I’m amazed that cleanup and loading took only 40 minutes.
The type of barbecue cooks you meet at a contest run the gamut from first time backyard cook to the serious barbecue scientist. There are folks who keep log books of every step of every process they’ve used for every contest they’ve ever entered and study these notes religiously. And there are cooks that show up, party, drink beer, and, if they remember, turn-in some barbecue to be judged. We fit somewhere in the middle. I cook good barbecue, at least I like it and my family and friends like it. But no matter what type of cook you are and no matter how serious you take to the task at hand, when that box hits the judge’s table all bets are off! So we sit and wonder and listen to the wondering of our friends and fellow cooks all the while just wanting this day to come to an end.
We’ve got 2 hours until the awards…
… it all comes to an end, next month.
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