Taking It Slow

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In the Land of the Pigs, the BBQ is King

At Memphis in May, the world's largest pork barbecue contest, teams from all around the world compete in the Super Bowl of Swine -- and have some fun while they're at it.

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His strategy shifted after last year. "We thought, we'll be subtle on the spicing because we're just going to concentrate on the meat," he says. "But that was exactly the wrong thing. Who's gonna get lost? The guy who doesn't spice heavily enough."

The dozen-member team -- which includes two Danes, a Mexican-American and a Greek-Australian, all of whom live in Norway -- also dropped most of the attempts to showcase Norwegian cuisine. (No cloudberry sauce this time.) The exception: Norwegian salmon flown in for the seafood category.

Whitson also enlisted Boland to be his "boots on the ground" in Memphis, helping to arrange for meat and other logistics.

Boland gave the team advice about how to prepare the blind boxes, plastic foam containers that go to the judges with no team name attached. With nine turn-ins within a two-hour window and an almost 15-minute walk to the judge's tent, the team would need to be as focused as a restaurant kitchen -- and it was, thanks to the leadership of Nico Lundsgard, the chef at Whitson's restaurant in Stavanger.

The Norwegians had another advantage: All of its members speak English, which smoothed out the communication with volunteers, staff and judges. The Estonian team, the Firemen From Turi, relied on the lesser English fluency of captain Roland Ounapuu, 37, which stalled things here and there. Witness this scene between Ounapuu and volunteer Leslie Boone that could have been out of a "Pink Panther" movie.

Boone: "Anything else you're waiting for?"

Ounapuu: "Vood."

Boone: "Food?"

Ounapuu, pointing at the team's borrowed smoker: "Vood! Vood!"

Boone: "Oh, wood! Of course!"

Awkward interactions are to be expected, said organizer Diane Hampton. At one point this year, a member of the Deominox team was trying to talk his way in past the gate. The "good old boy" working the entrance asked her to help, but her French is rusty, "so I either told the Belgian guy it was okay to take his meat to his location, or I told him to go shopping at Macy's," she said.

The language barrier almost got the Deominox team disqualified when it turned in its blind box in the whole-hog contest. Two of the non-English-speakers handled the delivery, but they missed the deadline after walking past signs they didn't understand. A sympathetic official interceded and successfully made the case for giving the team a break and letting their samples be judged with the 39 other entries.

Unlike at the Kansas City Royal, one of the other major American contests, in Memphis blind judging is combined with on-site judges' visits. As tradition has it, this is the chance for a team to strut its stuff -- and tell a tall tale or two.

The showmanship idea may have gotten lost on the Belgians. Though the Norwegian team had an elaborate presentation that featured one of its prettiest members in traditional dress (on, coincidentally, the country's national holiday), Stephane Deom quietly talked about the cooker and the preparation with one judge after another as Christophe Deom sliced off pieces of pork from three parts of the animal for tasting.

It wasn't the definition of barbecue, but the judges seemed honestly wowed by the juiciness and flavor of the meat: the result of a secret-recipe, herb-infused water that Christophe had injected into the pig a day earlier. When two judges returned later to offer feedback, they told the team that they had given perfect scores of 10 on most of the criteria. Butch Lulloff offered a 9 in presentation because "you've got to b.s. here in the South." If they could figure out how to get a smoke ring, that pink line that forms in meat slow cooked over fire, he said, "you'd really have something."

The Belgians were jubilant about the judges' reaction, but before long it was judgment time, and their faces fell when a volunteer came by with a tear in her eye to tell them that they hadn't made it into the final three. What about the top 10? Maybe. But at the awards ceremony Saturday night, amid the whoops and hollers for such winners as Natural Born Grillers, Sweet Swine O'Mine and Rib Ticklers, none of the international teams' names were called.

Later, when the rankings for the three main contests were posted, the news hit home: 100 Degrees Celsius ranked 76th of 115 in ribs. The Firemen From Turi, who cooked their hog for 12 hours and served it with a blackcurrant sauce, were 37th out of 40. Deominox's blind box must have hit a tough judge's table because, despite the initial praise, the team placed 39th, ahead only of a team whose zero score meant it didn't turn in a pig at all.

"Maybe the American taste is just not the same as the European one," Stephane Deom said. "Honestly, we are happy with the way our hog was cooked yesterday, and we couldn't have done it any better."

Whitson got some good news when the rankings for the ancillary contests came out. The team didn't win with the lamb this time, but overall did much better than last year, placing in the top 20 in four of the contests and in the top 10 in two; that succulent Norwegian salmon came in fourth, just a fraction of a point behind the third-place trophy winner. He expects the team's average to climb again next year.

For Deominox, the big question is whether there will be a next year. The team had hoped to sell its cooker for $25,000 to cover the cost of that expensive steel and to save them the few thousand euros it would cost to ship it back home. But there were no buyers. The team had some sponsors for this year's trip, but with the disappointing results of the whole-hog contest, Stephane feared that such money would be hard to come by again. Nonetheless, they plan to enter their second competition in the fall in Brussels, where tastes might be more in line with their technique. This time they can pull the cooker behind a truck.

The foreign teams learned that competitors are generous: with advice, equipment, samples of pork, home-brew and, in at least one case, some mighty strong bloody marys (in exchange for Estonian vodka and Norwegian aquavit). They also eagerly joined the party spirit once the cooking was done. On Saturday night, while the firefighters picked off the remains of the whole hog for delivery to a homeless shelter, a tipsy Ounapuu, wearing a leather Viking shirt, gave hug after hug to visitors hanging out in his tent.

"We do all this for friendship," said Steve Sims of the River Rat Pig Porkers, a Mississippi team stationed next door. "To meet these guys is totally awesome."

Ounapuu predicted that the friendship would last "forever," and then he wanted to tell a joke he'd come up with the night before. "Do you know the new meaning of barbecue?" he asked. "Barbecue is sex, hogs and rock-and-roll."

Sims shook his head and smiled. "That sounds like something an American would say."