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Royal order of bbq4/24/2023 I donned surgical gloves and began to help by slapping down slabs of pork and 2ft lengths of ribs and applying healthy squirts of French's mustard to act as glue for the 'rub'. My team had already begun to prepare an impressive 600lbs of meat. When I arrived at the show grounds, they made my acquaintance with an impressive series of testosterone-fuelled "bro" hugs before dragging me over to get on with the most important matter in hand - preparing for the party finale where we would be feeding more than 500 people. But for the duration of the Royal they swapped their office uniforms for shorts, polo shirts and baseball caps - the prerequisite of all America's weekend warriors. My own team for this year's event, Burn Rate, consisted of 15 men who in their real lives were marketing executives, financial advisers and art directors. Photograph: Simon MajumdarĪlthough there are plenty of women skilled in the dark arts of BBQ, it remains a bastion of male bonding. There's the rub: Massaging in the secret ingredients of his team's marinade. Where we use our precious two days a year of clement weather to make the man of the house wear an apron with printed comedy breasts, they make an adventure out of it, sleeping in tents or trailers, sipping more than a few cold ones and hanging out with the boys. Where we have charred sausages they have brisket, which leaks beefy juices as you carve it into thin slices. Where we have salmonella in chicken form, they have succulent slabs of pork butt ready to be pulled apart and sandwiched between slices of white bread. It involves cooking unfeasibly large joints of meat over an indirect source of heat in large smokers for long hours until they become moist and tender. This is real BBQ, which originated with the arrival of German immigrants in the midwest states and down as far as Texas. Events, which draw nearly 250,000 visitors every year, include rodeos, horse shows and, at the centre of it all, the world's biggest BBQ competition where 500 teams cook and consume their way through well over 500,000lbs of meat over two days of competition and hard partying. Now, the yards play host to a month-long celebration of America's rich agricultural heritage. It takes place on what was once the site of the Kansas City stockyards, where cattle were herded for nearly 100 years to be bought and sold to all parts of the midwest.
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