The barbecue cook-off kicks off the party
The parking lot near downtown was filled with dozens of barbecue smokers, tents, refrigerated trucks and cutting boards. Competitive barbecue cooks spent day and night cooking thousands of pounds of meats. After a few days, when it was over, they packed up and moved on to the next event.
This wasn’t the parking lot outside NRG Stadium, where barbecue teams from all over the world compete every spring in the World’s Championship Bar-B-Que Contest at the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo.
This was late August 2017 in the days after Hurricane Harvey in an abandoned but otherwise high-and-dry parking lot near Allen Center downtown. And the barbecue teams weren’t there to compete but rather to provide free, hot meals to the first responders and neediest residents affected by Harvey.
This “team of teams” is called Operation BBQ Relief and features a roving band of competition barbecue cooks who travel around the country providing free meals wherever disaster strikes. During those several days in Texas in 2017, “OBR,” as it is called, served over 371,000 hot meals, which included 158,000 pounds of pork and 18,000 cans of vegetables.
OBR began in 2011 as a response to a tornado outbreak in Joplin, Mo. Stan
Hays, a local competition barbecue cook, witnessed the devastation and mobilized the competition teams he worked with and competed against on weekends. During that first deployment, the team served 120,000 meals over 13 days. Since that day, OBR has served over 3 million meals in 26 states where natural disasters have occurred.
In between mobilizations, the barbecue teams who volunteer at deployments still compete regularly on the barbecue circuit. Starting in 2018, in part as recognition of OBR’s contributions to the Harvey relief effort, the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo invited the team to compete in rodeo cook-off.
They competed against 250 other teams in a blind judging contest in the three standard categories of chicken, pork ribs and brisket.
And in perhaps one of the greatest examples of barbecue karma, OBR, with chief cook Dewayne Daniel, bested a deep field of talent to bring home the Grand Champion Overall of the 2019 rodeo cookoff. It was a remarkable achievement for a first-time team in a competition where other teams have been chasing the championship for years or decades.
The Grand Champion Overall is determined by combining the scores in all three categories. OBR took the top spot with a second-place showing in brisket and fourth place in pork ribs.
Barring any major catastrophes in March, the OBR team will be back in Houston competing in the rodeo cook-off. As defending champions, they will be in the cook-off area known as Champions Corner.
Every year, the Houston rodeo invites the winners from other barbecue competitions including Rodeo Austin, the San Antonio Stock Show & Rodeo Bar-B-Que Cook-off, the Jack Daniel’s World Championship Invitational Barbecue and the American Royal Barbecue contest to compete as part of the Champions Corner. In 2020, Operation Barbecue Relief will compete as one of these invited guests as they defend their title.
Both the annual World’s Championship Bar-B-Que Contest and the ongoing activities of Operation BBQ Relief are a tribute to the volunteerism and philanthropy that are an essential part of the barbecue competition circuit.
If you attend this year’s cook-off, make sure to head over to Champions Corner and look for the OBR team and let them know that Houstonians haven’t forgotten their work during the hardest days just after Hurricane Harvey.