Chef predicts winning season
A Bella Vista couple run a business that doesn’t make money, but does make lots of points. Tim and Kristi Gray are Blowin’ Smoke BBQ and may be on their way to placing in the series, Ozark BBQ Alliance.
“It’s an expensive hobby,” Tim Gray said about Blowin’ Smoke. Although the books are set up as a business, he never planned to make a profit. Both he and his wife have full time jobs. Barbecue is a weekend pursuit and it’s all about the competitions.
During the busy fall months, they’ll be traveling every weekend with their trailer. They go as far as Texas and St. Louis. They cook all over Oklahoma. But one of their favorites contests is in Delight, Ark., because that draws teams from across the south and every region has its own flavor profile, Gray explained.
Gray cooks in a drum smoker he built himself. He usually cooks meats he purchases from Richard’s Meat Market in Fayetteville. They actually special order his briskets. It’s expensive, but worth it.
“That’s what separates the men from the boys,” he explained.
The smoker cooks fast and hot. He uses his own rubs and sometimes injections. Only his chicken is sauced, but his ribs get a glaze made of brown sugar, honey and a special hot sauce.
Everything has to fall into place to win a barbecue contest, he said. You need good quality ingredients, the perfect cooking temperature and excellent timing.
Often the barbecue competitions include extra competitions and that’s where Kristi Gray excels. Recently she received two perfect scores for her desserts. They have also competed in steak cook-offs and chili contests.
“She’s my worst critic,” Tim Gray said. If he makes a mistake, she’s quick to point it out, he said. Like when he experimented with orange juice as marinade and ended up with something that tasted like lighter fluid.
They met at a barbecue contest and have been partners since.
Tim Gray works for a fencing company now but he went to culinary school when he was much younger. He hadn’t meant to attend culinary school, but when he and a friend were just starting out with a new apartment in St. Louis, they realized that if they took cooking classes, they could eat their assignments and dinner was assured at least a couple times a week. Gray found he liked cooking and stayed in culinary school, but after he graduated he didn’t like the restaurant business.
At the time, the early 1980s, the health department hadn’t yet cracked down on commercial kitchens and he didn’t want to work in a kitchen that wasn’t clean.
It was years later when the Home Builders Association chose to sponsor a barbecue contest as a fundraiser that Gray started cooking again. Next came Bikes, Blues and BBQ.
Gray started collecting the equipment he needed to cook.
Next came the sponsors and that lead to even more competitions.
“I couldn’t do it without them,” he said about his sponsors.
This year he will enter 16 contests, which are mostly fundraisers. He had to miss one earlier in the year because one of his sponsors, Kingsford Charcoal, asked him to cook for the Walmart shareholder meeting in May.
He’s also proud that he helped get Operation Barbecue Relief started after the Joplin tornado. He was one of the cooks who dropped everything to spend a week helping feed workers and victims in the after math. The organization has gone one to help at other disasters.
He’s also involved when the Ozark BBQ Alliance sponsors Kids Q, barbecue contests for children as young as 5. That’s how they ensure another generation of cooks to take over the tradition.
Over the years, Gray has won 16 state championships and one world championship. This year, partway though the season, he is ninth in points in the Ozark BBQ Alliance with one missed competition. But the busy part of the season is coming up. Summer is too hot for barbecue contests, he said.
Spending all weekend at a contest has to be something you love to do, he said. It’s more enjoyable now that he has a travel trailer for housing. For years, they slept in the back of their cars. But they do love it.
“It’s a family event,” he said about his weekend competitions. “But you get to pick your family.”