GLOW IN THE DARK: How competitive barbecuing took off
Throw another brisket on the barbie, mate. And don’t forget the pork shoulder. The competition is heating up and barbecuing in New Zealand is on a roll, writes Richard Walker.
It is lonesome at night. There is just you out there under the stars at 2am, getting the food for the day under way. You, the stars, the glow of the barbecue. It is lonesome and, damn, it feels good.
Come competition day, though, that is a whole different thing. You and your team-mates arrive the day before, set up the pits and the gazebo, get your meat checked off by the judges, head back to where you are staying, start prepping the meat, hit the sack hopefully before midnight, get up again at 3am, head to the site, crank up the solid fuel barbecue pits.
Cook.
It is totally understandable, given the punishing schedule, that Cambridge woman Rebecca Blackstock needs a couple of coffees to get herself going in the small hours. She is a bit legendary in the Girlmours BBQ Girls team for needing a kickstart – it seems she can barely speak first thing otherwise. Two coffees later, though, she is bouncing, and they are all up and at it.
Blackstock is also legendary for being a bag of nerves on competition day. Dry retching is not unusual. It is just as well her protein, chicken, is first up. If it was the last she would be a cot case, her team-mates reckon.
Terrible nerves every single time. And then the cook is done, you have served up your best to the judges, it is out of your hands. Now you love it. Of course you will do it again.
Meet the Girlmours, newbies to the competitive barbecue scene and holding their own. In August last year, they were brought together by a lockdown post on the Waikato Barbecue Alliance Facebook page when Morrinsville dairy farmer Heather Davies proposed a women’s team. That post also roped in Gilmours Hamilton owner-operator Dayne Riddell as an enthusiastic sponsor. Hence the team name.
They are the first all-women team in the NZ Barbecue Alliance competition and others are starting to join them.
Blackstock cooks the chicken, Davies the brisket, Kirsty LarkinHeald the pork and Charlotte Hughes the ribs.
They started with a goal of not coming last and succeeded; in fact they were judged best new team in their first competition early in the year. Since then, they have been holding their own.
There is a lot of US-derived terminology in barbecue competition. Getting a call means you are in the top 10 or 15. There is also taking a walk. That is if you are in the top three or five, depending on the competition, and walk up on stage to collect a trophy. Larkin-Heald took a walk when she cooked for the first time with the team in Taranaki in August. There have been other walks for the team during the year as well.
Competition, with all its intensity, its rules and terminology, is a vastly different experience from home barbecuing. ‘‘At home you are feeding, I don’t know, anywhere between four and 20 people,’’ says Larkin-Heald, who lives on a lifestyle block outside Te Awamutu. ‘‘And they are having a really great time – pressure is off, you can really enjoy it. I could put a pork shoulder on at home and forget about it and serve it
12 hours later, and it is perfect.’’
Come competition, though, you are lighting the barbecue around 3am and then battling not only your competition but the conditions and sometimes the challenge you have had in sourcing meat.
Regardless, you have to serve up four dishes, at one-hour intervals. You have got six judges at the table to serve six perfect portions to. And they only take one bite. That is some kind of pressure. It actually starts days earlier. You know what your protein cut is going to be and you practise and practise it until your children can’t face another half chicken.
You head off on the Friday, compete over the weekend, return home shattered. And then, within a few weeks, you do it again. Partly – possibly mainly – you do it again because of the camaraderie, the feeling of family.
Competitors support each other and the Girlmours team say that includes one of the leading lights of the scene, Jared Macdonald, currently also appearing as a TV judge on Cooks on Fire. He is one of the few in New Zealand making a living from barbecuing, by dint of his two Texas Pete’s Barbecue Joint restaurants in Hamilton and his self-designed Octopit barbecue.
Macdonald, who is a big guy with a big beard to match, essentially everyone’s idea of the pitmaster, knows that right now he is one of the two best barbecue cooks in New Zealand. He knows that because he and More Better Barbecue team-mate Mike Ledingham are top of the New Zealand competition leaderboard, putting them on course to become the 2022 grand champions.
Macdonald, a qualified chef, has also cooked competitively overseas. The Waikato man casts his mind back to 2019 when he was heading home to New Zealand from Memphis. He had been on a trip with a purpose, to compete in a world championship barbecue competition, and it had gone well. He was the Kiwi in a team of Virginians cooking in the homeland of barbecuing, under head cook Tuffy Stone, nicknamed ‘‘The Professor’’. At the airport afterwards, the conversation went a bit like this:
Hi sir, where are you going?
Back to New Zealand.
Oh, what have you been doing over here in Memphis?
I have been cooking at the world championships.
How did you do?
Our team won.
The volume instantly cranks up. ‘‘Hey, look, everybody. This guy’s team won!’’ Macdonald recalls the moment. ‘‘They announced it at the airport and everybody starts cheering. I was quite embarrassed.’’
That is how seriously Americans take barbecuing. It is one of the only true American cuisines, according to Macdonald, developed by poorer people cooking cuts no-one else wanted and in Texas by cowboys. It is about slow cooking of secondary meats and competitions have been running in the southeastern states for generations. The concept is simple: use wood and charcoal to barbecue two large meat cuts
and two small cuts. Large are pork shoulder and brisket, and small are chicken and pork ribs.
Partly thanks to food channel coverage, interest in solid-fuel barbecuing grew through the 2010s. The turning point for competition in this part of the world came with the inaugural Meatstock in Port McQuarrie in 2016, with the competition coming to Auckland the following year.
‘‘I remember rocking up to Meatstock in 2017 thinking that it was going to be me against some other guy,’’ Macdonald says.
‘‘I didn’t realise that there were all these closet pitmasters, that came out of the woodwork to have a crack at cooking against each other. So that event was sort of the birth of competitive barbecue cooking in New Zealand.’’
It has taken off. He says the NZ Barbecue Alliance, which was set up as the sanctioning body for socalled low and slow competitive barbecue, has 48,000 members on its Facebook page and up to 50 teams compete at regular cookoffs throughout the country.
Last year, More Better Barbecue were reserve grand champs; and they are not aiming to repeat that second place.
You have to continually evolve and improve, because everyone around you is doing the same.
Macdonald and Ledingham write a list of everything they think they did wrong, before they get to the prizegiving, and apply that to the next cook.
‘‘At some point, someone is going to come in and waste us. But up until then, I will just keep pushing myself.’’
You do what it takes. Macdonald has airfreighted in briskets from Idaho and also from Queensland, where he reckons they produce the world’s best.
‘‘I know it is going to cost me 300 bucks for the brisket but I am going to get a really good product.’’
Pork is a different story. He buys his from Magills in Te Awamutu because they use freerange duroc and the butcher cuts it to his specifications.
For a pitmaster, it is about knowing the product from its butchering right through to when it gets presented to the judges on a bed of parsley in a 9 inch by 9 inch recyclable sugarcane box.
There are three judging criteria. The first is
presentation, the second,
which is double weighted, is the texture or tenderness of the meat. The third, triple weighted, is taste, which takes into account the sauce, the seasoning and the actual meat.
So a pitmaster has a broad skill set. Part lumberjack, part fire cook, part butcher, part chef. The bed of parsley is for contrast of colour. ‘‘We want the judges to look at it and we want that meat to pop in front of their eyes. So I guess your fifth role as a pitmaster is a part florist.’’
There are a thousand things to get right, he says. ‘‘The team that wins will be the one that screws the least of them up.’’
As tense as competitive barbecuing can be, it is also a hobby. ‘‘We don’t go and play rugby on the weekend, we go and play barbecue,’’ says Girlmours’ Charlotte Hughes.
It must be an expensive hobby, though.
Is that a good segue for our sponsors, one of them asks, to general laughter. Between them, they rattle off several sponsor names. Open to having more, they say, ‘‘as long they are not direct competitors with our already loving wonderful sponsors’’. A hire company would be good. ‘‘If you have got trailers, come see us.’’
But, yeah, it is expensive, particularly the outlay for the pits, though they also get used at home. The pits they cook on could cost anywhere between $1100 and $3500. On top of that come transport costs, entry fees, accommodation and meat and fuel costs, not to mention loss of income from not working Fridays.
Macdonald’s team hosted BBQ Mania at the end of October, alongside the A&P Show in Hamilton, with prizemoney of about $11,000 making sponsorship crucial.
This weekend’s competition, Let There Be Meat, with a flight to Christchurch, will be particularly expensive for the Waikato contingent.
But that city has been a happy hunting ground for the Girlmours’ Hughes, a Cambridge dairy technologist.
Time for some more terminology. There are the long and slow cooks of secondary cuts for the NZBA (New Zealand Barbecue Alliance) and then there are steaks and ancillaries for the SCA (Steak Cookoff Association), which is slightly more akin to the Cooks on Fire series. Hughes will be heading to Texas in March to compete in the SCA world champs in both categories, having gained golden tickets from a Christchurch competition in August.
Whatever the comp, whether it is low and slow cooking or hot and fast, it is all about using solid fuel and using gas at home is unthinkable for the women from Girlmours.
Not that they haven’t in the past. ‘‘Gas had a time and a place, right?’’ says Hughes.
‘‘When I was growing up my parents always had a gasser and that was how I learned to cook pork chops and that was how I would cook steak.’’
But you would never catch them on a gasser now. It is all wood and charcoal. The wood is sourced locally. Put it to one side, let it season and 12 months later it will be beautiful.
Different woods impart different flavours. Blackstock and Hughes used the wrong one by accident at the Brewtown competition in Wellington, burning maple instead of cherry. It didn’t hurt – they got three calls.
Jared Macdonald, for his part, remembers his dad switching from charcoal to LPG and never going back because of the convenience.
But now there is a revitalisation of solid wood cooking. ‘‘I think it has been driven by the fact that we are working on computers, we are stuck in our cubicles, we are looking for a way to reconnect with our primitive past.’’
That said, he is pretty happy with a salad and one of his favourites is smoked orange kumara done on the barbecue.
The future of meat is lower volumes and higher quality. ‘‘Let’s not just gorge on it as we have in the past. Let’s take a smaller serving and put a lot of effort into making it fantastic.
‘‘And let’s look at some of these other things we can do to supplement our meals. Because whether you like it or not, eating a lot of meat is not good for you,’’ he says.
‘‘But I don’t see that anyone is going to give up eating steak any time soon. I mean, it tastes amazing.’’
Then this typical Kiwi bloke, who likes a good burger and thinks barbecued lamb is amazing, springs a surprise.
‘‘We have to accept that alternative proteins are the future,’’ he says. That could include the kind of plant-based meat alternatives offered by USbased Impossible. ‘‘We are currently talking to Impossible to actually see if we can be the first restaurant in New Zealand to do an Impossible brisket.
‘‘If Impossible can get me a brisket, I will happily cook it and if customers want it, I will feed it to them.’’
Meanwhile, on the Girlmours home fronts, meat is front and centre as the women do the barbecuing.
‘‘My husband, love him to bits, but I met him and he burnt a steak,’’ says Blackstock, who works in building. ‘‘I was like, that’s it, he is not touching the grill again.’’
Larkin-Heald says she got into barbecuing because she enjoys cooking for family and friends. She and her partner grow as much of their own food as they can, including most of their proteins. Mind you, she has other demands on her time as a midwife and part-time butcher’s assistant at a familyrun Te Awamutu butchery.
‘‘She is winning the busy Olympics,’’ remarks one of her mates.
Barbecuing is therapy, they reckon. ‘‘We all work so hard, and then lighting that pit, and just the smoke and the visual of the glowing coals,’’ says Davies. ‘‘It is so sensory.’’
Maybe they are all pyromaniacs, the women joke.
‘‘You have got to be careful, you are leaning in and you see the blue smoke come out,’’ says Blackstock, who barbecues most weekends and during the week when she can.
‘‘Barbecuing gives us time to stop. You are just focusing on your meat. It is time away.’’
Hughes: ‘‘When you light a fire at 2 o’clock in the morning because you are serving lunch for 30 people and the stars are out and it is pitch black but [for] the stars, and there is this glowing chimney staring back at you, and it is the only thing that is staring back at you, it is real heaven, a bliss.’’
‘‘It is probably quite primitive, isn’t it?’’ says Davies.
‘‘It goes right back to sitting in a cave poking at a fire.’’
‘‘I am going to be honest, barbecuing is addictive,’’ says Blackstock.
‘‘You want to do it. You enjoy doing it. You have fun.’’
Rebecca Blackstock
‘‘I am going to be honest, barbecuing is addictive.’’
Ahawk drifts above the bush of Waiwhakareke Natural Heritage Park. Tū ī are raucous in its branches. Those who know could hear shining cuckoo earlier. The goat, though, is gone. It seems people don’t dump only cats and chickens at reserves, they have also left at least one goat. This one found Waiwhakareke in urban Hamilton to its liking; it caused years of damage to the undergrowth before it was finally dispatched about 10 months ago.
Chalk one up to the recently installed team of two, team leader and manager Mike Paviour and ranger Jayden Bradley.
Nature’s having a bit of a moment in Hamilton. The city council’s commitment to two salaries for the Waiwhakareke restoration comes at the same time as the establishment of a 10-year, $29 million gully restoration fund.
Meanwhile, the Nature in the City project aims to restore Hamilton’s native vegetation cover from 2% to 10% by 2050.
Whether or not that ambitious target is met, one certainty is that Waiwhakareke, on former farmland, will contribute 65 hectares. The showcase project, two decades in the making and drawing well over 1000 visitors monthly, aims to represent the major vegetation types once found in the area. Just how diverse its ecosystem will be, however, depends on whether the council pushes ahead with a pestproof fence following a feasibility study putting its cost at around $2.5m.
With a decision likely next year, ecologist and longtime Waiwhakareke advocate Professor Bruce Clarkson is confident. The value proposition stacks up, in his mind. He predicts it will be an attraction to rival Hamilton Gardens within 15 years.
Clarkson says international reviewers who came to the spot during a 2014 review into the neighbouring Hamilton Zoo and Waiwhakareke ‘‘kept coming back to this’’.
‘‘They said there’s nowhere else like this in the world where you get the two systems nearby, you’ve got the overseas ecosystems on one side of the road and you’ve got the original ecosystems on the other side of the road,’’ he says.
‘‘Furthermore, most places in the world don’t take on the goal that we’ve taken on, which is to bring nature back the way it was in an urban area; they usually leave it to the reserves out on the periphery.’’
It makes Waiwhakareke unique, he says. But he also says the project needs a fence to reach its full potential. He cites the example of lizards. ‘‘You only get the generalist lizards without full predator control. You just get the background generalists. If you want the special things that would have been common across the region, the fence will provide that opportunity.’’
A fence would stop seed predation by mice and rats, and would also allow the reserve to play its part in the bigger ecological picture. It is likely to benefit other parts of the city, with spillover of the bird population, and will help with connectivity from the likes of Maungatautari to the Hakarimata Range.
Even without a fence, it’s impressive how quickly native species gain hold. Not far inside the Baverstock Rd entrance to Waiwhakareke is a stand of trees including kahikatea that have grown remarkably tall since they were planted less than 20 years ago. One kahikatea in particular – already with that distinctive conical shape and far higher than any passing humans – was planted by then Conservation Minister Chris Carter in 2004 as the restoration project was kickstarted. Given a chance, some of these wetland-loving natives grow at the rate of a metre a year, and this kahikatea has clearly been given the chance.
Nearby, a gahnia xanthocarpa – the giant swamp sedge – is living up to its name and sprouting vigorous seed heads above its more than head-height leaves. This is cutty grass in the extreme; Paviour recalls working in a forest of it once and having to bring out a workmate who had given up in despair at the cuts.
First sight when entering the park, however, is a paddock with cattle grazing in it, a vision of this former farmland as it was before restoration began. A ditch runs straight as a die through the paddock, a channel for nutrientladen water emptying into the lake. This area will become a wetland, with the stream cutting a more meandering path and plantings helping purify the water before it reaches the 3ha lake.
Regardless of the ditch, the lake has been getting steadily cleaner since native planting began, with reduced e-coli and nitrogen. Paviour says a regional council scientist checking it recently remarked he would even consider swimming in it. Not that anyone’s trying.
Two swallows dart around, swooping onto the water to snaffle insects. More sedate are the ducks, including an almost black mallard. Beneath the surface are eels and, as of last week, native mudfish, relocated as per the terms of a nearby development. Also beneath the surface are the less-loved mosquito fish, rudd and bullhead catfish – no koi carp yet. The burrowing catfish is particularly hard to eradicate, Paviour says.
This is a dream job for him after he was inspired into conservation as a youngster by the example of family members including his grandmother, New Zealand’s first female forestry student.
He trained as a DOC ranger, and has worked around the country including in wetlands and restoration in the Waikato. That includes Lake Rotopiko, near Ō haupō , where a national wetlands centre is in the making, and where he had a stint as operations manager for the Ngā ti Hauā Mahi Trust.
At Waiwhakareke, he’s loving the level of detail in the job. And there is also the crucial people side of things. When he started with DOC, people were seen as the problem, he says. ‘‘Now it seems the only way we’re going to survive is actually having people engaged, rather than shutting them out.’’
Iwi and education will be at the heart of the project, he says. He thinks attitudes at large are changing, and pays tribute to the unsung heroes who have worked on restoration projects like Waiwhakareke.
In turn Clarkson gives credit to former Wintec head David Rawlence, who, he says, approached him with the idea for a plant museum at the site back around 2000. ‘‘I had several discussions with him and managed to turn it around to being ecological restoration as opposed to a plant museum and basically then we convinced the council.’’
Not that it has been plain sailing. Clarkson has honed his arguments, having fought the good fight when an earlier council almost sold off 5.2ha of the reserve. Had that gone, the bowl-like ‘‘mini catchment’’ would have gone with it, he says. The environmentalists won, but it was close.
Now he thinks the city has crossed a threshold, marked by the Nature in the City strategy.
‘‘Looking back at the previous councils, and looking at what we’ve got now, we’ve actually shifted – a massive threshold, we’ve crossed over it,’’ Paviour says. ‘‘What it can provide, I mean, a 65-hectare beautiful park for people to come in and enjoy – to me, that makes Hamilton way up there.’’