Back in the twentieth century, I decided to move up from gas grills and hibachis to a small offset smoker in the quest of better barbecue. I never cared much for commercial sauces due to their inclusion of liquid smoke, preservatives, artificial additives and WAY too much salt. So the obvious solution was to craft my own. A few hundred pounds of pork later, the family no longer wanted to go out for barbecue any more because "it's not as good as what you make at home, Papa."
Fifteen years later I find myself at barbeque competitions as a cook team member, judge and organizer. Smoking equipment has displaced the car in the garage and whole vacations are planned to visit notable barbecue hotspots. And then there is the sauce... Friends plead for me to ship sauce to Arizona, California and Washington state. My new nephew refuses to eat chicken unless it is served with Pickett. The UPS man rings the doorbell - not to deliver a package, but to ask if he can buy more sauce to ship to his parents in Wyoming "because they can't get anything this good up there".
A few years ago I attended a Fourth of July party in a remote but beautiful corner of Bartow County called East Valley. When we arrived I was surprised to see a couple hundred people milling around the horseshoe pits hefting plates piled with some terrific looking barbecue. I followed the smoke to find the biggest smoker I'd ever seen where by this long-haired madman was practically crawling inside the monster pit to harvest meat from a caramel colored whole hog. It turned out that the gigantic pit was named "the Crematorium" and the madman was named Johnny Mitchell. Turns out our wives had been trying to get us together for some time, knowing before we did (as wives usually do) that we would soon be fast friends.
Johnny had recently turned his decades of playing in the smoke into a full time job with the creation of East Valley Culinary Catering. I began helping Johnny out with vending and catering gigs here and there, and soon we were entering some local non-sanctioned contests, primarily to help out the charities behind the events. Then one fateful day we (or was it our wives again?) decided to take a weekend road trip together to Decatur Alabama. I'd always wanted to check out Big Bob Gibson's famous white barbecue sauce at the restaurant in Decatur, and it just so happened that there was a KCBS contest going on there.
Well, by golly we worked that event from one end to another. We bought ribs from every vender on the grounds. We circled the pro team camps, watching while they prepared their entries, and asking a question or two once they were done. Several teams gave us samples of their Q. Still the gravitational pull of one team kept bringing us back around - reigning World Champions Jack's Old South. Amazingly to us at the time, Myron Mixon himself invited us into the tent, took time to talk with us and offered samples of his turn-ins for the day, including one of the best ribs either of us had ever tasted. We were hooked.
The whole drive home was an unending discussion of cookers & contests, recipes & rubs. By the time we got back to Georgia, the Johnny Mitchell's Smokehouse Championship Cooking Team had been born.
As most things worthwhile, we found out there was a big difference between getting rave reviews from local diners and high marks from certified barbecue judges. We had some initial success, but spent most of our inaugural season learning by trial and error. It was hard to let go of the big iron, but the Crematorium was exchanged for two successively smaller trailer mounted stick burners as we came to the realization that equipment that was perfect for feeding 100 people was poorly suited for preparing six perfect samples for judging. I became a Certified Barbecue Judge to better understand the standards we were expected to reach, and by the close of that first season we had begun to receive those coveted calls to the stage.
Now in our third season, the JMS team is proud to represent several fine sponsors, including Grill Dome and Buckhead Beef. As we soon found out, practically all the folks on the professional barbecue circuit are as friendly and generous with tips and advice as Myron was to us that day at the Decatur Riverfest. Our love of the art of smoking meats brought us to the sport, but it's the warm friendships we've formed with the wonderful people that follow the circuit that keep us looking forward to the next contest.
I currently produce a dozen different flavors of sauce, and the list is growing. Each is handmade in small batches and canned in a pressure cooker just like grandma used to do with the extra summer tomatoes. I only use top quality ingredients, which means my sauce is ridiculously expensive to produce. After you add the cost of jars, if I work all day to produce a couple dozen pints I'm making about a dime an hour if I sell them for five dollars each.
Many folks have suggested that I sell my sauces commercially. I've looked into it, but it can't be done. Quite a few famous pitmasters have tried this route - you send a sample to a commercial packing house, where they analyze your recipe, substitute ingredients and manufacture pretty bottles by the thousand. The trouble is, it isn't the same sauce anymore, and you can taste that right away.
Manufacturing food is very different than cooking. Compare some of Big Bob Gibson's white sauce to my Dodge, or KC Masterpiece to my Morgan and you'll see what I'm talking about. So why do I continue to make barbecue sauce? Because I love it! Nothing beats watching a diner's face light up when the bite into a rib glazed with that new concoction you spent six months working on.
When it's right, nobody has to say a thing.