Judging SCBA

Lake High is a man with a vision and a mission. When the affable, avuncular retired stockbroker teamed up with Walter Rolandi to form the South Carolina Barbecue Association (SCBA) a few years ago, they had one thing in particular in mind: To make South Carolina the acknowledged center of the barbecue world.
“We’re already the unacknowledged center of the barbecue world,” he says, standing at the podium at the SCBA judg’s seminar in Columbia, SC. He ticks off the reasons:
“Barbecue was invented here. We’re the only state that has all four basic barbecue sauces; Vinegar and pepper, mustard, light tomato and heavy tomato. North Carolina has three, as does Georgia.”
High has a big job ahead of him. South Carolina would probably be way down most people’s list of states that make the best barbecue, behind, say, Kansas, Tennessee, and North Carolina. High is out to change that. His strategy is to use his association to both advertise for South Carolina barbecue and to train up a cadre of judges who will serve as a kind of quality control for South Carolina’s “cookers” –he never calls them chefs.
SCBA judges travel to about thirty barbecue cook offs across the state each year to evaluate the product of between a dozen and 100 cookers per event. The average judge will taste eight samples of barbecue per event. He needs a lot of judges.
“We’ve found that about 12 samples is all anyone can handle without getting mouth fatigue—you blow out your taste buds,” he says.
There are about fifty people attending the seminar, as well as about ten members of the association, proudly wearing their aprons, which the get once they are “certified”, and their Senior or Master Judge boaters, which they earn by judging at least thirty events as well as serving on a cooking team up to three times, “to get an idea of what the cooks go through,” as well as to give the cooks an idea of how the judging is done.
“Cooks are paranoid”, says Lake. He tells of cooks who accused he judges of recognizing a certain cooks’ plate, or making back room deals, all of which is untrue. This paranoia probably comes from stress and fatigue, as the cookers at your average event have usually been up all night working steadily for 18-24 hours straight, preparing, cooking, and tending their pork, quite often with liberal infusions of their favorite alcoholic beverage.
“One thing I’ve learned from being on a cooking team is that a 1:30 in the morning, the jokes are a lot funnier if you’ve had a few beers under your belt.” he says.
After staying up all night and fretting over, and saucing the pork and tending the fires, the tired, bedraggled, hung over cooker has a twenty minute time window to have his pork plated (on a simple white Styrofoam plate) and taken to the judges, where it disappears inside the judging room and is not heard from again, often for several hours.
What takes place in the judging room could mean a prize of several hundred dollars to one cooking team—and a world of disappointment to many others. SCBA takes this job seriously.
“Judging is easy, scoring is difficult.” Says Rolandi, who looks like he could be former president Bill Clinton’s long lost brother.
At the seminar we go over the three main scoring systems used by other states.
High discusses the good and bad points of each.
The Kansas City system is too snobbish according to High, who reports of an event where a cooker’s sample was summarily disqualified because it wasn’t plated properly.
The Memphis system is too heavily reliant on appearance, with three out of six categories relying on sight vs. taste.
“The only way to tell if barbecue is good or not is with your mouth.” he says.
The North Carolina has no barbecue association, so event promoters end up rounding up whoever is handy to do the judging.
“They may get the local disc jocky, the Mayor’s wife and the town drunk; but some of those town drunks are pretty good judges,” he quips.
The score sheet for North Carolina makes up for the lack of expertise by giving guide lines for how the meat should look and taste, which, according to High, tends to make all the barbecue the same. High wants diversity. He talks of his “first principles”: Get rid of your biases. He asks the group; “How many of you hate mustard sauce?” A few hands go up.
“Bad, bad, bad!” he says. You can’t bring your personal bias into the judge’s tent.” When another participant avers that she thinks she would be a good judge, he asks why.
“Because I think I’d be good at judging the consistency of the sauce.”
“We don’t judge sauce. We judge meat!” He snaps. “If they bring us their meat with a container of sauce we politely hand the sauce back.”
This is a good strategy, as sauce, like memory, can hide a multitude of transgressions.
Working with Walter, who is a doctor, Lake, who has been a certified wine judge
for decades, came up with a scoring system that attempts to make what is admittedly a subjective process as scientific as possible. Samples are judged blindly. Only a number, assigned by the Marshall identifies its owner. SCBA no longer does on-site evaluations, where you go out to the cooker’s rig and sample the meat, as this could lead to bias.
SCBA is the only association that judges aroma, as well as the other standard categories of appearance, taste and tenderness. The SCBA system consists of setting a standard for each category among the samples and judging each successive sample against the standard. That way, instead of comparing eight samples against each other, you are only comparing two samples at a time; the current sample and the standard. The judging is done on a weighted twenty point system with taste and tenderness having the most weight. Judges are encouraged to carry their numbers out to two decimal places, which according to High, virtually eliminates ties; and they can change their ratings, based on their reaction to subsequent samples, unlike the Kansas City standard. In fact High mentioned the Kansas City system so often that the person sitting next to me felt the need to lean over and whisper; “I’m a Kansas City judge. We’re not that bad.”
The average score turns out to be around 14, which may seem high until understand that average cooks don’t go to cook offs.
“Most of these people cook barbecue for a living. If their barbecue wasn’t above average, they’d be out of business.” Says High.
When it’s his turn to talk, Rolandi strides to the podium and relates the three guiding principles of the judging: Fairness, consistency and objectivity. He warns about order effects; the effect on the judging of the (random) order in which the samples are received; and time effects, that occur because the samples toward the end of the line will have cooled off compared to the first samples; and the judges enthusiasm tends to wane
as they begin to get full and their taste buds become exhausted. This is why judges are limited in the number of samples they taste. Husbands and wives aren’t allowed to judge at the same table, as they can pick up subtle cues from each other. Judges are expected to keep a poker face and not talk about their samples, a rule which, according to High is punishable by a gruesome death if violated. Outliers are questioned.
“If everybody else scores the meat 3.7 on tenderness and you score it a 1.53 we’re going to ask you why.”
It may be that you just happened to get a tough piece of meat, or it may be that you need to do some soul searching.
High peppers his remarks with anecdotes from his years working cook offs. There was the guy who handed him a sample that was rotten, the guy who set his pig on fire—and ended up winning first place, the sample that was so spicy it severely hampered the judges ability to taste the subsequent samples, the time a team passed out drunk and slept through the judging, and the time they were short on judges and he and Walter had to evaluate 22 samples each.
“We survived, though,” he says.
Before judges become certified, they must attend the seminar and also work four events where they sit at a “newbies” table and are allowed to judge the meat, but their scores aren’t used.
“We don’t want you to do any damage.” Says Walter.
Newbies are shepherded by an experienced judge and are allowed to discuss among themselves how they came to their conclusions about the samples. By the time they are certified, they will have tasted upwards of 32 different samples of barbecue, and hopefully honed their palettes.
Along with putting South Carolina barbecue on the map, all of this thought and preparation goes into the SCBA’s judging system in order to fulfill the second part of Lake High’s vision.
“We want you to have fun!” he says.

YOU CAN ALMOST BREATHE THE CHOLESTEROL

Blue Ridge Barbecue Festival
Harmon Field, Tryon, NC


Each year around mid June Barbecue aficionados from all over the south and points beyond converge on the little town of Tryon, NC for a festival of music, art and pork. Smoke and music fill the air in equal parts. You can almost breathe the cholesterol. At one end of the park is the stage where local blues, rock and folk acts ply their trade to a willing and somewhat lubricated audience. Under the shade trees at the back, artists and artisans line up their stalls and hawk their wares from the arcane to the sublime. In between, food stalls line the field where you can choose from several award winning purveyors of pork, beef and chicken in eastern, southern or western styles, or sample several if your arteries are up to it.

The barbecue is good, as one would expect. I’ve never been disappointed. But the treat for me is touring the competition area on Friday night, where well cooks imbibe their beverages of choice and tend their grills in preparation for the judging. Each team has its own recipe, of course, but their creativity is not confined to their food. Their tents and trailers are decorated in styles ranging from tacky to hilarious. The last time I went (2008). There were “The Silence of the Hams” complete with a rip-off banner from the old Jodie Foster movie, “Butts and Breasts,” “Pigs in Paris” with a mock up of the Eiffel Tower, “Sue E. Pigg”(“Cooking everything from butts to guts.”) and my personal favorite, the guys from “Buttrub.com.” As a rule, the men tend the smokers, the women chat and organize, and the children play games in a placid family atmosphere reminiscent of my childhood days of camping with family and friends.

It’s a fun and lively couple of days. The festival is only open on Friday and Saturday. On Sunday everyone packs up and heads for the next festival, and Tryon goes back to being a sleepy and picturesque little mountain town for another year. The 2010 festival is tentatively set for June 11-12. Barbecue lovers mark your calendars.

Diner rating: 5

I DON'T KNOW WHAT THEY DO TO THE GRITS, BUT I WISH THEY'D TELL ME

The Boathouse
101 Palm Boulevard
Isle of Palms, SC
843-886-8000

The Boathouse stands at Breech Inlet

I was torn between the (tilapia) fish tacos and the shrimp and grits. The waiter inquired as to whether I enjoy spicy food. When I responded in the affirmative, he suggested the ($12.00) shrimp plate. I’m glad I took his advice. I seldom pass up this plate when it’s listed on a menu, but I doubt I’ll find a better sample of this old standby, which rivals she crab soup as the signature coastal South Carolina dish. The substantial serving contained slivers of fiery andouille and a rainbow of sautéed peppers with red onions, and plenty of succulent shrimp. The mixture is double sauced with a hearty brown sauce and a lighter, buttermilk based sauce on the top.

But it’s the grits that make this meal stand out. In most shrimp and grits plates the grits are slopped on the plate almost as an after thought. Often they are bland and soupy, relying on the rest of the dish for support. Not the Boathouse grits. These grits are buttery, light and fluffy, they refuse to lay down on the plate but pile themselves around the edges; a substantial scaffold for the rest of the dish. I’ve never had grits like these, and I don’t know their secret, but I wish I did.

The restaurant is on a spit of land only a few hundred yards wide on the edge of the breach inlet, where God decided one day that there needed to be another opening to the sea between South Carolina’s barrier Islands; and from where the Confederate submarine H. L. Hunley left on its heroic and fateful voyage in 1864, to give what for to the USS Housatonic during the War of Northern aggression. Both vessels ended up on the bottom of the sea with a loss of good sailors (Yankees 5, Rebels, 9), yet another Pyrrhic victory for the Cause.
Behind the Boathouse restaurant is an actual boat house where boats can be rented. You can watch the boaters come and go on the Intra Coastal Waterway while sitting on the restaurant’s screened porch enjoying your beverage of choice. I was there for Sunday brunch, but they say at supper one can enjoy a fantastic view of the Carolina sunset. I hope some day I get to see it for myself.

Diner rating: 5

THE PLACE DESERVES A CLIENTLE

Station 22
2205 Middle Street.
Sullivan’s Island, SC
843-883-3355

An employee solicits customers outside Station 22

The pub across the street was packed on this Sunday noon as we squeezed into a parking space on the cramped and diminutive main drag at Sullivan’s Island, but crowds don’t always equal good food, so we opted for this place across the street. Perhaps because the building is being renovated and it was hard to tell if it was open (more about that later) the place was nearly deserted. Soulful sounds of an alto saxophone greeted us as we walked in the door played by an actual live musician who never took a break while we were in there. He played old standards (Misty, Stardust as well as more recent melodies like Wind Beneath my Wings.) accompanied by canned orchestra music. The place is nicely appointed with bead board wainscoting and an interesting ceiling made I think, to mimic a boardwalk Dozens of pictures line the walls including a blown up color photo of the island taken from about 10,000 feet. I had Shrimp and Grits ($12.00.) My partner had the chicken salad croissant with sweet potato fries. ($9.00). Both were very good. Shrimp and grits is a favorite of mine and I hate it when restaurants skimp on the shrimp, but I kept finding the succulent little crustaceans buried in the grits. I was slightly taken aback to see that the andouille sausage that usually accompanies the shrimp had been replaced with country ham, but the pork was julienned and tender and added a good flavor, if not heat, to the plate.

Perhaps because it was Sunday brunch the appetizer was not bread, but pound cake, store bought from the looks of it, and it would have been nice to have some bread to soak up the creamy sauce. The chicken salad had a strange but pleasant almost soapy flavor that I could not place. We had rushed in to get ahead of the church crowd but almost no one was there. Only a few tables were occupied, including a ladies day out group over by the Roman shades featuring a mother and daughter arguing about the propriety of having mimosas with their brunch.

I hope they get there remodeling finished soon. The place deserves a clientele. When we left one of the staff was standing on the steps holding up a sign that said “Open.” It seemed to be a sign of desperation.

Diner rating: 4