Best Food Writing 2012

by Holly Hughes (ed) (epub)

  So while we do cut away some of the fat, more than the chefs would have liked, there is still plenty left on the hog. I’ve never seen a pig like this. It’s marbled, laced with thin lines of fat. It looks like a rib eye steak. There are fewer than a thousand Mangalitsas in North America, and this is the first time, to the best of everyone’s knowledge, that one has ever been barbecued. (We’re putting two on the coals.) It could put a new face on barbecue or, more accurately, give barbecue its old face back. The guys shake on a rub, the extent of the doctoring, and look down at the pit-ready pig.

  “I think we should do a shot of bourbon,” says Drew Robinson from Jim ‘N Nick’s.

  There are murmurs of agreement. Hell, yeah. Breakfast.

  “I’ll get the Pappy Van Winkle,” says Brock, chef/owner of Husk in Charleston, South Carolina.

  Pappy is poured into those flimsy cone-shaped water cups. I hold mine over the pig and knock it back.

  “Bourbon and pigs,” Link says.

  The Wee Hours

  Bourbon and pigs. That fairly sums up my next twenty hours. The pit doors shut and smoke rolls out. Nothing to do but wait. The chefs and pit masters hold little summits, conversations that food nerds would freak out over. There is laughter. There is boudin and soft-shell crabs and oysters and crawfish. There are trays of Jell-O shots, and big cups of bourbon, and people dance until the speakers overheat. There is some drama at the pig; the fire gets too hot, but Rodney Scott finesses the coals, brings the temperature down. There’s no pit problem he can’t fix. You’ve seen Pulp Fiction? He’s the Mr. Wolfe of pork.

  I fall asleep in a chair by the pit and later move to a couch. I wake up at 4:30 a.m. to find Scott and Brock still awake. Brock and I tag out, and I settle in next to Scott. He’s bulletproof. I’m not. The Pappy is gone. There’s a dead tall boy of Pabst and a cashed bottle of Patrón on a table, along with the empty shell casings of Jell-O shots.

  “We look rough,” says Sarah Johnson from Jim ‘N Nick’s.

  “I feel rough,” Brock says.

  Scott puts R&B on the speakers. Al Green brings us back to life. We’ve been goofballs for the past two days, but when the end comes, it’s all business.

  “Do you feel good about this?” Nick Pihakis asks.

  Brock nods.

  It’s time to create the Box. We’ve talked about the Box endlessly, lending it the importance of an advanced policy initiative, which seems slightly ridiculous, given that the Box is a Styrofoam container of cooked pig. But the Box is for the most important part of judging, the blind taste test, so there are four Beard-winning chefs on the Jim ‘N Nick’s mobile smoking rig. Everyone is calm, quiet, with a few jokes and short, precise comments. The Box has to go at noon. Link has a knife in his hand. Some of the Beach Road 12 sauce is in a jug; abstract ideas and theories are great, but these guys didn’t become who they are by trying to lose. Some of my snark evaporates as I realize every team is doing this exact same thing.

  “It’s 11:50, guys,” John Currence, from City Grocery in Oxford, Mississippi, says quietly.

  What follows is a damn impressive ten minutes. My boys are stone cold. Nobody ever raises his voice or appears to rush, and I realize that before these guys were famous, they spent their lives in hot kitchens, cranking out dinner night after night. All thirty-four other whole hog teams are equally concerned with sticking the landing.

  The Box is off, and three in-person judges are coming through. They are given the Gospel According to Fatback. Pat Martin does most of the talking. They hear about the Mangalitsas, about the pit masters and the chefs, about Martin’s dream of a win at Memphis in May changing the arc of the pig industry, replacing the flavorless factory hogs with ones more like our grandparents ate. His son, he testifies, might one day enjoy the results of our work today. Finally, the last judge leaves, and Scott walks back to the pit. Sam Jones, whose joint, the Skylight Inn in Ayden, North Carolina, grew out of a family barbecue tradition that dates back two hundred years, is standing there.

  “We are so full of it,” Scott says.

  “Full of what?” Jones asks.

  “Truth,” Scott says.

  Fatback Glory

  Pihakis is worthy of love for many reasons, for his generosity, for his terrible dancing, and for his creation of the Fatback Collective. But the moment I really want to spoon him is when he arranges for $500 worth of Gus’s World Famous fried chicken to be delivered to the tent just after the judges leave. People make love to that chicken, coming up for air with faces and fingers covered in grease—“That’s my last meal,” Brock gushes, orbiting the tables like some sort of bird of prey—and I eat, very quickly, four chicken thighs and two pieces of Wonder bread. So, we’re pigging out, and someone is telling Drew Robinson that bad news comes via a messenger on foot, but if you make it to the finals, a judge will arrive in a golf cart. At that exact moment, a golf cart pulls up.

  “You mean like that?” Brock asks.

  The Fatback Collective is in the final three.

  The last group of judges arrive, four this time, and the show is smooth. They eat the pig and head out to make their decision. The confidence is palpable. People are flocking to the pit to pull out meat. Word has spread that the team of ringers has the greatest barbecue ever cooked. There are judges coming by just to eat. One tells me: “You’ve got it in the bag.” A feeling arises.

  “If we win this thing,” Pihakis says, “people are gonna look at pork differently.”

  We go stand by the stage. Someone there has a pig’s head on a stake, with a cigarette in its mouth, a picture of excess that defines much of Memphis in May.

  “This is the old model,” Edge says.

  However, we are not entirely innocent. We consulted a past champion. We did a taste test on various sauces. We tried to game the judges, too, while preserving our integrity. We came here wanting to change this competition, but now, in the last moments, we want to win it. I haven’t even cooked anything—my role is to be a hyper-partisan observer—and even I want to win. I’ve rolled my eyes for the past two days at the other teams, and now I realize my ire is misplaced. Everybody else isn’t trying to educate the judges—they are trying to kick ass. And, as a look at the tense Fatback Collective confirms, so are we. Finally, the results are announced. The winner is Yazoo’s Delta Q, the same team that won last year.

  Fatback Collective is third.

  We shuffle to the stage, trying to smile. The crowd cheers, and all our hopes of stopping the homogeneous ’cue train suddenly feel like sour grapes. We are lots of things, but we are not sore losers. Martin takes the microphone and tells the other cooks that we all respect the hell out of what they do. Those are his exact words, and after, teammates slip up to him to tell him he nailed it. We go back to the tent, and there is talk of how great it is to finish third in our first year, and hugs, and drinks, but the DJ cuts to the heart of the feelings in the tent. We are serenaded with “Auld Lang Syne.”

  Truth in Barbecue

  After Sean Brock grew up “dirt, dirt, dirt poor,” with a dream that seemed impossible from the forgotten corner of Virginia he called home; after he won his Beard medal at age thirty-two and hid with his cell phone in a Lincoln Center bathroom, weeping, calling to tell his mama, I did it; after Donald Link did for boudin what Arnold Palmer did for golf; after Sam Jones tended his pit the same way his ancestors did two hundred years ago; after Rodney Scott showed up to man the fires at midnight the night he graduated from high school; after John Currence learned to cook on a tugboat the morning after he graduated; after we traveled to Memphis to try to change the way people think about barbecue; after we succeeded, and also failed; after all that, I can’t shake an image that I’ll cherish long after my cardiologist buys a new ski boat with the money he’ll make off the weekend: Pat Martin, our loud, opinionated mouth of the South, sitting in the corner, waiting to find out if we’d won.

  He’s quiet now, with his little boy on his lap. They have the same haircut. Martin gi
ves his son a kiss and rubs his forehead. He holds him tight. Something becomes clear in this moment. The real barbecue we love, that we pretentiously and earnestly came to save, might be under siege, but it isn’t dead. It lives in anyone who believes in doing things the way their grandfathers did, who believes that what we eat tells a story about who we are. It lives in anyone who cares enough to sit all night with a hog. It lives in the fading notes of “Auld Lang Syne” and in the sparks popping off the burn barrel past midnight. It lives in the way a father holds his boy when the cooking is done.

  TRUFFLE IN PARADISE

  By John Gutekanst

  From Gastronomica

  The proprietor of Avalanche Pizza Bakers in Athens, Ohio, John Gutekanst has worked as everything from a pot scrubber to a sommelier, but his great passion is pizza. His creative pies have won numerous awards, including several in Italy, pizza’s homeland. He blogs about pizza on PizzaGoon.com.

  Our car climbs the mountainous roads above the northern Italian spa town of Salsomaggiore. It is late March, and we have a job to do. I’ve convinced my three teammates—Tony, Bruno, and Justin—to accompany me on my quest for tartufi bianchetti, Italian spring truffles. The bianchetti aren’t the hardest truffle to find in all of Italy, or the most fragrant, but they are the best at this time of year because they’re fresh. By now, the white truffles have lost their intensity, and the blacks, all of their flavor. I need the bianchetto to make an award-winning entry for the 2008 World Pizza Championship, and these elegant truffles, paired with sweet Maine diver scallops, are perfect partners. The judges will be looking for taste, innovation, and execution. If I can find the truffle guy, I’ll nail the championship.

  The town of Salsomaggiore Terme, located in the Parma region of Emilia-Romagna, dates from the time the Etruscans first found mineral springs nestled in this snug valley. Today, people come for massages and bathe in the brown stink of the healing egg water, thanks to Benito Mussolini, the fortieth prime minister of Italy, who built a palatial building around the springs, called the Berzieri Spa. The waters are famed for healing.

  But I am a pizza man with just one purpose: to win first place, USA, at this year’s competition. Normally, I confine myself to my small pizzeria in Athens, Ohio, and suffer no illusions as to my business’s place in a small college town: customers are locals and college kids; business is brisk until 4:00 A.M.; volume is high and profit is small. My customers love my products, and I’m happy but not complacent. I know the next three days won’t bring me any fame, but just maybe they’ll bring some validation that even a small guy can win sometimes.

  The championships are held annually in a huge stadium just outside Salsomaggiore. Blooming flowers and squawking pheasants on the steep, vine-covered slope outside the building belie the intense human conflict within. This year I’m entering four pizzas: scallop and truffle pizza in the Pizza Classico category; spinach, feta, chicken, and sun-dried tomato pizza in the Pan Style category; fresh mozzarella with basil and San Marzano tomatoes in the Neapolitan category; and in Non Gluten, a new category, an onion-linguine and sweet potato orecchiette-topped pizza with dough made from rice and garbanzo-bean flour. All culinary scores are figured from 800 as perfect, with each contestant rated by cooking prowess, sanitation, presentation, taste, and knowledge of the pizza. From prior year competitions, I have also learned the unwritten rules: look Italian, cook the Italian way, make your presentation short, have confidence and a pinch of arrogance. My show of detached condescension must make the judges think I am the most knowledgeable pizza maker ever, and, as a gift, I am going to turn them on to the best pizza they’ve ever had. Once I get my truffles, that is.

  We see the worn sign in front, Ristorante Al Tartufo, flickering across the white gravel parking lot, and we turn, circling to the back of the building. Tony Gemignani, founder and president of our American team, leans across the front seat to get a better look at the building, dark bangs falling across his forehead. He has just driven Justin Wadstein, Bruno di Fabio, and me on this four-hour expedition. He is probably weary from the winding roads and the jetlag, but Tony looks calm, as usual, and intense.

  “We’re here, I think.” A quick smile accompanies his classically handsome Italian looks and puts us all at ease. Tony is an international legend in the pizza industry. With his brother Frank, he owns Pisano’s Pizzeria in Castro Valley, California. He has won more acrobatic and culinary awards for pizza than any other person in this country and probably the world. Tony and Bruno recently opened Tony’s Pizza Napoletana, a successful pizza school and pizzeria in San Francisco. Tony has already driven us around to purchase radicchio, zucchini flowers, and broccoli rabe. These truffle guys are our last stop.

  “So, John,” Bruno says to me. “This is the place with your amazing truffle guy, huh?” Bruno beams. He can’t help himself. There on the gravel he looks like an actor about to go on stage. Both he and Tony live for strange new situations; after hearing of my last visit to the truffle guy in 2006, they had to see for themselves.

  Just like last time, the quest began with creepiness, a James Bond moment by the hotel front desk when we asked for directions to the truffle guy’s restaurant. Two men in pressed blue suits asked why we wanted these truffles and how we knew of the truffle guy. It seemed more like an impending drug deal than a stinky fungus inquiry. If we could get fresh truffle at the local stores, life would be simpler, but that’s not how it works in Italy.

  Truffle hunters gather the bianchetto, also known as the Tuscan truffle, from January to March, from Tuscany north to this part of Emiglia-Romagna. Its lobes, unlike the round, sandpaper-like skins of the black truffle, look like bulbous bumps on a small animal brain thrown in the dirt. It’s tough to nail down the exact aroma and taste of the spring truffle: cheesy, woody, earthy, and garlicky are the usual adjectives. While not as aromatic as the white or black truffle, the bianchetto is particularly suited to pizza—at low, warm temperatures it gives off a mildly pungent aroma. Introducing strong flavors to a pizza can be disastrous. A great pizzaiolo (pizza dude) has to make sure that the competing flavors of bread, sauce, cheese, protein, and vegetable are compatible and not overpowered by another element.

  Now I’m just moments away from a stash of bianchetti. I can almost smell them. But Justin turns and looks off into the dark green hills beyond the parking lot. “I’m not gonna get whacked for a truffle,” he says. “I’m staying in the car.” Justin is no coward. He’s a world-class pizza-dough-tossing acrobat who once tossed three rounds of pizza dough high into the air while jumping up and down on a soccer ball. When Justin won the World Pizza Championship of 2007, the crowd jumped out of their seats, screaming in adulation and surprise.

  Bruno leans in toward Justin, who’s still sitting in the car. “Okay, Justin, this is the deal. If you hear some loud pops, then see me hauling ass to the van with a big bag of truffles and John’s and Tony’s brains splattered on my face, start the car, and we’ll be gone.” Bruno laughs his usual high, nasal guffaw and kicks the loose gravel. He then punches my arm and nods a “let’s go” toward the back of the restaurant. We crunch our way through the parking lot. The sunlight is waning now. Clouds moving in make the mottled and muted blue sky meld with the valley below.

  The restaurant’s door is a huge slab of beaten, scratched wood that to my mind looks like a door to a gladiator ring. Tony, in the lead, stops to face me. “Hey, John, how do you know that this guy’s your buddy? This area was a Mussolini stronghold in World War II, and there’s still lots of ill will toward Americans. I’ve also heard of some strange deaths attributed to the truffle black market. It’s a big business here, taken very seriously. Why don’t you go in first and I’ll back you up?”

  I hesitate. Perhaps I overstated how familiar I was with the truffle guy, having met him only once, and that was two years ago. What if Justin is right and the truffle mafia decides we’re interlopers?

  Bruno chimes in with a chuckle. “Yeah, dude, we’re right behind you. Anyth
ing happens, we’ll be the first to run and get the cops or the ambulance.”

  I stop at the threshold and sniff the air. “Smell that?” I ask.

  “Porcini, cepes. Unmistakable. Food of the gods,” Tony mumbles. “You sure this is the place you visited last time?” My hands grip the near-mythical brass doorknob. I smile nervously and throw open the door.

  I have indeed been here before. I’m transported back two years ago, to a late March night in the marble lobby of the Grand Hotel et de Milan in the heart of Salsomaggiore Terme. Feeling a little like Jack Nicholson at the start of The Shining, I had blurted out, “I need to find some truffles. Do you know where I can buy some?”

  “Who wants to know?” a slender, elegant man in his mid-fifties asked. His perfectly pressed blue suit with white lapels was more suited to a movie than a hotel. He looked beyond me with such curiosity that I turned and looked myself. No one there.

  “Follow me, please,” he said as he clicked his way across the marble, circling behind me and out the door. The lights of downtown and the disco across the street twinkled as we walked through a black-green garden filled with huge marble statues. The fence around it reminded me of a cemetery.