“A lot of people wish they could do what we do,” Eric Burkhart said Saturday morning as he carefully laid a slab of ribs in a 55-gallon drum converted to barbecue grill.
He was among those who traveled from a wide swatch of Kansas and several states to participate in the Allen County Fair BBQ Cookoff.
Regardless how competition shakes out, participating in cookoffs, meeting new people and renewing old acquaintances means “everyone is a winner,” Burkhart said.
He has had his share of success.
In 2007 Burkhart was a winner at the prestigious American Royal Cookoff in Kansas City.
He lives in Eugene, Mo., about 20 miles southwest of Jefferson City, and has a day job with a company that manufactures radiators for heavy equipment, some weighing as much as 3,000 pounds. On weekends he, wife Robin and his mother, Dorothy Burkhart, often journey to cookouts.
They arrived in Iola an hour before dark Friday evening. He was up at 4:30 on the morning to get the pork butt cooking.
Cookoffs are judged in four categories: pork butt, brisket, ribs and chicken.
Burkhart’s brisket went over the coals at 6 a.m. Saturday, followed by the ribs at 10 and chicken, a quick-cook, at 11.
He doesn’t have a specialty, Burkhart said. “I try to be good in all four categories. That’s what it takes to win.”
Nor does he have a set formula for how he cooks any of the meats.
“When they’re done they’re done,” he said. “Time is just a number.”
But, it isn’t all just catch-as-catch-can. Periodically, he thrusts a thermometer’s probe into simmering meat to check internal temperature. Then, when it’s time to prepare a portion for judges, the process is exacting, but also fast and furious so each entry arrives on the table as fresh and succulent as possible.
The wild card is the judging is subjective.
“You don’t know from one competition to the next what the judges are going to like,” Burkhart said. “It’s not the same everywhere. You have to trust what you know and not try to second guess the judges.”
WATCHING cookoffs on television prompted Burkhart to get into competition cooking a little more than five years ago.
He and a friend, Jeff Spurgeon of Lee’s Summit, starting cooking together, but eventually went separate ways because “we live 170 miles apart, which made it hard to team up.”
Today’s Burkhart cooks as Uncle Bub’s BBQ, in competition and a catering business.
He recalls their first competition — his and Jeff’s — was in Warsaw, Mo., early in the year with snow on the ground.
“We finished in the middle of the field and the next week went to Columbia,” he said. “We didn’t go so well there. Finished last.”
That only steeled Burkhart’s resolve.
“I’m very competitive,” he said, and within two years came success at the American Royal.
