If the Men Who Grill event proved one thing last weekend, it’s that men like bacon.
You’re shocked, I know.
While bacon may be the single most loved food of American males, it’s not exactly the first meat that comes to mind when firing up the grill. It spatters, it burns and it falls through the slats. (The secret, several cooks told me, is to parboil it before grilling.)
But there it was, wrapped around shrimp and drumsticks, cooked in little cubes, snuck inside jerk chicken pizza and draped over pineapple.
“Everything is better with bacon,” said Russ Smith as he tasted Rent A Man’s pineapple-bacon dessert offering. “Everything.”
Rent A Man led the way in a group of cooks who experimented with the not-your-usual-suspects on the grill, to the delight of the adventurous and the thrill of the non-meat-eaters in the crowd. Yet the happy hordes who turned out for the Women’s Resource Center’s annual fundraiser could also sample everything from barbecued chicken to carne asada. (Full disclosure: I volunteer for WRC.)
Sixteen teams of cooks arrived by 9 a.m. to cook and prepare 400 servings for the public, who paid $20 a ticket. Many of the teams were sponsored by local businesses, which donated the costly proteins. Some chefs stayed up all night smoking and marinating meat, chopping vegetables and perfecting sauces.
Dr. Jordan Loftis of La Plata Family Medicine wiped sweat from his face as he basted two huge tenderloins of beef over a screaming hot fire. He brought 20 pounds of beef, 30 pounds of pork, 30 pounds of shrimp and 60 more of chicken to be sure he had enough.
Why go to such lengths for a community cook-out?
“The Women’s Resource Center has helped a lot of my patients,” he said of the nonprofit that serves needy and abused women. “It’s a tremendous resource.”
While you could find the usual pork offerings – pulled, tenderloin, ribs – there was nary a pig product in sight at the Hot Heads stand. There, Turkish-inspired meatballs-on-a-stick were paired with Greek salad-on-a-stick, to be dressed with a vinaigrette or dipped in a creamy tzatziki.
“I figured we’re in Durango, they’re going to eat the veggies,” said Jim Tencza, owner of HDS Services and head chef and bottle washer.
He was wrong.
Despite displaying a list of the nutritional values of the salad, twice as many customers bypassed the greens and headed off with just the meatballs.
Tencza was unperturbed.
“We used to do chili cook-offs,” he said. “If you didn’t win, at least you were drunk.”
Hot Heads did win, taking home the prize for best veggie dish and a handsome plaque adorned with a large, painted silver carrot.
In another here’s-what-you-can-grill-besides-meat effort, the men at Directory Plus served up the novel with grilled jerk chicken pizza in aluminum baking pans. Everything was homemade, even the contraption used to fire the pizza, a black propane tank bigger than a bull elk attached to a smaller tank that burned charcoal to give it that authentic smoky flavor.
The cooks there were pleased with the event’s move from Main Avenue to Buckley Park, saying that the grass was a break on their feet and the ground absorbed some of the heat from the 400-degree cooker.
But if it was heat you were looking for in your sauces, you largely didn’t find it. While men may like their food hot enough to destroy their taste buds, most women and children don’t, and the men who grilled knew it.
“There’s some spice in there, for sure,” Ben Rockis, head cook and owner of Backcountry Experience, said of the dry rub he used to coat his drumsticks. “But the sauce can’t be too hot. They won’t like it.”
As for Rockis’ sauce, for me, it tied for best of the bunch with that of the neighboring tent, Keller Williams. It included garlic, onions, Worcestershire, molasses, strawberries and the winning smoky flavor of adobe peppers.
The cooks at Keller Williams wouldn’t reveal the ingredients in their scrumptious sauce (a terrible pity), a tangy, spicy, aromatic concoction with just the right touch of heat. It would be good on everything from the enormous pork ribs they served to a hearty slab of Pacific salmon.
As for seafood, a number of cooks recognized what a crowd-pleaser a simple grilled shrimp can be. They came prepared with the bacon-swaddled version, a chipotle-tamarind marinated morsel, a honey-aki steeped rendition and my absolute to-die-for favorite, jumbo grilled shrimp in butter-soaked Cajun sauce over equally decadent grits.
This taste-treat of shellfish, butter and cornmeal was prepared by the professional team of chefs from T’s Smokehouse Grill and J. Bo’s. J. Bo’s owner Bo Maloney, who has cooked at the event for five years, wracked his brain to come up with dishes that would wow the judges and be the envy of his fellow cooks. In addition to the shrimp, they served pork belly, beef tenderloin with two different sauces and an amazing dessert of balsamic-macerated fruit over grilled bread.
It paid off, winning them the $250 Judges’ Choice award and lines of fans at their stall.
“People appreciate the quality here,” he said. “They really dig the food.”
Where there’s more than one man at a gathering, competition follows, even if it’s good natured. Loftis of La Plata Family Medicine noticed the large crew at Maloney’s tent as he prepared his food before the crowds arrived.
“The point of it is a good cause, but all of a sudden it becomes a lot of smack talk and silliness,” he said, grinning.
But beyond the delicious food, the goofy competition and the surreptitious beer drinking, Men Who Grill has a serious point, and the cooks who volunteered never lost sight of it. They raised $16,000 for the Women’s Resource Center to help the women in our community who have nowhere else to turn. Bravo.
phasterok@durangoherald.com
