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For a meal that can be cooked in a hole in the ground, barbecue is serious business.
Sure, it’s typically devoured off a paper plate and washed down with a cold beer in minutes — but those lip-smacking minutes are the result of up to 20 hours of prepping and cooking and meticulous attention to heat, smoke, spices and sauce. It’s a South Carolina tradition that’s older than the state itself — and one that South Carolina Barbeque Association president Lake High says wasn’t getting the respect it deserved.
“I started the SCBA because South Carolina has the best barbecue in the nation and we had the worst judges,” says High, who in 2004 used the experience he’d gained in 20 years as a certified wine judge to develop a curriculum for certifying barbecue judges — along with a new set of rules to raise the bar for cook-offs across the state.
High, who’s pretty sure he’s eaten in every barbecue joint in South Carolina (and many more around the country), says the previous rules for judging were so lax they bordered on unlawful.
Photography / Rob Kaufman
“The judges talked together. They swapped notes. They let husbands and wives judge together — that’s no good,” says High, who lives in Columbia. “Those wives can read their husbands’ body language.”
To tighten things up the SCBA — which goes with the less-traditional “q” spelling hence our seeming flip-flopping on that in this article — instituted a policy of “blind judging,” which means every entry comes to the judges’ table in the same plain white box so the judges can’t tell who made what. Beaufort resident Jason Dangerfield, who does a little catering and a little competing under the name Cooking Just For Fun, says that approach makes for a much fairer competition.
More Monthly: 'The dying art of barbecue': More with SCBA president Lake High
“The judges don’t know whether the barbecue they’re eating was cooked in a Crock Pot or a $40,000 Carolina Pride smoker,” he says. “It makes it a more level playing field.” The SCBA also requires that all the meat for a cook-off come from the same source, instead of allowing each team to bring its own.
“That’s so you can’t bring in a $700 pig that’s been raised by Mennonites on beer and corn or whatever,” High says.“Everybody starts with the same meat. The idea is: ‘Let’s see what you can do with it.’ ”
But the association didn’t just level the playing field — they also raised the bar for those officiating on that field. To become a certified judge in South Carolina, one has to complete a daylong seminar and then serve as a novice judge in four different publicly held, SCBA-sanctioned barbecue cook-offs. Janie Lackman, development director for Friends of Caroline Hospice, went through the training last year when the nonprofit organization decided to hold a barbecue cook-off as a fundraiser.
“The training’s a lot of fun,” said Lackman of the all-day seminar in Columbia, during which novice judges were schooled in the psychology of judging, and how to rate things like tenderness and taste.
High is now as confident in the state’s judging superiority as he’s always been in our barbecue supremacy.
“Our judges are without a doubt the best-trained in the nation,” he says, with South
Carolina’s certification process far surpassing that of other barbecue hot spots like Memphis and Kansas City.
But more than that, High says the association’s efforts have helped to push the barbecue boom along. “We’ve changed the whole culture of barbecue in this state,”
High says. “There are probably twice as many people cooking and competing now than when we started.”
