First and Last Competition

Mondays we have to get the kids up and off to school so Sunday is our only sleep-in day. This past Sunday saw us up at dawn and herding the kids out the door to set up camp in fair park for the state fair chili cook-off.



We pulled into gate 11, found a space and unloaded our plethora of equipment. It looked like a pretty good turnout - maybe 30 or so other tents were already set up. I noticed that everyone seemed to know everyone else as I hauled the grill stand, chopping block and coolers out of the 4-Runner. After a brief battle with a borrowed Coleman pump stove we had the bison browning and I began to chop onions. I tossed the onions in the pot and started on the garlic. Another contestant, a cherubic middle-aged lady, made her way over to our canopy and peered in the pot.



"Uh oh! Ya'll are going to be DQ'd!" she said with an easy drawl. We looked at her quizzically. "Disqualified!", she exclaimed. It was around that time that I began to feel a bit uneasy, like showing up shirtless to a job interview. I was the only one with a cutting board and fresh vegetables. Fran and I watched as a few other cooks got out plastic bags with various powders and dumped them in their pots while stirring furiously. We turned back to the cook-off regular who was looking curiously at our stash of Holland habaneros. She had come from a very decorated canopy with many ribbons proudly displayed.



"Well, if we get disqualified, would you taste our chili?" Fran asked. "It looks like you've won a lot of competitions and we'd be glad for the input."



"Oh my!" said the chili veteran, "I don't LIKE chili! I just do this for the fun of it."



Let me take a step back and acknowledge that we should have studied more, we should have read all the rules. We didn't. We were totally blindsided by what has become a strange and insular culture of chili contests all culminating in a grand showdown in Terlingua Texas. Here's the deal; let's assume I paid off all the judges to vote for my chili. I would grease each palm with a genuine five dollar bill and say, "Just look for the sample with the jalapeno chunks!" The powers-that-be of chili contests have become so paranoid of such a scenario that they have systematically turned competition chili into a grand quest to duplicate Wolf Brand.



Anything identifiable is known as a "marker" and surely placed there not for flavor but to alert your carefully bribed judge to give you high marks. Red "gravy" and meat is all that is allowed to be sent to the judging tent. Needless to say, Fran and I were straining our chili into the Styrofoam cup. Our other major faux pas was spice; we added roughly the same amount of habaneros as we would add to our regular spicy chili at the kitchen. "The chili out here is pretty bland", confided another cook-off regular upon tasting our batch and reaching for his beer. At least we weren't disqualified. We didn't place, but we certainly shocked a judge or two. As an aside, I took a keg of homebrew - a basic red ale - which was very well received by the assembled cooks. Everyone was extremely friendly and I can certainly see how these competitions can become addictive; it would be easy enough to formulate a recipe which would please the judges and bring home ribbons - but why?

To quote the Beastie Boys "Sure Shot" -

You think I'll change up my style just to fit in?

Nah.