UPDATED: From backyard to competition: chefs learn barbecue lessons

There’s the barbecue you cook at your house. And then there’s barbecuing for competition.
The chefs who competed in the weekend's Bayou BBQ Bash made the transition and picked up some tricks along the way.

The defending St. Mary Parish champion is the Sewart Supply team, which dished out barbecued ribs at Thursday’s Bayou BBQ Bash Kick-off event at Hampton Inn & Suites.

The team’s secret?

“A whole lot of love,” said team member Billy Waguespack said.

Paul Cheramie Jr. joked that the team had a new member, Carl Beecher, last year, so maybe he was the secret weapon.

No matter the reason, the team had to learn a new way to cook when it entered competition.

“We’ve been told we’re pretty good backyard barbecuers,” Cheramie said. But “there’s a fine line between backyard barbecue and competition barbecue,” he said.

The big difference is that judges may take just one bite from an entry. So cooks season the meat more aggressively for competition than they would for a Fourth of July cookout.

“So we spiced it up and salted it up,” Cheramie said.

Sewart won last year after competing in the bash for 10 years.

For competitor Ryan Russo of Baton Rouge, barbecue is like comedy: "Timing is pretty much everything," Russo said.

Russo and his father Paul compete as Twisted Boot BBQ in Barbecue Competitors Alliance events.

"I saw them on Facebook," Ryan Russo said. "We decided to go into it, and bought a trailer and some pits."

There's the cook time itself in a competition where the first commandment is "low and slow" -- low heat and long cook times.

And then, Russo said, there are the demands imposed by the deadlines for submitting meat to be judged.

"You got three cuts of meat in an hour," Russo said. "It seems like a long time, but it's not.

"It's real easy to lose track of time when you're trimming a piece of meat, and then you're half an hour behind."

For Jereme Skrabanek of the Big Slick Cookers, "it takes a lot of practice and a lot of meat thrown away."

Big Slick, one of 31 competitors at this year's Bayou BBQ Bash, is from the Houston area and is affiliated with a Veterans of Foreign Wars post there.

"It's just a bunch of guys sitting around poker table and saying, 'We can do that,'" Skrabanek said.

They compete in events sanctioned by the Barbecue Competitors Alliance and the International Barbeque Cookers Association.

Mostly, Skrabanek said, it's about meeting people and helping organizations that benefit from the barbecue competitions.