Slow Cooking For The Holidays

Cooking one turkey for a holiday dinner is intimidating for many of us. Cooking 22 turkeys at the same time for Christmas would be terrifying.

Jim (JR) Roth, executive vice president and general manager of manufacturing for Hillyard Inc. of St. Joseph, Mo., and his friend Randy are avid barbecuers. About 20 years ago they entered a contest in St. Joseph and, as Jim said, “We got hooked.”

Jim and Randy — known as “the Gas House Gang” when they compete in contests — have been known to cook 22 turkeys at a time, and deliver them to friends for Christmas.

The barbecuing that Jim does is done on a custom-made cooker, made from a 600-gallon fuel tank.

“I can tow the cooker behind my truck,” said Jim. He also puts it on a company semi-truck and sends it to points as far away as California and Pennsylvania to cook for company open houses.

As competitors in barbecue contests such as the American Royal in Kansas City — said to be the biggest competition in the U.S. — Jim and his team did well, usually finishing in the top 20 of about 165 teams. They have won awards, including a third place and a couple of fifth place finishes. They’ve also done cooking for fundraisers for non-profit organizations such as art galleries and the local university’s athletic department. They even sold ribs at a 4th of July event in St. Joseph.

“We set up a booth by the river and cooked 2,000 pounds of ribs in three of the hottest days of the year. I’ve never worked so hard in my entire life,” said Jim.

As for barbecue secrets, Jim says he has none. I was hoping for a special recipe for sauce, but Jim doesn’t cook with barbecue sauce.

“We slow cook the meat, and smoke it. The flavor is in the meat, not in the sauce,” said Jim.

They prepare the ribs the day before they cook them, removing the membrane, sprinkling a dry rub over the meat, using a meat pounder to pound in the rub, and refrigerating the ribs overnight. They cook the ribs for eight hours, using apple or hickory wood for the fire, with a 10-gallon pan of water in the cooker (the water keeps the meat from burning).

“Four to six hours after the ribs have cooked, we pull them out, baste them with honey, and put them back in the cooker,” said Jim.

I can only imagine how good those ribs taste.

As for mishaps, there haven’t been any major ones. Once, in the early days, the neighbors saw smoke rising in the driveway from the cooker, which had been fired up since 1:30 a.m., and thought there was a fire. And then there was the time that Jim said he could do a barbecue for 50 people for the opening of a new building, but 500 people showed up, and everybody got one rib.

With the holidays right around the corner, I asked Jim if he’d be repeating his 22 Christmas turkeys cooked this year?

“No,” said Jim. “Now we cook 45 slabs of ribs at once and we throw a party. The guests come to us and we give them a slab of ribs wrapped in foil with a red or green ribbon,” said Jim. Apparently, the logistics of delivering 22 just-cooked Christmas turkeys can get complicated, not to mention the overabundance of Christmas cheer.

Gretchen Roufs, an 18-year janitorial supply industry veteran, owns a marketing and public relations company in San Antonio. To suggest someone you think should be featured in “Freetime,” contact her at GretchenRoufs@aol.com.