3,500 pounds of barbecue sold at Hog Day

Nearly 13,000 attendees at the 30th annual Hog Day festival feasted on barbecue.

And for the teams responsible for cooking this barbecue, it was a serious competition involving various styles and preparations.

The Hillsborough/Orange County Chamber of Commerce provided about 3,500 pounds of pork to 30 teams the night of May 18 for the judging of the barbecue cook-off early the next morning.

After the cook-off winners were announced, all the barbecue was combined and sold to benefit the chamber. There were five teams that had placed in previous Hog Day cook-offs that competed in the People’s Choice Award and did not combine their barbecue.

Dan Levine, creator of the blog “BBQ Jew” and a native of Orange County, has traveled across North Carolina and eaten at more than 50 barbecue restaurants. Levine said there are two common styles of barbecue preparation in North Carolina — eastern style and Lexington style.

Levine said eastern style usually cooks the whole pig combined with a sauce made of vinegar, hot pepper flakes and salt, while Lexington style cooks the pork shoulder combined with a sauce similar to eastern style, but with a dash of ketchup or tomato.

People’s Choice competitor Matt Triskey, of Dickie-Do’s BBQ in Mebane, said all teams at Hog Day were given picnic ham, which, along with the Boston butt, is part of the pork shoulder.

“For some reason we all have picnic ham, and that’s annoying,” Triskey said. “The picnic ham is not as fatty and can be dry compared to the Boston butt.”

Margaret Cannell, executive director for the chamber, said the chamber wanted to provide whole pigs for the teams to cook, but these create too much waste compared to the picnic ham.

Triskey said it takes about 12 hours of cooking for the barbecue to be ready to eat. He smokes the pork over a mixture of charcoal and wood, which he said gives it a distinctive smoky flavor.

Levine said he believes the true barbecue preparation style is cooking over wood or charcoal. However, cooking with a gas or electric cooker is much more common in modern barbecue.

“Barbecue is so tied in to culture and tradition that when you start to separate things like wood cooking, you lose the metaphorical flavor of what barbecue’s all about,” he said.

Hog Day competitor Donnie Seymour, from Timberlake, N.C., cooked his pork over an enormous smoker using only wood and said he always finishes in the top five.

Although the competitors cooked Lexington-style pork shoulder, many of them prepared eastern-style sauces.

People’s Choice competitor Cindy Baldwin, a 14-year-old from Efland, N.C., has been competing in barbecue competitions with her father since she was 9.

She developed the sauce for her team and said it’s an eastern-style sauce that is both spicy and sweet.

“It’s sweet at first, then a little heat comes in that’s not overpowering,” Baldwin said.

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