British BBQ Star Heading to Hot Springs
Toby Shea to cook against America’s best at the Forrest Wood Cup Bass & BBQ Festival
Toby Shea’s path in life shifted dramatically about a decade ago when he found himself “kitchenless” and hungry.
Expecting their first child, Toby and his wife, Katie, were deep into a kitchen renovation when they got a call from the folks who were supposed to be delivering their new kitchen appliances. The message was disappointing: The delivery was held up, and Shea would have to wait five weeks for the appliances to arrive.
With the kitchen gutted and nothing to cook with, Shea found himself thrust into a new realm of food preparation.
“I went down to a local DIY store, and they had a Brinkman Smoke’N Pit – a barrel-stove barbecue,” he recalls. “I bought one and started playing with that. I could put charcoal on one side and cook meat on the one end, and vegetables too.”
Pretty quickly, Shea realized just how enjoyable the simple smoker was, and even after his kitchen finally arrived, he continued to grill and barbecue while entertaining friends.
“It became a real social part of what we did,” he says. “It happened naturally, by accident. It’s just been a good time. It’s kind of taken over my life. It’s good fun.”
Later this month, the “good fun” of slow-cooking meats will land Shea in Hot Springs, Ark., at the second-annual Bass & BBQ Festival, which will be held Saturday and Sunday, Aug. 22-23, in conjunction with the 2015 Forrest Wood Cup that begins on Aug. 20.
Now, a little barbecue and a little bass fishing are nothing out of the ordinary for Southern folks in the summertime. But Shea’s not Southern. He’s not even American. Shea is one of the premier British competitive cookers, and he’s traveling across the Atlantic to test his slow-cooking mettle against some of the very best pitmasters in an event sanctioned by the Kansas City Barbecue Society (KCBS).
Taking on America’s Best
?Bass & BBQ, which is presented by KSSN-FM, is actually two events in one. Each day, the 25 or so teams in the event can enter four competition categories: chicken, pulled pork, ribs and brisket. More than 30 KCBS judges will pick the winners, and fans in attendance can purchase five 2-ounce cups of pulled pork or three ribs for $5 to find out just what the best BBQ in the world tastes like. Fans who buy the sample plates also get ballots to vote for the Fishermen’s Favorite Award winner.
For Shea, who competes as the British Bulldogs BBQ team (often with the help of part-time teammates who want to learn from him), this competition is about sizing himself up against the best American competition cookers – widely considered the best in the world – in preparation for the World Series of Barbecue taking place this fall at the American Royal, a non-profit festival dating back to the late 1800s that raises money for agricultural scholarships and the like in Kansas City.
“To be perfectly honest, I never look to win a competition,” says Shea, who’s hoping for at least a top-five finish. “I know it’s a really strange attitude, but I don’t put myself under that pressure. I’m there to enjoy myself and learn and to meet some of the people who enjoy barbecue. This competition has some of the best teams, so I can get an idea of how I’m cooking. There are a lot of teams in Europe, but the level of competition doesn’t come close to that in the States. I’m using this somewhat as a practice to see how I can stand against some of the big guns. And then there’s the American Royal that I qualified for. I will see what kind of work I need to do to get my food where it needs to be.”
Though he says he’s not exclusively seeking a win, Shea’s background in barbecue suggests that he has a really strong shot at taking home some hardware.
In 2007, having never competed in a barbecue cook-off, Shea entered an event near home and took first in brisket, first in pork and second in chicken. He was hooked.
Shea later founded the British BBQ Society, which now hosts a web forum and helps to train British barbecue teams that Shea says have severely underperformed at the international level in the past, frequently finishing in the bottom 10 percent, though recently the Brits have had good success against other European nations. He’s also the director of the International BBQ Network, which is the largest barbecue competition organizer in Europe – the FLW of European competitive barbecue, if you will.
On a larger scale, Shea has been part of the grassroots effort to introduce barbecue and other forms of outdoor cooking to Europeans, especially Brits, who don’t have a culinary, cultural history with it. In that sense, he’s sort of the Forrest Wood of British barbecue.
“There’s a real big movement for barbecue in the U.K.,” Shea adds. “When I first started this eight years ago, nobody had learned of ‘low and slow.’ It didn’t exist.”
While dedicating so much time to improving the quality of barbecue in his homeland and expanding the competitive network, plus raising a family that now includes five children, Shea found himself missing out on the competition. And others around him started questioning his skills at the pit. They expected him to prove he still had the chops, so to speak.
That drove Shea back into the competitive folds last year, and British Bulldogs BBQ proved the doubters wrong.
A sample platter of his accomplishments:
> Second place in the whole hog category at Memphis in May 2014 in Shea’s first attempt at a whole hog competition
> Grillstock Champion in Manchester, England in 2014
> Grand Champion at the 2015 WBQA World BBQ Championships in Sweden
> KCBS SERIES Grand Champion at the World Food Championships in Las Vegas
> Grand Champion at the Euregio competition in Germany (where Shea cooked alone)
Crossing the Pond
Reality television might portray competitive barbecue as a rich man’s game, where teams cook on enormous stainless-steel trailers and have large crews of specialists who handle each part of the cooking.
Shea says it doesn’t have to be that way. It can’t be for him at the Forrest Wood Cup Bass & BBQ Festival.
He’ll have his meat and some supplies shipped to his hotel in Hot Springs. Basic tools will be checked on the airplane. And his friends at Ole Hickory Smokers (Shea imports them to Great Britain) in Illinois are hauling over a smoker for him to use.
It’s a simple setup, which reflects Shea’s simple style of cooking.
“I kind of let the barbecue do the work,” he says. “I know a lot of barbecue people worry a lot about the flavor profile. For me, I just want to make sure I cook the product right. I try to create a flavor profile that a majority of people will like. It’s not going to be too hot for one of the judges. We have six judges, and it’s hard to make them all happy. I want it to be cooked perfectly. The flavor profile comes second.”
Bass Fishing and Slow Cooking
In many ways, competitive barbecue has a lot of parallels with competitive bass fishing. It began on the grassroots level with folks who not only loved to cook and share information about cooking, but who also wanted to know who was the best. That led to competitions, and sanctioning bodies emerged. Now it’s an international affair.
Shea has been part of the process in Britain. When he comes to Hot Springs, he’ll not only be part of the barbecue scene, but he’ll see first-hand via FLW’s premier event just how large bass fishing has grown.
“To be honest, I’ve seen bits and pieces [of bass tournaments] on TV on various shows, but I don’t know a lot about it,” Shea says. “It sounds extremely exciting. It’s not the type of thing you see over here.”
Like tournament bass fishing, competitive barbecue is also a means to make some cash. The total payout at the Bass & BBQ Festival is $10,000.
Of course, the payout at the Forrest Wood Cup is at another level – a total of more than $1.4 million is up for grabs, with $500,000 for the winning pro. That part has Shea’s attention. He says he once left the U.S. in the middle of a barbecue competition to fly home for one of Katie’s medical appointments when she was pregnant with their twin boys – born earlier this year. He left potentially thousands of dollars and major awards on the table by choosing family first. People called him crazy, but he says it was an easy decision. Though, had he been fishing the Forrest Wood Cup, there might have been a different outcome.
“For $500,000,” he says, “I think I would’ve told her I was going to stay in the States.”
Bass & BBQ Festival Details
> What: Two-day barbecue cook-off in conjunction with the FLW Expo at the Forrest Wood Cup as part of a yearlong series of barbecue competitions
> Date: Saturday and Sunday, Aug. 22-23
> Location: Hot Springs Convention Center, 134 Convention Blvd., Hot Springs, AR
> Sanctioning Body: Kansas City Barbecue Society
> For fans: $5 gets five 2-ounce cups of pulled pork or three ribs and a ballot to vote for the Fishermen’s Favorite Award
> FREE Outdoor Concerts: Shari Bales and Southbound on Saturday from 2 to 3 p.m.; Samantha Feathers on Sunday from 1 to 2 p.m.; and Luke Williams on Sunday from 2 to 3 p.m.
> FREE Justin Moore Indoor Concert: Country superstar Justin Moore performs at 4 p.m. on Sunday on the Forrest Wood Cup stage in the Bank of the Ozarks Arena
Important Links