"Any steak can be a good steak"
Another weekend of lessons learned
“We’ve got twenty minutes!”
The kids kept working with a minimum of chit chat. They had just torn their last tortilla, and they were running out of time to turn in their entry in the burger category in the Texas High School BBQ championships. But they didn’t complain or in any way show that they were feeling the heat, which, standing next to a grill and three smokers on a blacktop under the first really hot sun of the year, was considerable.
The Navarro High School FFA was taking a big swing by doing their take on a Taco Bell crunchwrap. Instead of pink slime and industrial ground beef, these kids were adding barbacoa to grass-fed beef to give it both flavor and moisture. First you grill a disc of oaxaca cheese, spread guacamole and a homemade yum sauce (a chipotle mayo) on top, and add crunchy tostadas, onions, and cilantro. On top of that you put the patty, wrap that sucker in a flour tortilla, grill it to give it color and texture, and then stick a wedge of lime on top.
The question wasn’t whether the burger was good. The question was whether judges an hour outside of Austin would dig a fusion of irony and Hispanic flavors. To give you an idea about the cultural currents at play that day, Navarro was the only team making burgers to a reggaeton soundtrack. Everyone else was playing country songs that sounded like they didn’t make the cut for truck ads.
A dad wearing a novelty Hawaiian shirt wandered over and saw immediately what they were up to.
“Taco Bell!” he said. “Frickin’ sweet!” He laughed with Tracey Cortez, the Navarro coach, a bit before wandering back to his tribe. “Goddamn…” he said.
The kids from Navarro could see other kids starting to bring white cake boxes into the gymnasium where the judges waited. It was getting close.
The coach, separated by a league-mandated rope line to prevent adults from taking over, offered an idea that flopped. Finally, they realized they could just put the imperfect side down, and that since the judges would be cutting up the burgers anyway into individual bites, they didn’t have to worry about the whole burger holding together.
“Get the cake box and line it with foil!” said Cortez. A tall boy took the finished crunch wraps off the grill one at a time with his gloved hands, yelping in pain each time. The young woman in charge of assembly used utensils to carefully place them into the box. They got the burgers to the judges’ table with time to spare, but not much.
“Hopefully we’re going to win this thing,” said Cortez, “but it’s always up to the taste buds and the region that we have.”
Cortez had reason for optimism. The previous weekend his squad had finished third in the other state high school BBQ championship. A few years ago, a fellow started the high school championships in Burnet. There was a conflict between him and his board, and now there is a schism. Texas boasts of many things but none as deservedly so as barbecue and adults losing their minds over high school competitions.
The top finishers at this championship, though, wouldn’t just have bragging rights for a year but a chance to compete at nationals over Father’s Day weekend in Round Rock. Teams are coming from Ohio, Missouri, and Florida to compete. Last year they had to do it virtually, and a school from Missouri won.
“Taco Bell! Frickin’ sweet!”
I was in town to judge the steak category, and lest you worry that I had my thumb on the scale for the Navarro Vikings, one of the high schools in the district I work for, rest assured that judging was blind, and in my case, dumb. At first there was joking around the table. A woman confessed she’d just judged the desserts and was already stuffed. Two fellas on the other side of the table bragged that they still had two more events to go after this. By the looks of it, they were well-practiced.
But once the officials explained the rules (“Be nice, these are just kids, and for some of them this is their first time cooking”) and the scoring system (“Don’t worry, there’s no math”), we all became quiet. A volunteer from the local FFA and her younger sister took turns cutting into the steaks and then walking them around so we could judge the appearance, and then an official would slice off bites.
On the way up, I texted my friend Matthew Odam, the local paper’s food critic, for tips on judging a cooking contest.
“Good luck,” he said. “Take small bites.”
The first time I saw one of those careful slices, my heart sank. Taking small bites would not be a challenge. I would not eat my fill that day. On the other hand, the Dessert Mom sitting next to me complained, “Oh God, I’m going to be so full.”
The official put the slices onto individual plates that the volunteer and her sister passed around to us. We were told to use fresh plastic cutlery for each round, and they gave us Ritz crackers and dill pickle slices to cleanse our palates. It was all very fancy.
The steaks were fine. Some of the 15 I tasted were quite good. Only one was bad. The funniest thing about it was how seriously everyone took it. No one made appreciative sounds so as not to unduly influence our fellow judges. Judges turned their scorecards over so no one could see their scores, and the judge who pointed out that I was filling out my cards all wrong apologized. “I didn’t want you to think I was looking at your scores,” she said.
To choose the steaks, the teams draw lots, but before picking, every team gets to look at every steak. One judge, the husband of a teacher at one of the competing schools, said that how you cook a steak depends on the steak. These were all strip steaks, but they varied in thickness and in marbling. If a steak doesn’t turn out well, it’s not the steak’s fault, but the inexpert cook.
“Any steak can be a good steak,” he said.
“Any steak can be a good steak.”
The day before I’d spoken to a class of 7th graders who had been doing a lot of journaling, and their teacher thought they might benefit from talking to a “real writer.” I substitute taught for these kids back during the Omicron wave and liked them immensely. A couple of the kids were new to the country and didn’t speak English, which presented difficulties in English class, but most seemed happy to participate.
“What’s the hardest part about writing?” asked one girl.
I told her that absolutely every writer I know has a liar and a shy trickster inside of them. The liar tells you you’re not good enough and that no one wants to hear what you’re writing. The liar tells you to quit, or worse, to write what is expected. The shy trickster, however, discovers something wonderful but doesn’t think it can be written. “I’m not allowed to write that, am I?”
The hardest part, I told the girl, was telling the liar to shut up while giving permission to the shy trickster.
After class, the teacher handed me a journal entry from one of her students. In neat, completely unpunctuated text comprising a solid block of prose, page after page, a boy wrote about being made to fight his younger brother in front of his father and his friends, who would then beat and burn cigarettes into the one who lost the fight. The boy purposefully would lose to spare his brother.
“Isn’t that something?” the teacher kept repeating, over and over again. I held the pages in my hands but only pretended to keep reading. She assured me that she had gotten the boy help and that she had told the police. Two pages of notebook paper, front and back, filled with a matter-of-fact description of cruelty inflicted on children. I handed the pages back to her after a time in which I could have reasonably read them. I don’t know why I shut myself down. I don’t know why I couldn’t read what this boy wrote. But I do know that I’m glad I read it after class, because I would have given different answers otherwise.
What’s the hardest part of writing? Remembering the details so the bastards don’t get away with it, and getting the details onto the page so they don’t poison you from inside.
Kids aren’t born with cigarette burns. It’s the adults who do that.
Kids aren’t born with cigarette burns.
One thing the officials told us when judging steaks is that if you think your first steak is a 10, and then another steak comes along later that you think is better, you don’t go back and mark the first one down. You judge each steak on its own merits. If every steak can be a good steak, your job is to judge how well the cook did to realize its potential.
The Navarro BBQ team didn’t get the results they were looking for.* Their highest individual score was desserts, where they got third place. Overall, they finished in the middle of the pack at 15. This is where I’m supposed to say they were all winners, but they know better. They’re not getting the belt buckles that Cortez promised them if they won state. What I wish they knew about themselves is what I saw. I saw kids working together with pride at something they were good at. I saw them support each other under pressure. I saw them smile and joke.
I saw that they were happy. And I’m really, really glad they don’t know why I needed to see that so badly. Any kid can be a happy kid.
*I just found out that because they finished in the top 15, they qualified for The Slab, which is what they call the national high school BBQ championships! It’s Father’s Day Weekend in Round Rock. By the way, they finished 12th out of 30 in burgers. Click here if you want to buy some smoked meat to help get them to nationals.
Jason Stanford is the co-author of NYT-best selling Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth. His bylines have appeared in the Washington Post, Time, and Texas Monthly, among others. He works at the Austin Independent School District as Chief of Communications and Community Engagement, though he would want to point out that these are his personal opinions and his alone, but you already knew that. Follow him on Twitter @JasStanford.
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