Essex County Toys for Kids Lobster Bake and BBQ

I love small towns. It is often said that people who live in small town are “nicer” as if they have some genetic predisposition to friendliness. I'm sure that some of those genes may be the reason, but I have a theory that the size of the community has more to do with it. If someone cuts you off in the market parking lot, you think twice before popping your cork at them, because you are going to see them again real soon. There's only one market. And then you'll see them at the Post Office, and then at the (only) bank, and probably this weekend at the Fish and Game Club. You just smile and forget about most small breaches of etiquette. That's my theory on why small towns are so nice. I spend most of my time in one such really nice small town - Schroon Lake, NY, whose year round population is less than my high school senior class at Brooklyn Tech. People are really nice here. Towns like this have sense of community that I find lacking in big cities. Its really easy to get to know most of the people in town, and one of the occasions to do just that is at the numerous summer barbecues that are held every year.

"Lobstah" Joe, Dave "Sporty" Beale, and Carl Russel

A few years back a few friends decided to use a barbecue as an excuse to raise money for a new charity that they were starting up – Essex County Toys for Kids , which as the name suggests tries to make sure that the neediest children are not forgotten during the holidays. Essex County is one of the poorest counties in New York, and it occurred to these guys that there were kids going without. So they just took care of it. All eleven schools. Every year. The fund raiser, and the genesis of this organization are also examples of the wonderful self sufficiency that you find in so many rural up state communities. The guys who started this project – Dave Beale, a/k/a/ Sporty of Sporty's Iron Duke Saloon in Minerva, and Carl Russel from North Hudson, saw the need so they just took care of it. No questions asked. Done.

Yesterday's barbecue to benefit this charity was the third annual event. It sold out weeks in advance again this year, as it did last year. They toyed with the idea of increasing the tickets from the current limit of two hundred, but I'm glad they kept it there. Two hundred dinners is manageable with the crew that we have and the size of the BBQ pits. It's still very enjoyable for the volunteers.

The highlight of the event for me is the fish chowder, but I'm getting ahead of myself. One of Sporty's childhood friends is this guy named Joe who just happens to own a lobster boat in Maine. Sporty convinces Joe that the neatest thing in the world would be for him to drive the six hours from Maine every summer with a few hundred lobsters, coolers of fish for chowder, sacks of potatoes and corn, and a van full of friends to cook it all up. Which Joe and his friends do. They all show up at 3 A.M. the night before the Saturday barbecue. They of course all think of 3 A.M. as late Friday night and help Sporty close the bar, before retiring to the cabins out back for a few hours rest. I start my pulled pork butts at 4 AM so I am most definitely thinking of 3 A.M. as Saturday morning. This dichotomy clashes around 7:30 when I pull in trailering my BBQ smoker and start setting up my cooking station accompanied by the appropriate BBQ music which yesterday I decided was the Beach Boys. I blast Joe and his crew out of bed who are now looking for breakfast. I've been up for five hours and am ready for my first beer. Let the games begin.

My crew is responsible for the chicken part of the bake, and I bring along the smoker to cook off some pulled pork and a dozen racks of spare ribs for friends and family and crew. I had prepared the dry rub and the barbecue sauce the day before. I use a basic rub recipe you will find on these pages, and the BBQ sauce is also a variation of the basic sauce recipe. I say variation because I almost always add something different, depending upon what is in my refrigerator, and what bottle of booze I am looking to depart with. This year I used Canadian Club instead of my usual bourbon. I sometimes refer to my sauce recipe as Christmas Sauce because I will use whatever bottle of whiskey that someone gave me for Christmas five years ago and still hasn't been drunk. I also found a bottle of wasabi something or other in the fridge that I thought would be interesting and add a little bite. Nobody keeled over at the event so I assume it was OK. The picnic shoulder for the pulled pork required ten hours of cooking at 200 degrees so with a 4 AM start it would be ready around 2 PM. The ribs only take six hours to cook, so I put them in as soon as I showed up at 8 AM, along with a firebox full of wild cherry that I had picked out of my firewood at home.

The chicken needs to be seasoned with the dry rub prior to going on the grills. Ideally I like to do this the night before, but keeping a few hundred birds chilled without the benefit of commercial refrigeration is problematic so we play it safe and season them just before they go on the fire. We utilize what is commonly referred to as a “firehouse grill” set up – enough to spread out one hundred birds at a time on wired grates that hold twenty half chickens each. I suspect that the phrase “firehouse grill” comes from the fact that most local firehouses use this set up for their cookouts. The grates are usually made of welded re-bar and have handle extensions. By putting an empty grate on top of a full grate of chicken, two people can flip the whole thing over and turn twenty chickens at a time. We have room at Sporty's charcoal pits for six racks so we can prepare approximately 120 birds at a time. We need to cook off two rounds of chicken at ninety minutes per round to get to the 225 dinners that will be required. Mary and our friend Steve joined the chicken crew this year as we were shorthanded. A few of our regulars got shanghaied into taking their significant others to see Carlos Santana at Bethel Woods. The lobster crew, now regretting last night's “let's help close the bar” decision, has yet to start boiling water for their lobster. Which is when I decide to start our annual discussion of why they get “top billing”. Cooking hundreds of chickens, I argue to them, takes a lot of work. We spend days preparing sauce and dry rubs, cleaning the grates with a roofing torch, standing in smoke for hours flipping chicken, making sure to avoid flare ups, timing the saucing to avoid charring. It's a lot of work. The “lobstah guys” roll in from Maine with their funny accents, steam up some “bugs”, wait for them to turn red, and they're done. How hard is that? And they get top billing. OK they make a really, really, good chowder, but please. We're not even on the marquee. In fact our chicken is not even on the menu. Sporty calls it the Essex County Toys for Kids “Down East Maine Lobster Bake”. Chicken is not even a footnote. Nor the pulled pork or ribs. We give Joe and the Maine crew a lot of grief about this every year, but all in good fun. And we do have a lot of fun. I can't think of a way to raise money for a great cause that could be more fun. We look forward to next year. Hope to see you there.

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