I love a good town barbecue, a culinary tradition as uniquely American as apple pie and jazz. It is a distinctly “rural” event, celebrated at firehouses and town centers across the country with racks of grilled chicken and hamburgers and hot dogs and corn on the cob. Beer and soda are the beverages of choice. A glass of wine or a cocktail may make a rare showing but a frosty bottle of something just seems to go better with barbecue sauce.
Schroon Lake, New York holds their annual bake every year on the weekend after Labor Day. It is a celebration of the end of summer. It affords an opportunity to share one last meal with, and say goodbye to, the summer residents who depart soon for their winter homes in Florida and points south. It is a great party, usually attended by hundreds of people on the Schroon Lake Fish and Game Club grounds. A pavilion on the grounds shelters picnic tables that can accommodate over four hundred people. As far as I can tell, this annual bake is the single reason that this pavilion was built. I can count on one hand the number of times in the last twenty years that it has been used for anything else. The event is called the Schroon Lake Lobster & Chicken Bake. Up until a few years ago it was called the Lobster Bake. The secondary mention of “chicken” is a concession, I think, to me and my crew of chicken flippers. We spoke up for the chickens, who we thought were being upstaged by the lobsters. After all, what does it take to boil a lobster? We start the day before, blending our spice rub, and concocting our secret barbecue sauce. (Secret recipes on wwwNorthCountryBBQ.com). We spend hours fighting smoke, carefully flipping racks of chickens to try and get that perfect crispy but not charred finish. It's hard work. The lobster guys show up and boil some lobsters for a few minutes. And they got top billing! Whats up with that? But I digress.
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| Slice & Dice Prep Crew |
The bake crew – all volunteers – start cooking the day before the event (except for the said aforementioned lobster guys). There is a lot of slicing and dicing necessary to prepare hundreds of portions of potato salad, coleslaw, vegetables for the clam chowder, and potatoes that will be served with the dinners. The pig crew shows up at 4 AM on the morning of the bake to ready the hog for a ten hour stint in the cooker. The rest of us start rolling in around 9 AM to prepare for the noon opening. The chicken gets served at 1:30 PM, the pig at 2:30, the lobster at 3. All day long the grill crew is also putting out hamburgers and hot dogs, sausage and pepper sandwiches, bowls of clam chowder, and all of the freshly picked (that morning) corn on the cob that you can eat. No one leaves hungry.
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| Dan & Dana Loading Lobster |
The lobsters are cooked in a wood fired stainless steel steamer that can hold up to five hundred lobsters at one time. A pile of scrap wild cherry is set ablaze under the steamer after wooden baskets containing a live lobster and prepared red potatoes are arranged in rows inside. When they turn red, they're done. How hard is that?
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| "Firehouse" Chicken Grills |
We cook the chickens on what are called firehouse grills, so named I suspect because they are frequently used at firehouses. Twenty chicken halves are placed on a grill that can be turned easily by two people. When the chicken needs to be turned, a second empty grill is placed on top of the full grill of chicken, and the whole thing is flipped over. A boxed frame three feet wide by ten feet long holds one hundred sixty pounds of charcoal. Each box frame can hold four individual grills, accommodating eighty chicken halves per box. We have a total of six box frames meaning we can cook four hundred eighty chickens at one time. Serious BBQ.
The weather and the BBQ gods cooperated yesterday, and the food, the camaraderie and the music made for a wonderful celebration of summer's end. Next weekend the snowbirds will start flying south and I will get my bar stool back at Flanagan's for the winter. In another week we will be picking our last tomatoes, and pounding stakes in the driveway to guide the snowplow. But let's not think about that just yet.
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