INTERVIEW: Tuffy Stone talks brisket, ribs, pork butt

Tuffy Stone, the celebrity chef whose skilled judging is put to the test every week on Destination America’s BBQ Pitmasters, said he’s having a “really good time” on the new season of the competition show. His friendship with fellow judge Myron Mixon has been a highlight.

“We’ve done a lot of interesting things together over the years,” Stone said recently about Mixon. “We’ve competed against each other a lot. We’ve been able to travel to Kuwait and cook for the troops, and we’ve done a lot of television work together. I told him, we were filming the grand finale two weeks ago, and I looked at him, I said, ‘I feel like I went to high school with you.’ We’re actually very close in age. We’re about a year apart. So we’re very familiar with each other, very comfortable. We’re able to like have fun, tease each other, just very relaxed.”

Stone admitted that his responsibilities on BBQ Pitmasters have become challenging. “It’s a tough job when you’ve got to sit down and you’ve got judge barbecue that great, trying to figure out which one is the best,” he said.

To find the best dishes across the United States, Stone relies on his extensive culinary background. He has been cooking for a living since the 1980s, and his experience with the barbecue competition circuit dates back to 2004. He said that even in the past 10 years, the circuit has changed drastically. Because of the proliferation of barbecue classes, television shows and books, the competition has steadily improved.

“You used to be able to pull into a contest, and there would be a certain population of competitors there that they didn’t really care about the competition so much,” he said. “They were just going there with family and friends and were just going to have a very social weekend. And the competition part wasn’t that important to them. What we’re seeing is more and more focus, more and more serious cooks. You’re seeing prize money grow. You’re seeing more competitions pop up on the circuit.”

At a recent competition in Washington, D.C., where Stone took first in ribs and second in pork, the chef met with fans who constantly told him about the techniques they were picking up after watching BBQ Pitmasters. Case in point about the stiff competition: Stone said that last year he missed the grand championship by 4/10,000 of a point.

That near-miss comes after a lot of expenses and time on the road. A true barbecuer needs to buy all the meat, pay for the entry into the contest, have all the necessary equipment and take the day off from work. “Some contests will have a good payout, and some won’t,” he said. “The food is getting closer and closer as far as how it looks, how it chews, how it tastes. I really like this season in particular because we did nine episodes, and each of those first nine episodes have three pitmasters competing against each other, which turns into nine winners. Those nine winners go into three episodes … And then the grand finale, three pitmasters that have won twice.”

The current season of BBQ Pitmasters has several guest judges, including Dale Earnhardt Jr., who is a fan of the show. “[His presence is] a surprise for the pitmasters competing,” Stone said. “They have no idea, and so when he steps onto the set, they’re pretty amped up.”

Stone first entered the cooking realm in a high-intensity French kitchen. From there he and his wife branched off into a gourmet catering company, which this year is celebrating 20 years in the business. A Sharper Palate, the name of the company, grew into 50 full-time employees and approximately 100 part-time employees. The success meant Stone was managing more than he was cooking.

“Cooking and being a chef is my passion,” he said. “And I felt this need, this internal need, to kind of reconnect with cooking. … I felt like there would be no better way to reconnect with the processes of cooking than to buy a barbecue pit, get some wood, and get a modest cut of meat like port butt or beef brisket. I mean those meats tended to be less expensive meats. They weren’t the filets. They weren’t the New York strips. And I thought to be able to make a modest rub or seasoning and try and coax something great out of a cut like that, a cut that’s tougher and takes hours of tending to render it to a state of tender, would be a great way to reconnect with cooking.”

Initially, Stone said he thought it would be easy because of his French culinary background. “Actually it took a long time, and it just sent me down this culinary path. And I worked on it, and I worked on it, and I ruined meat, and eventually it got better, and it got better. And by the time 2007 hit, my competition team, Cool Smoke, we were the national champions.”

Since his first wins on the circuit, Stone has opened four barbecue restaurants (Q Barbeque, all based in Virginia). No matter his current project, this chef still relies on those fundamental cooking lessons from his early days in the business. But he also needs to strike a balance.

“When I first started cooking I thought, you know, white truffle salt would be so good on beef brisket, and it is. But don’t take it to a barbecue competition, in my opinion. … I always say there are stereotypical flavor profiles that people expect to taste when they think of barbecue. And some of those flavors are, you know, smoke, for example, salt, spice, tang, you know things like that. There are certain things that people expect in barbecue, and that took me awhile to figure that out. But what I was able to do, and tap into from my French background and my gourmet background, is to learn how to finesse, really dial down technique and method.”

The key to good barbecue, in Stone’s mind, is one word: smoke.

“If you look at Virginia hundreds of years ago, they were burning down hickory to coals and shoveling them in a pit, and cooking whole hogs,” he said. “By burning that wood down to coals and then shoveling it over there, you got a much cleaner fire. And what’s important … is not over-smoking the pork butt or the chicken or the ribs or the brisket or whatever it might be that you’re cooking, and taking smoke and treating it more like salt and pepper, and having it be a supporting flavor to the meat itself.”

His varied career and his judging on BBQ Pitmasters has led Stone to be a tightrope walker, balancing between creativity and tradition.

“So I do rely on some of the things I was able to learn in the professional kitchen and apply it to barbecue,” he said, “but at the same time, I’ve got to always remind myself to try and bring in flavors that I think are reminscent of barbecue and what people expect to taste.”

By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com

• BBQ Pitmasters airs on Destination America on Sundays at 9 p.m. Click here for more information.