KIPLING — Last year was Mathew Bonville’s first foray into hosting a Canadian BBQ Society event in Kipling with the Smokey Skies BBQ Competition. The event drew eight teams.
But this year, Bonville has much more in store for all those barbecue enthusiasts out there, with the competition planned for June 21-22.
“Last year, it was a Canadian BBQ Society event, which is obviously the Canada-wide one,” he explained. “This year, it is sanctioned by the Kansas City BBQ Society, which is the largest barbecue society in the world. They sanction stuff, whether it be Australia, the States, here, all that fun stuff. You gain points, basically, if you belong to the Society, so as you win events and win different things, you gain points, and then you can get an invite to the World Series of BBQ.”
So far, Bonville—who operates Phantom Smoke & BBQ—has 26 teams signed up for the second edition of the Smokey Skies BBQ Competition, including folks from Winnipeg, Manitoba, Bonnyville and Edmonton, Alberta, and a couple from North Dakota. There’s still room for a few more teams as Bonville would like to reach the maximum of 30.
“This is called a KCBS Master Class competition, which means it’s a four-meat competition, and it meets all the requirements because it’s sanctioned,” he explained. “We have so many teams, it meets all the requirements to ‘get invited to the show,’ as they call it. The American Royal is held in Kansas City every year, and that’s called the World Series of BBQ.”
At the American Royal, there are two types of competitions teams can participate in—the Open and the Invitational.
“The Open, anybody can go to and compete at, but the Invite, you need to become a Grand Champion at one of these smaller events like what we’re holding that meets all the criteria,” Bonville said. “So you have to win it overall to get the invite.”
The Smokey Skies BBQ Competition will be the only KCBS-sanctioned event in Saskatchewan this year, with only 11 other events across Canada.
“The big difference is to become sanctioned, you have to guarantee money up front,” Bonville said. “So it’s not just we sign up as many people as we can, and then we decide how much everyone wins on the last day. Through KCBS, we have to guarantee an amount of money three months before the event starts and how much we’re going to pay the winners. We also have to acquire reps, so we’re lucky enough that we have some Kansas City reps out of Calgary, and they’ve offered to come out. They come out and make sure that we’re following all the Kansas City rules so that we’re eligible. Basically, they’re like the refs, if you want to look at it that way.”
In addition to the competition taking place in Kipling June 21 and 22, there’s also the opportunity for people to become judges through the KCBS Certified BBQ Judges course on the afternoon of June 20.
“It’s about five hours of just eating professional barbecue and telling people what you think of it,” Bonville says of what can only be classified as a dream job come true. “At the end of it, you get your certificate saying that you are a certified barbecue judge. You get a name tag with your number on it, but it opens up a lot of things.”
Bonville is a CBJ himself and explained how he had the opportunity to judge a state championship in California this past January.
“You can go anywhere in the world,” he said. “You can be going to Australia on a vacation, and if they have a competition going there, you can register to judge at it.”
Certified barbecue judges are in demand, as a competition generally has a one-to-one ratio of judges per team.
“It’s a judge per team, so right now we’re at 26 teams; we have to have 26 judges, but then it has to be divisible by six, so you have to have six judges at a table,” Bonville explained. “So we’ll have 30 judges.”
With the Smokey Skies BBQ Competition a couple months away, Bonville has a lot of the planning in place for the event, but more sponsors are always welcome to join the excitement.
“Sponsorships are always accepted because the more we could offer to the competitors and to the people coming to the event, obviously the bigger it will be the next year,” he said, adding that there is a goal he would like to hit as far as team numbers go. “The largest barbecue competition in Saskatchewan ever was 27 teams, so we want to get at least two more teams so we can beat that.”
The beauty of the world of barbecue competitions is the variety in experience levels and the camaraderie between teams.
“Out of the 26 teams, we have two World Champions already signed up, and then we have everything to a team that did his first competition last year with us,” Bonville said. “So you don’t have to be the best in the world, you just have to show up. You’re not competing against the other teams, you’re competing against the judges because it’s all blind testing.
‘If you want to see what a barbecue does and all the different kinds of barbecues, or learn anything, or just talk about food, I suggest coming out on the 21st, and you can talk to pretty much anyone you want,” he concluded. “They’ll love to show you what they got.”
