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Feature article
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Cooker made for more than just barbecue
By Fred Sauceman
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| Dennis’ “helicopter” barbecue cooker draws lots of attention at Kansas City Barbeque Society competitions. |
Dennis Ricks is a builder, a plumber, an electrician. He says he “gets by” as a welder, but his joints are as clean and tight as any professional’s. When it comes to using his hands, Dennis can do about anything. He built houses for his two sons, from the ground up.
Dennis is a barbecue man from Smyrna, Tennessee. On Mother’s Day nine years ago, at the Murfreesboro Church of Christ, he cooked a ton of chickens. The birds had come to him frozen, and he had to thaw 38 cases by hand. It took all day and night and the next day, too.
He barbecued those chickens on what he calls his large cooker. It weighs 4,700 pounds, has a pizza oven, lights and a food warmer. It’ll hold 105 chickens at a time.
But it’s his “small” cooker, a 2,000-pounder, that gets the attention. He made it himself, with 20-cents-per-pound scrap iron. His rig is an engineering wonder, allowing him tight control over the smoke that passes across his ribs, chicken and pork shoulder.
“I like barbecue golden brown, not black,” says Dennis. “It just has more flavor that way.”
His smokestack design allows him to divert the hickory smoke and direct more heat to the meat.
“But I can put the smoke to it, too,” he adds.
His two-ton creation is more than just a barbecue cooker, though. It’s a symbol of Dennis’ devotion to his country, to its prisoners of war and soldiers missing in action, and a memorial to the fine military career of his late father, Marvin D. Ricks, a special agent in the United States Air Force whose name is permanently inscribed on his son’s cooker.
“My dad died in 2000,” says Dennis. “He solved a lot of military cases in Japan. His trunk is full of commendations and awards.”
Dennis’ cooker is an exact replica of a military helicopter. It took him 2½ years to build, squeezing in a couple of hours a month between construction jobs.
The missiles on the back are combine pins. The door of the hamper came from the coal-burning stove the Ricks family used when Dennis was a boy. The bomb is an old scuba tank topped with the front end of a stainless steel beer keg.
Propellers are made from bicycle bearings. Dennis said he got the idea driving down the Interstate and seeing bicycle wheels turning, mounted on the backs of cars.
The olive drab coloring was powder-coated at 2,000 degrees.
“That powder flies onto the metal like a magnet,” Dennis says.
He even found a spot for a barbecuer’s essential, a rack of paper towels.
Dennis and his wife Marlene have been cooking competitively since 1989. Now they judge the cooking of others, on the Kansas City Barbeque Society circuit.
Dennis is still analyzing his own cooking, though: “My chicken is the best, and I’m working on ribs. I’ve got brisket and pulled pork down. A lot of people like my ribs, but I guess I’m the only one that don’t like them.”
Dennis credits his sons, Robert and Dennis Jr., for taking care of the business while he indulges his tastes for smoked meat.
“Yesterday they were out pouring concrete in nearly 90-degree weather while I was judging barbecue,” he tells me, during the Fiddlin’ Brewin’ Bar-B-Q’N competition on the grounds of the Gaylord Opryland Resort Hotel and Convention Center.
He has only cooked in that “helicopter” eight times. Adorned with a metal eagle, it represents something even deeper, more powerful and more basic than barbecue. That homemade metal barbecue rig is a rolling monument, a testament to patriotism, a tribute to family. And those emotions still mean something among the folks on the barbecue trail today.
--------GoTriCities--------
Food writer Fred Sauceman, author of the book “The Place Setting: Timeless Tastes of the Mountain South — from Bright Hope to Frog Level,” is senior writer and executive assistant to the president for public affairs at East Tennessee State University. E-mail him at sauceman@etsu.edu.
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