Eleven years after their first run as a Patio Porker team at Memphis in May World Championship Barbecue Cooking Contest, one winning team has chosen to stay on the Mississippi River for this year’s festivals.

Last year, Sweet Cheeks placed first in the pork shoulder competition and won the Green Grilling award at the WCBCC. This year, they won’t be competing at that festival. 

Memphis in May or SmokeSlam? For two teams, the answer is both

“(Former President and CEO of Memphis in May) Jim Holt has been tremendously good to myself, and to our team, and Memphis in May is a fantastic organization for the city,” said Sweet Cheeks team captain Alex Boggs. “But, at the end of the day, it really boiled down to us wanting to be on the river.”

Sweet Cheeks is competing at SmokeSlam this weekend. They’re one of 57 teams competing at the inaugural festival, and their tent, a double-decker high-rise complete with a staircase, is right on the riverfront at Tom Lee Park.

“Being on the banks of the mighty Mississippi is a game changer,” Boggs said. “Every barbecue competition in the world is in a big grass field or in a parking lot. We’re sitting right here, looking at two different bridges, having a fantastic time.”

Boggs said the team discussed competing at both WCBCC and SmokeSlam this year — which would have required the team to split up — and the decision to do SmokeSlam alone was rooted in being “a barbecue family.”

“We didn’t want to split up,” Boggs said. “Winning is great. That’s not what this week is about. This week is about cutting out from work for a little bit, hanging out with some of your best friends in the world.”

But that doesn’t mean Sweet Cheeks is cutting its competition any slack.

At SmokeSlam — unlike at WCBCC — teams can enter into more than one cooking category. Categories include whole hog, ribs and pulled pork, dessert, bacon, duck, poultry, beef, seafood and wings. 

Sweet Cheeks is entered into the pulled pork and ribs categories, as well as several of the non-pork categories. 

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On the team are Marshall Bartlett and John Jordan Proctor of Home Place Pastures, a regenerative pork and beef farm in Como, Mississippi. Bartlett took over the farm — a family operation for generations — in 2014 and uses regenerative and conservationist farming practices in his business.

All the meat Sweet Cheeks uses comes from Home Place’s farm, from which they can cherry-pick the best of the Berkshire pastured hogs they’ve processed. Sweet Cheeks is using whole pork shoulder — which is made up of cuts known as the Boston butt and picnic roast — for their pulled pork.

Proctor said they’re looking for dark-colored, rosy meat with a nice fat cap. Heritage breeds of hog such as Berkshire are known for their darker meat, which typically means more flavor and better marbling. A solid fat cap on a pork shoulder helps keep the meat moist and tender while it renders during smoking. 

“I would have to say we’re the only ones that are raising, harvesting, processing and cooking pork,” Proctor said. “There was a time in barbecue fests past where I would go into a tent and try to talk to somebody about Home Place Pastures, and more or less get laughed out of there because they just did not care.”

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Just as the pork Sweet Cheeks uses is raised traditionally, so, too, is it cooked. They smoke their meat in a reverse-flow smoker, which works by directing heat and smoke under a baffle plate to the far end of the cooking chamber before reversing their flow back over the pork.

“You’re just having to feed logs into it all night, all day,” Proctor said. “If you don’t pay attention to it, it goes out. And when you’re cooking something as big as these whole shoulders, that becomes very critical.”

Sweet Cheeks teammates take shifts feeding the fire — using oak and pecan wood, also from Home Place Pastures — throughout the night to ensure the temperature stays consistent.

“Everything we use, all of our stuff, is locally sourced,” Boggs said. “We like to use all of our resources that we possibly can.”

The selection of Sweet Cheeks’ ingredients and technique, combined with the team’s family-oriented and relaxed atmosphere, is exactly what Boggs said his team is going for. When he joined the team seven years ago, Sweet Cheeks was, as he described it, a “party team.” 

“Then, some of us got together and decided that we wanted to cook quality competition and compete with the best in the world,” he said. “They said, ‘You can either be a party team or cook team, but you’re not gonna be able to do both.’ And we’ve been proving them wrong for about four straight years.”

When asked how cooking at SmokeSlam is different from cooking at Memphis in May, teammate and chef Schulyer O’Brien said one of the biggest challenges for the team has been behind the scenes. Sweet Cheeks has been putting in as much time as possible to ensure the team is operating within the regulations of the new sanctioning bodies, who set the rules and standards for judging in the competition.

Desserts, bacon and wings compete on SmokeSlam Day One

But besides the semantics and technicalities, it’s also just cooking at the end of the day.

“We’re gonna stick to what we know, and we’re still gonna do these massive shoulders that nobody else is doing,” O’Brien said. “That’s what makes it beautiful.”

Cooking and hard work, that is.

“We’re all in an industry where we just know working hard and doing things and you’re gonna put in the effort,” he said. “Why not just put even more effort to make it that much better and stand out?”

A first look at SmokeSlam on the river

“Everybody that comes to these things has, like, families, jobs, life happening at all times. It really is a crazy amount of work,” Boggs said. “But it’s really rewarding when it all comes together.”

Editor’s note: Kevin McEniry — a member of the board of Memphis Fourth Estate, the nonprofit that owns and operates The Daily Memphian — is founder and master producer of the Mempho Festival and Mempho Presents, the organization behind SmokeSlam.