Extreme Barbecue by Dan Huntley & Lisa Grace Lednicer & Layne Bailey

Author:Dan Huntley & Lisa Grace Lednicer & Layne Bailey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chronicle Books LLC
Published: 2007-04-02T04:00:00+00:00

Bill Rousseau & Marty Edwards

The weird and the wacky are on full display at the American Royal Invitational: Smokers in the shape of giant ceramic pigs. Old steam engines re-jiggered as cookers. Rigs in the shape of coffins and shotguns.

But it’s the Cessna 185 that really grabs people. In a former life, it was a sleekly elegant blue-and-silver corporate plane before a thunderstorm flipped it over while it was tied down at an airport near Kansas City. The wings and tail of the plane were still in good shape, though.

So Bill Rousseau, a barbecuer and skydiver—he jumps out of Cessnas—hauled it home. He called up his buddy, Marty Edwards, and said, “Hey, I’ve got something.”

“You’re outta your mind,” Edwards said when he saw the 1950s-era plane.

“That’s beside the point,” Rousseau answered. “We’re gonna build a grill.”

“We stuck it in my garage, then sat around for a coupla days, drinking beer and trying to think what we could do with it,” Rousseau recalls. “In this case, function followed form, instead of the other way around. It was like building a ship inside a bottle.”

They measured the inside of the plane and built two steel boxes. One became a firebox, which they lined with firebricks and secured inside the cargo hold using steel pipes. They slid the second box under the windshield after gutting the instrument panel and engines. Edwards snagged part of an elevator door’s machinery from work and snuggled it inside the nose of the plane to make a rotisserie.

Finally, they painted “Meat-Seeking Missiles” on the side and christened their barbecue team “The Swine Flew.” Team members, Rousseau says, are forbidden to take themselves too seriously.

The Cessna’s been written up in magazines, local TV news reporters do their standups in front of it, and once, TWA sponsored their team. The smoker is designed to cook while the Cessna is in motion. One time, Rousseau says, they were on the way home from a contest when a guy wearing a Federal Aviation Administration cap pulled alongside the car. He gaped, then sped off.

But the plane is more than just an odd contraption, Rousseau says. Team members have taken first place in contests and gotten catering jobs after folks oohed and aahed over the meat they cooked. Rousseau and his buddies won the Royal’s Hot Wings category in 1991, the first time they entered, and they’ve cooked at weddings, company picnics, and skydiving conventions.

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