By Carolyn Webb
Jim Cameron’s day on Sunday began at 5am when he got up to start cooking his beef brisket for the annual Meatstock barbecue competition in Bendigo.
He cooked the 1.3-kilogram cut of brisket – the piece of beef taken from the cow’s chest – low and slow in a specialty smoker for eight hours in the hope of taking out this year’s brisket competition.
Liza Cameron, Jim Cameron (centre) and Nick Gutterson compete as the Jimmy Brisket team at Meatstock in Bendigo.Credit: Chris Hopkins
“I started with a $100 Weber barbecue and went to Melbourne Meatstock in 2017, and I said to my wife, ‘I want to be back here next year competing’,” he says. “It was something we hadn’t had here before and it looked so good, so I thought, let’s try it. And once you try it, you can’t go back. You love it.”
Cameron now cooks on a $45,000 smoker and leads the Jimmy Brisket team alongside wife Liza Cameron and son-in-law Nick Gutterson.
Jim trims the meat for competition standard and cooks, Gutterson injects flavour into the meat with sauce such as beef stock and spices for brisket, and Liza is the stylist.
In 2018, Jim Cameron started a catering company to pay for his competitive barbecuing, which he estimates has cost him $100,000 over the years.
The side hustle now has six staff who run 50 to 60 catering jobs on weekends, from weddings to parties and corporate events, for which they travel as far as Swan Hill in northern Victoria.
At Meatstock on Sunday, there were five categories: chicken, lamb, pork shoulder, pork ribs and beef brisket.
However, Cameron says brisket is the category everyone wants to win.
“It’s like the unwritten rule that if you had a choice to win one, that’s the one you’d want to win,” he says.
The competition heats up at the Meatstock event in Bendigo on Sunday.Credit: Chris Hopkins
The meat is judged on appearance, taste and texture, and the competitor with the most overall points across the five meat categories is grand champion.
Cameron’s day job is as a finance manager who heads the lending department for a bank, but competitive barbecuing has become his passion.
He’s participated in 40 to 50 barbecue competitions around Australia and flew to Houston, Texas, last month to compete in the 2024 World’s Championship Bar-B-Que Contest, where the Jimmy Brisket team finished fifth in the ribs competition.
Cameron says the atmosphere among the large crowd in Houston was like AFL grand final day at the MCG.
“You’re looking out and there’s thousands of people, you’re on a massive big stage, and we were lucky enough to be called up as a finalist in ribs. Just the scale of it is massive,” he says.
Barbecue fans compete for the glory rather than the money.
At Meatstock, the prizemoney for the team with the highest total across the five categories – the grand championship – is $3000, along with a trophy, and first place in each category wins $750.
The costs of being a part of the competition outweigh the money that can be won.
The Jimmy Brisket team’s finished woodsmoked chicken is ready for judging at Meatstock.Credit: Chris Hopkins
“For example, in brisket, to have any chance of winning you’re probably going to have to buy a wagyu, a high-grade brisket that’s been grown and fed longer to get the meat so much richer because of the marbling,” Cameron says.
An Australian brisket with a marble score of nine-plus costs about $250 to $300 and some teams will cook two briskets, just to win a category worth $750. A brisket usually weighs 7.5-9 kilograms. At Meatstock, the entry fee for competitors is $375 per team.
Meatstock festival director Jay Beaumont says competitive barbecuing is an expensive sport for people who have to buy the meat and spend the whole weekend cooking, but the reward for participants is the joy that comes from preparing and sharing food.
“I think a lot of people that are into barbecue just love to cook for other people,” Beaumont says. “It’s a primal instinct to cook over fire and cook that kind of way, but I think people love to please other people with their food.”
With Cara Waters