The World Steak Championship fires up at Billy Bob’s Saturday

Google Maps is having a hard time finding Joe Torres’ house, tucked deep within a suburban maze where Fort Worth meets Justin.

It’s probably best just to take Torres’ advice and follow the smoke.

In the driveway, beneath a Dallas Cowboys canopy, Joe and his family have fired up the charcoal grill and are ready to show us how to cook championship rib-eyes — similar to the two he will be grilling Saturday at the World Steak Championship at Billy Bob’s Texas.

That’s where 60 teams will compete for a grand prize of $7,500 and the coveted title of World Steak Champion. The winner gets a ring, too — this is the Super Bowl of steak, after all.

Torres, a project manager for a Dallas alarm security company by day, has been grilling every free night he gets to prepare for the Cowtown smackdown.

“I have to be at work every morning at 6, 6:30,” he says. “I usually don’t get home till about 6, 6:30. There are days where [Amy, my wife] will ask me what I want for dinner, and I’ll tell her, ‘Just make sure there’s something that I can grill.’ ”

Unlike barbecue cook-offs, which fill up the Food Network and Cooking Channel, competitive steak grilling hasn’t exactly caught fire yet. But that could change if the fledgling Steak Cookoff Association, based in Bedford, has anything to say about it.

Started in early 2014 with only one sanctioned event, the association has grown to more than 68 cook-offs this year.

In 2016, plans are to expand to 26 states in the United States, plus cook-offs in France, Germany, the Czech Republic, the Caribbean and South America. SCA founders Ken Phillips and Brett Gallaway, former grillmasters and competitors, are determined to become “the godfathers of steak cooking.”

“It’s very addictive, steak cook-offs,” Phillips says. “It’s the kind of event where you can go with your extended family, your neighbors, your grandmother, your in-laws. We’ll see four generations any given day at these cook-offs.”

Saturday, Torres will compete with his wife and adult son, Anthony, as Torres Competition Cookers. He says he learned the magic of the grill from his father and his uncle, who were always cooking at their large family get-togethers.

Now the tongs have been passed to him and his brothers.

“Cooking has always been in our blood,” he says.

While there are a few family secrets he’s not willing to divulge before the big championships Saturday, he says there is a science to delivering a competition-caliber steak.

“It is about the timing, it is about the flavor profile,” he says on a recent afternoon as a couple of thick rib-eyes sizzle on his grill. He’s using a GrillGrate to give them a nice cross-hatch pattern. “Right now, it’s a beautiful sunny day, but there’s a little bit of wind. The humidity plays a factor in it, the temperature plays a factor in it, everything kind of blends together. But the flavor is usually the winner.”

Burning hot in Bedford

In this age of Top Chefs and Iron Chefs, Chopped and BBQ Pitmasters, it might seem odd that the almighty steak hasn’t really had its competition close-up.

But unlike barbecue cook-offs, which have a long, slow and smoked tradition, the early days of steak-offs were chewy at best, say Phillips and Gallaway, who are partners in RW Jobs, a DFW-based restaurant recruiting firm.

“Back in 2009, we saw a show on TV about a competition down in Hico, Texas, where they did a steak cook-off,” Phillips says. “He talked me into going down there and we did our very first steak cook-off.

“We did miserably, but we had the best time ever. So we sought out a few other events that we could go to.”

But at every event, the rules would be different, and the results were questionable, he says.

“I was on a rant that we should report them to the governing bodies, because in barbecue, there’s a number of sanctioning bodies for barbecue competitions,” Phillips says. “We discovered that there was no governing body for steak cook-offs, so that’s where the idea was born to create standardized rules.”

They began by putting on their own event, the North Texas Steak Cook-off at Lake Lewisville. About 40 teams showed up, and they learned how to run an event and give their judging methods a test-drive. Then they started contacting organizers of other events and asking to sanction those.

In 2014, the SCA oversaw 18 cook-offs, and Tulsa hosted the first World Steak Championship, a season-ending tournament of champions in late August. From there, SCA-sanctioned events have grown to a total of 68 in 2015, in 19 states and internationally in the Netherlands.

The steak cook-offs are heating up for several reasons.

First off, they’re pretty quick. Unlike barbecue competitions, where brisket and pork typically have to spend more than 12 hours in a smoker, steaks burn bright and fast, and spectators can watch the grilling process from beginning to end. Rarely does a steak cook-off last more than an afternoon and it can be integrated into larger festivals.

Torres says there is another key difference between steak and barbecue competitions.

“There’s really nobody that has an attitude, an ego,” he says. “We’ve been involved in barbecues and you know who the big guns are because they’re usually in a separate corner and each clique kinda hangs together.

“With us, it’s very common that once you’re set up and we go through our meeting and get our steaks and our cooking schedules, we start cross-mingling amongst campsites.”

Rarely will you see Torres lose his cool in the heat of competition.

“The only time I ever get upset is with myself,” he says. “And it usually passes within about five or six seconds. I’ll [stomp my foot] and then it’s over.”

The organizers provide the meat — 16-ounce, 1-inch-thick rib-eyes from Raider Red Meats of Texas Tech University fame. And then the teams draw lots to see who gets to choose first.

Each team picks two steaks, which are supposed to be cooked medium, with a warm, pink center. Overcooking or undercooking can lead to point deductions. Taste, tenderness and appearance are all judging criteria.

Techniques vary. Phillips says cooks have used charcoal, wood or propane, going hot and fast, or slow and steady with a reverse-sear technique, with steaks marinated or dry-rubbed.

But there’s something beyond the timing, technique and seasoning that matter, too.

“Mojo,” Phillips says with a bit of a chuckle. “Putting love in it. Some of the cooks are very superstitious. They wear the same T-shirt every time.”

The thrill of the grill

The line between a backyard barbecuer and a competition grillmaster is thinner than you might think.

Torres, who was born and raised in Arlington, learned how to grill from his father and Uncle Cruz, growing up in Spur, a map dot about an hour east of Lubbock with a population of a little more than 1,000.

“We would have family reunions, simple get-togethers, graduations, weddings, whatever the case was, they were always behind the grill,” Torres says. “Through the years, my father’s health started to decline, and my Uncle Cruz’s health started to decline. Uncle Cruz’s sons took over, and I took over for my father.”

It wasn’t till about three years ago that Torres got into the world of competitive cooking, with a strong push from friends and family.

“We always made excuses,” Torres says. “ ‘Nah, we’re not that good.’ ‘Nah, it’s too expensive.’ ‘Nah, we don’t have the time.’

“Eventually, we were all sitting around and we all kinda pointed at each other and said, ‘Let’s give it a shot,’ ” he says. “From then, we’ve all been bit.”

Torres, two cousins and a friend dove into competitive cooking, starting with barbecue. They had some success, placing in the Top 10 at some contests and even winning first place once. But there were scheduling conflicts, so Torres and his wife, Amy, a kitchen manager at Chisolm Trail Middle School in Rhome, decided to do their own thing, often with help from their son, Anthony.

Torres decided to build a smoker. He was told that the process would take about three months; it took a year and a half.

Steak without beefs

Family also figures into Phillips’ cooking background, perhaps a little more sadly.

“My mom died when I was very young,” Phillips says. “So it was either eat cereal every day or learn how to cook. So I started cooking myself at a very young age.

“I really love to cook and we enjoyed [it] when we were competing.”

Phillips and Gallaway improved as a team to the point where they seldom finished weaker than third place, and they often finished first. Now they are administrators instead of competitors.

“It’s kind of the next step toward being the godfathers of steak cooking,” Phillips jokes.

The SCA has quickly spread throughout the southern U.S., with competitions in several Texas cities, as well as in Oklahoma, Louisiana, Arkansas, Missouri, Mississippi, Tennessee, Georgia and Florida (so far, the lone cook-off held up north was in Minnesota). For contestants, adaptability is key.

“Each region is different,” Torres says. “The further south you go, the more done the steak has to be. The further west you go, they prefer mesquite. You go into Oklahoma and Arkansas, it’s a little more bland, but Louisiana likes theirs spicy. …

“You can go in with the same flavor and score a certain way, but you’re not always going to hit it all the time.”

For Amy Torres, the kitchen manager, the competitions and her work overlap.

“When we’re out here playing with this stuff, it’s almost like being at work for me,” she says. “But we can play with a recipe here. We can’t do a lot of that at work. Being here allows me to be a little more creative.”

They’ve done everything from Cajun shrimp sliders to a breakfast burger with blueberry-waffle buns. Many of the SCA competitions also include appetizers, burgers, desserts and drinks in the judging.

Saturday’s championship is all about the steak, however.

Torres admits he is nervous and he is always striving to take his steak to another level. After a Saturday competition, they typically run errands Sunday morning and then are back cooking steak again by Sunday evening.

“We’ll look at our score sheets and go, ‘OK, this part didn’t hit so well, let’s work on that,’ ” Amy says. “If it’s an appetizer or a burger thing that didn’t do so well, we’ll be out here tweaking that.”

“If you owned stock in beef,” Joe Torres says, “I guarantee you your stock went up. We practice a lot.”

Phillips says that all sounds familiar. What was once a hobby becomes a passion and eventually a business.

“Brett and I have worked together recruiting, and the steak competitions, when they started to get busy last year, Brett kind of shifted full time setting up events and organizers,” Phillips says. “This past summer we started leaving the country, and now it’s almost a full-time job for both of us.

“It’s a great story about how a great idea can grow. Two years ago, this didn’t even exist. It’s really quite humbling to know that we started that spark that now has become a big fire.”

This story was originally published October 22, 2015 at 3:30 PM with the headline "The World Steak Championship fires up at Billy Bob’s Saturday."