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On December 4 th Western Bank had their annual company Christmas party in Joyuda Puerto Rico. This year's gala event entitled, Pasadia Familiar, took place on the grounds of Club Deportivo just South of Mayaguez on highway #102. This is one of the most impressive undertakings and largest private parties I have ever seen with nearly 5000 people attending the event.

Chef Manuel Diaz Pifferrer, one of our CBBQA members and the organizer of this massive undertaking for the past 8 years, invited the Caribbean BBQ Association to join the ranks of nearly 20 other catering groups to feed this enthusiastic and hungry crowd by serving up ½ a ton, 1000 pounds, of BBQ spare ribs.

The list of gourmet delights included paella prepared in 5 in 4-foot pans, fresh oysters flown in and iced down in a “yola”, 8 whole hogs on roasting spits, pastas stuffed with lobster, pinchos, churrasco, burgers and dogs, 9 tons of fresh tropical fruits smothered in Grand Marnier and whipped cream, a chocolate fountain for dipping fresh strawberries, bananas and other fresh fruits in, and criollo delights like “sorrullitos”, “empanadillas”, and “morcilla”. The list of gourmet foods just goes on and every booth was putting out the highest quality, and most beautiful treats you can imagine.

Congratulations and thanks are in order for CBBQA members, Garry Howard, Mike Thomas, Raymond Escudero, and Hector Rivera for and outstanding effort in turning out a great batch of ribs, or should I say a boatload of ribs. The best news is that the money we earned for our hard work and efforts went into the CBBQA Smoker fund. Many thanks gentlemen for your outstanding performance and dedication to helping The CBBQA.

The CBBQA crew departed San Juan Saturday morning at 8:00 am and arrived in Puerto Real at 11 am and promptly started applying a fine dry rub prepared by Hector Rivera. If you are wondering just how much 1000 pounds of spare ribs really is, it breaks down something like this. It filled 6 huge coolers packed to the top, about 60 to 65 racks of ribs to a cooler with each rack weighing about 3 pounds or roughly 350 racks of ribs.

Applying the rub started bring back recent memories of the BBQ Training Camp we had in November. We had about two and half hours of rubbing pork before we were done and then we packed them all into the coolers and trucked them up to Mayaguez where we placed the whole batch into two giant ovens and baked them for 3 hours.

Man oh man, I have got to tell you that those ribs were looking so good when we took them out of those ovens that they had to put three armed guards on us to be sure we didn't start eating them right there on the spot. Just take a look at those pictures, doesn't that kind of give you a case of the munchies?

Well ,we were behaving and didn't sneak even one bite but did pack them all back into the coolers for holding overnight till Sunday, party day.

On Sunday December the 4 th we arrived at the party site at 7:30 am and started building out fires and getting the coals ready to cook, just like Garry Howard taught us in training camp, and started cooking and serving ribs at 8:30 am, yea that's right 8:30 am.

We were fortunate to have assistance from about 10 chefs in training from Instituto De Banca Culinary School located in Mayaguez. The CBBQA manned the grills and fires while the culinary students cut, plated and served this delightful mouth watering example of fine BBQ Ribs.

The ribs were served dry, without sauce, but Hector Rivera had also prepared several gallons of Guava BBQ sauce and regular BBQ sauce for the Western Bank guest to apply at will or as desired. During the process of finishing the ribs off on the grill they were sprayed with a secret mixture of apple juice, vinegar, and water to give them a nice shinny glaze and generous amounts of soaking wet Mesquite wood was applied to the fire while the ribs were cooking to add that good smoked flavor. By 4 pm all the ribs were gone, a half a ton of pork ribs prepared and served by the CBBQA without a hitch or glitch.

Do you have a company party or function coming up that requires feeding a group of people? Keep the CBBQA in mind we still need some more money to accomplish our goal of obtaining that BBQ Smoker.