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Otto brings chili cook-off heat from south of the Pasco border

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By TOM JACKSON

Published: September 25, 2009

As the annual Steve Otto Chili Cook-off makes its first appearance outside Hillsborough County on Saturday - and, significantly, makes that first non-Hillsborough appearance in Pasco County, at the Shops at Wiregrass - there are, at minimum, two insights novice competitors and first-time observers should have.

First, in the vast bubbling vat that is Otto's Rules of Chili Recipes, there are no beans. No pintos, no kidneys, no garbanzos, no limas. No reds, no blacks, no whites and especially no chickpeas.

Second - and for this, Rule No. 1 should bear upon the mind - no chili wins without Otto's blessing. Ten judges may share the sampling duties, but at the end of the day, Otto says, "we add up the votes, and if I don't like the results, we add them up again."

After all, it is Otto's name on the contest, and Otto's lumpy likeness on all the publicity material.

It's good to be a regional treasure.

Feeding the deadline muse

For the record, besides his responsibilities as host and combination Donald Trump-Gordon Ramsey for the Bay area's most acclaimed chili throwdown, Otto writes a subtle, homegrown, must-read column for the Tribune's Metro pages, a duty he shouldered long before the inaugural cook-off 22 years ago.

In performance of the local journalist's dream assignment - and en route to establishing his iconic status - Otto has managed countless beep-ball teams whose losing record against the polished nines from the Lighthouse for the Blind rivals those of the perennially luckless Charlie Brown; judged the best drumsticks competition at the Spring Hill Chicken Plucking Festival; and was once syruped-and-feathered at a Flapjack Festival breakfast for admitting, in print, he wasn't sure where Lutz ended and Land O' Lakes began.

But it is almost certainly the enduring chili fest that tops the charts of his extracurricular activities. How did it come to pass? As with most activities in a columnist's life, it emerged as an answer to a deadline, as the fulfillment of an appetite - in this case, the voraciousness of blank newsprint.

Of men, by men - for men?

It goes without saying that much of what winds up in a newspaper column is derivative. You don't need a columnist's column about another columnist to make the point. To make matters worse, however, Otto's inspiration for his first chili cook-off came from a book - "The Great Chili Confrontation" - authored by yet another newspaper columnist, the well-traveled H. Allen Smith, who, the story goes, spent a couple of years at the Tampa Telegraph, an Ybor City-based daily that debuted not long after the conclusion of World War II and vanished soon after without leaving a trace.

Allen galvanized Otto's conviction that chili is almost solely the province of real men, and this is so because a proper chili's central ingredients are malecentric: ego and envy. Otto himself was introduced to chili by a man - his Boy Scout troop leader, who whipped up a fiery batch on a cold night camped by the Missouri River - and he has been resolute on the matter ever since.

Initially designed as a one-off - Otto figured on inducing some good-natured gender-rivalry fun, extracting a handful of columns and moving on - the event gathered a life of its own. Now, with no end in sight, as many as 75 teams enter in any given year, bearing names ranging from wacky (PigSilly) to foreboding (Crocodile Breath).

This year's showdown has drawn 41 squads that will be spread out along the Wiregrass mall's central thoroughfare. Given the rather malleable nature of what constitutes real chili, what they'll cook up, beginning at 11 a.m., is anybody's guess.

But that brings us to another unwritten Otto rule: "You don't want to hurt the judges." This one came about in response to a tale, possibly apocryphal, involving a spoon dipped by former Tribune film critic Bob Ross into a sinister concoction from which only the handle was retrieved.

Unrelated to the Ross experience, a couple of years ago, halfway through the sampling session, one of the judges - a woman whose anonymity remains fiercely protected - suddenly went slack. Her eyes rolled back in her head and she slid, as though suddenly boneless, off her chair and under the table.

"I'd never seen that before," Otto says. She spent the balance of the afternoon recovering in the company of paramedics.

Additional advice: Although any good chili, by dint of a proper application of well-selected peppers, will have a bold bite to it, hotter is not necessarily better. "You want a slow heat that builds up," Otto says, "and that you remember about 2 o'clock in the morning."

Ah, yes. Nothing says satisfaction like the old gastrointestinal sucker punch - bean-free, of course. And history-making, to boot.

Tom Jackson's "The Jax Files Weekend" airs 11 a.m. Saturday on WGUL, 860 AM, from Steve Otto's 22nd annual Chili Cook-off at the Shops at Wiregrass, off State Road 56 and Bruce B. Downs Boulevard in Wesley Chapel.

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