As 50 mph winds whipped through the Texas Motor Speedway, Brian and Ann Neale kept their eye on the prize: The perfect barbecue.

Dust battered their faces while they toiled for hours against more than 125 other top “pitmasters” from around the world for the Steak Cookoff Association World Championship in Fort Worth, Texas.

After making it to the final round with 39 competitors, Brian Neale, of Cedar Lake, was declared the World Champion in Ribs in mid-March. With a perfect score of 201.3, Neale tied with Craig Sanders, of Mississippi, in the second-tied world championship in SCA history. Ann Neale also made it into the final round, placing 27th overall.

“It can be unpredictable,” Brian Neale said. “We’ve cooked in sun-beating-down-on-you, 90-degree weather, where the next day it’ll be 40 degrees and rainy- and the weather challenge was a big one this year. A dust storm rolled in with strong winds, people’s canopies were rolling around like tumbleweeds. The trick is to not get dirt on the meat.”

Cooking competitions have taken the couple to Wisconsin, Illinois, Mississippi, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Kansas, Texas and more, pushing them to adapt to a number of conditions and obstacles.

“As you’re cooking, you might have to open the grill or add in seasonings, and when you’re cooking ribs in 50 mph dust, you just have to find ways to work with it,” Ann Neale said. “Maybe you need a wind barrier — you need to think of all of these things and how to deal with it in the moment.”

“That’s what competition cooking is about,” Brian Neale said. “You have variables you have to manage. Whether it’s a world championship, state championship or a local competition, you have got to have a little luck. These are people at the top of their game, some have won a lot of competitions before. You hope to find five or six judges who thought your product was the best.”

Brian Neale uses a method he calls “hot and fast” at 300°F using a Hunsaker Vortex Smoker. A contrast to the “low and slow” tradition, his ribs are ready in 2.5 hours. His winning ribs were from Wichita Packing Co. in Chicago and cooked with sugar maple, cherry and apple wood.

As a former Chicago Tribune editor, Brian Neale said copy editing and barbecuing have a lot in common.

“I think there are a lot of intersections,” he said. “One of them is attention to detail, as a copy editor that was what we did — the details matter, the facts matter. It’s really about having command of the details, and to edit, I have to have extreme focus. In competition barbecue, from steak to brisket, from start to end, I have to focus on every little thing I can control. Just like how reporters look for a good story, I am looking for good marbling. There’s a lot of storytelling in journalism, too. You’re giving people useful information they need to know in a story form. Barbecue itself has a fascinating history. It’s almost like a family tree, you can trace to see who has influenced it, with so many legendary people. So many folks who have come before, so many stories.”

The Neales have come a long way since their first neighborhood cook-off in 2015, which netted them a bowling trophy for best barbecue ribs. Today, Brian and Anne Neale are co-founders of Smoke Freaks, with Anne as the head cook and Brian as the pitmaster, where they teach classes and share secrets of competition cooking.

“With several years of competition experience and winning this championship, we are doing a rib camp in our Cedar Lake headquarters,” Brian Neale said. “It’s extremely hands-on, where you trim, prep, season, and cook the ribs, while we are doing the same with our world championship recipe alongside you. Then we hold a mini competition at the end. We’ve never heard of anything like this in Northwest Indiana. The first classes filled up fast, so we added more.”

The Neales described the Smoke Freaks headquarters as a mecca for barbecuing, grilling and smoking with 24 different pieces of equipment, from a big Texas offset smoker to 55-gallon metal drums. Students would also study flavor development, in which the Neales created a seasoning decoder that breaks down 400 different rubs into various flavor profiles.

“When it comes to barbecue, there’s no greater American culinary tradition,” Brian Neale said. “Ask anyone what their favorite food, whatever they name, it has origins from somewhere else. That’s America, it’s a melting pot. But barbecue is ours, it started in the founding of our country. It’s about transforming low cuts of meat and making them great. Those were the lowly cuts that weren’t given to the high class. This is what normal folks cooked. Our forefathers developed low and slow traditions, and that’s a part of barbecue. I grew up in Kansas City, one of the barbecue meccas in the US, which is where the seeds of interest were planted in me as a kid.”

Barbecue has a longstanding history tracing back to Mesoamerica and Caribbean cultures. According to Smithsonian Magazine, in their travels, Spanish conquistadors saw the indirect-heat cooking technique for meat, calling it “barbacoa.” The tradition swept up north and then moved west into the early American settlements.

From there, each region developed its own flavors and techniques. French and German immigrants in South Carolina developed mustard-based sauces and Memphis, Tennessee became famous for its sweet barbecue due to its accessibility of molasses. Another American Southern technique includes cooking meat in an in-ground pit, which likely was developed by enslaved African people.

Today, barbecue and smoking meats is often a communal event associated with celebrations and cookouts.

“Barbecue has always been about community and gathering,” Brian Neale said. “If you’re cooking a whole hog for hours, you want everyone to come over. And once people start coming out and getting to know each other, the neighborhood starts to feel like the same as when you were kids, playing at the neighborhood cookout.”

Ann Neale is a Region native, who didn’t grow up around a lot of barbecue, but a different type of culinary tradition with the same sentiments.

“I’m Greek and we show love with food,” she said. “We didn’t call it barbecuing, but for special occasions we would roast a whole lamb in our yard. I remember watching my grandma. For me, cooking for someone is about a continuation of that: Making people happy, making people smile.”

To learn more, visit www .smokefreaks.com.