Bryan Hopkins, the 2012 winner of the Chicken Bog Cooking Contest, serves up samples of his bog to hungry festival-goers. For $10, the public can taste a sample from every competitor and vote for their favorite to win the People’s Choice award.
Two hours before he must fill up a Tupperware dish for the judges, Bryan Hopkins is tasting his chicken bog, adding a dash of black pepper, shoving sausage into the cast-iron pot and doing a little dance that goes along with the blaring country music of the 2014 Loris Bog-Off Festival.
Like so many small-town celebrations, the annual celebration of Horry County’s signature dish has all the necessary ingredients for good Saturday fun—food, dancing, amusements and entertainment—but the heart of this festival is the highly competitive Chicken Bog Cooking Contest. Reputations and big money are on the line. First prize for the best chicken bog is $1,000 and a giant trophy. A $250 check and a slightly smaller trophy goes to the People’s Choice winner.
“There’s a lot of ego with chicken bog,” says Singleton Bailey, the owner of Loris Drug Store and the Bog-Off’s forefather, who stirred up the idea in 1979 as a way to bring people downtown. “People always say, ‘You need to taste so-and-so’s bog.’ Well, I thought we could have a bog-cooking contest. The idea came to me because people take pride in their chicken bog.”
As the 2012 winner of the competition, Hopkins is one of 15 competitors in the Grand Champions row, and like his fellow top-tier bog chefs, he began setting up his cooking tent on Main Street at dawn. Table decor is part of the fun, so tents are often decorated to impress the judges and festival-goers. For past winners, it’s customary to show off their colossal trophies, but Hopkins decided to leave his at home.
“My Bible says to be humble,” he says, laughing. “What they really need to do is make the checks bigger and the trophies smaller.”
Six ingredients for success
The Loris Chamber of Commerce estimates that around 40,000 people attend the festival each year, and if my experience is any indication, there might be as many different opinions on what actually constitutes award-winning chicken bog.
Kevin McDowell, a previous winner and a member of Horry Electric Cooperative, gives me the rundown on this deceptively simple dish that is a local favorite. Chicken bog, he says, really only contains six ingredients: chicken, rice, sausage, onion and salt and pepper to taste.
“The only thing you can manipulate and flavor is the broth,” McDowell says about the rules of this cooking competition, which, unlike most chili cook-offs or barbecue contests, isn’t open to restaurant professionals. But he won’t say too much more, safeguarding his secrets.
Hopkins, however, has taken me under his wing, offering up whatever tidbits of chicken bog knowledge I seek.
“The longer you cook the chicken, the better it turns out,” he says. “If I’m cooking for church, I won’t use a hen, but for this I use a regular old hen, because that’s where you get the most flavor. You can put all the spices you want to, but it still comes down to the fat.”
He uses locally grown Palmetto Farms rice, adding Lipton soup mix to the broth along with Morton salt and Tone’s black pepper. For his sausage, he goes with the garlicky Hillshire Farms Polish kielbasa.
“A man said in the newspaper one year that no one will ever win this without smoked sausage, and I won it the next year,” he recalls with the friendly, competitive pride that this community dish inspires. Indeed, chicken bog is the quintessential one-pot dish for large gatherings in Loris—church socials, political rallies, fundraisers, benefits, hunting camps. As for its origins? It’s anyone’s guess.
“I think it came from the rice plantations around here,” Hopkins says. “Rice was so plentiful. You had your barnyard chickens running around, and you’d grab one and clean and cook it. The chicken is ‘bogged’ in rice. At least that’s what I thought I heard.”
But when it comes to knowing what makes his bog the best, Hopkins is much more confident. It’s his cast-iron pots. One of them is his great-great grandmother’s pot—9 quarts, over 100 years old, and only used for cooking chicken bog. The other he got 24 years ago when he married his wife, Nancy.
He brings both of them, he says, in case of an emergency. He might accidentally scorch one bog. If the wind flares up, the flame can die down, leaving a bog too wet. It’s all about that great Southern culinary rule of thumb—a soft boil, low and slow—that gives you good, yellowed fat, not to be over salted or over stirred.
“The more you stir it, the more you break the rice down,” he says.
A matter of taste
At noon, the festival is in full swing, and the judges begin making the rounds to each competitor’s tent. Hopkins has his containers filled and offers me a fork for a taste. And here I have to admit: Despite all that I’ve heard, I’m skeptical that it can really taste that different from, say, the restaurant-catered bog I ate the previous day at a local golf event.
But it is. Darn good. The bog is dried-up but not dry; salty but not overly so; tender, with a mix of textures that range from melt-in-your-mouth to slightly chewy. There can be no better bog in the world, I think.
Or can there? I’m suddenly hungry and gung-ho to find out. I stand in line to buy a $10 ticket that grants me the right to sample each and every bog in the competition and then cast my vote for the People’s Choice award.
I make my way sequentially from table to table, where prep cooks and head chefs hawk their bogs. When I get through the first nine, I sit down on a curb to drink a Coke and watch the eclectic throngs of happy festival-goers. At this point, all the bogs are beginning to blend together in my stomach and in my mind.
I make a detour down a side street, where I talk to Kevin Edge, an Horry Electric Cooperative member and first-time chicken bog contestant, who is skipping a Saturday of deer hunting in order to try his hand at cooking bog.
Edge pretty much sums up everybody’s experience at the festival: “There’s only two things I’m gonna do today. I’m gonna get full of chicken bog, and I’m gonna have a good time,” he says.
“Get full of chicken bog” might be the understatement of the year. After making it through all 15 master chefs, plus a few amateur tents, I’ve eaten well over 30 ounces of chicken bog. I am—and there’s only one way to say it—bogged down. I can only think about starting a festival booth, a kind of traveling motel among the fair rides and the funnel cakes, with fresh beds in which one can take an air-conditioned nap.
Shortly before they announce the winners, I return to Bryan Hopkins’ booth.
“This is the nervous part—the wait-and-see part,” he says.
Sting’s “Field of Dreams,” which is blasting in the background, suddenly gets cut off. The emcee clears her throat. They announce the winners. Hopkins is not one of them. With a shrug, he begins packing up his tent. There’s always next year.
“Ain’t no sense in messing with it,” he says when I ask if he might be tempted to change his recipe. “It just means the judge today didn’t like it best.”
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Get There
The Loris Bog-Off Festival is held every October in downtown Loris. The 2015 event starts at 9 a.m. on Oct. 17. For more information, call (843) 756-6030 or visit lorischambersc.com or facebook.com/Loris-Bog-Off-Festival.