By Martin Cizmar
The Pontiac Aztek is maybe the most maligned automobile of all time. “Deformed and scary,” (Time), the boxy modernist crossover contraption was the “ugliest car of all time” (Daily Telegraph) and single-handedly “destroyed an eighty-four-year-old automaker” (Edmunds). Don’t slander the Aztek to Jay “Snail” Vantuyl. His Galaxy Silver 2002 Aztek is proudly parked in the front yard, in the shadow of the silos of the ready-mix concrete plant across the street.
“This is a badass car,” Snail says. “It’s got a tailgate, it’s a truck. The back here is exactly four foot and one-quarter inch. You put a four-foot piece of plywood in the back and it’ll stick out exactly fourteen inches.”
The car is a clue that Vantuyl is one of those rare individuals who sees the world from a unique angle. He’s a lifelong tinkerer: A boy who built his own toys turned into a man who raced his Chevelle (“one humble sumbitch,” Snail says) on the figure-eight track at the old Riverside Stadium. The man they call Snail raced for twenty-two years and went fast enough to win a championship each of the last six years he ran through the mud at that flood-prone bottomland track, where racers had to swerve to miss other drivers crossing the center twice per lap.
Right around the time Snail put away his helmet for the last time, he started another competitive hobby: barbecue.
Thirty-odd years later, it’s arguable that no one has done more to shape competitive barbecue than Vantuyl. That’s because one of his inventions, the can cooker, changed competitive barbecue in much the same way Knute Rockne’s forward pass changed football. The can is cheaper and faster than other popular styles of smoker, and it has become the dominant platform for serious competition teams. Cans—also known as drums—are not only ubiquitous but also overrepresented among teams taking home ribbons.
“The can has changed barbecue in the last ten years, so much that it would make your head spin if everyone had to go back to 2006,” says Dan Hathaway, manager of the Kansas City BBQ Store and a veteran of the competition scene. “No one would know how to cook. It’s a completely different thing now.”
Ardie Davis, the prolific barbecue author and insider based in KC, says that Vantuyl hasn’t got enough attention for his contributions to the “sport” of barbecue.
“Snail is more motivated by the process and the product than getting the recognition and the pay for it,” Davis says. “Slow and low has its perks because the socialization that you get at night is valued by a lot of the old-time cookers, but the convenience of the barrel smoker and hot and fast is going to be hard to beat.”
Around his home workshop in the tiny Northland burg of Pleasant Valley, Vantuyl has all kinds of contraptions. In the driveway, loaded up for towing, there’s a catering-capable smoker made from a bright orange Jobox built with help from friends. In the backyard, he has two homemade pizza oven prototypes made from barrels before he bought an Ooni, which he’s improved with his own front door design. When Vantuyl makes ribs, he doesn’t cut off the skin; he punctures it using a device he made from hot glue and Exacto knife blades. (“There’s something called a jacquard, and this is just a redneck jacquard.”) Vantuyl is even working to build a better raccoon trap—the biggest coon he ever caught escaped his Havahart, so he’s building his own heavy-duty design.
Many of the contraptions Vantuyl makes are hewn from sheets of steel mesh netting known as expanded metal—he uses it for both his rib racks and his racoon traps. The main thing that connects all of his innovations, though, is his personal motto: Keep It Stupid Simple. “You ever heard of ‘Keep It Simple, Stupid?’ Well, my mother was the type of person who would just not tolerate someone calling someone a name. If you said ‘Keep It Simple, Stupid’ you were calling somebody stupid,” he says. “She heard that and chewed my butt out. So I flipped it around.’” The can cooker, Vantuyl’s most influential innovation, is the perfect exemplar of the motto. The can cooker—which Vantuyl prefers to say he “developed” rather than “invented”—is what it sounds like: a fifty-five gallon drum that was previously used to hold cooking oil. He started barbecuing in the can after meeting a man in Boston who complained that he couldn’t get into barbecue because the smokers were too expensive.
So Snail set out to show him that he could cook with anything, even a five-dollar steel barrel that had a few screws in it to hold a round grill above the fire.
People had been building smokers out of metal barrels since the invention of barrels. Davis remembers an offset smoker called “the pig” that includes a vertical barrel made by the “Baron of Barbecue” Paul Kirk sometime in the early eighties. Still, it’s fair to say that these devices were just offset smokers made using a barrel and not the barrel we know today, which Vantuyl developed. A deep internet search reveals no mention of a vertical drum smoker like the one Snail pioneered before he won his first ribbon in 2003. Indeed, the oldest mention online is a grainy YouTube video from July 2006 in which Snail introduces the concept. In the video, the interviewer, a barbecue expert who runs a very active channel, is completely perplexed by the design and is borderline argumentative about the details as they’re explained.
Vantuyl’s biggest challenge in developing the drum was figuring out how far above the fire box he needed to put the grill. The final design is fourteen inches. The current version of Vantuyl’s device has a few other higher-tech additions—there are not only tubes for air intake and to let the smoke leave but also covers that slide over them to hold the vents in place and allow for temperature control. In keeping with the methods of simplicity, those vent covers are held in place with metal clips from an office supply store. There’s also a tube in the top that holds a standard kitchen thermometer. Vantuyl’s design from the early Obama years is essentially the same as the Gateway Drums that sell for twelve-hundred bucks today.
Hathaway, the BBQ store manager, has access to every smoker available. And on the day we spoke, he was going home to cook on a can.
“There’s a flavor you don’t get with anything else,” Hathaway says. “It’s somewhere in between smoked and grilled and there’s nothing that replicates the flavor on the drums. It’s the craziest thing. It just gives it something a little bit extra. There’s something in that gap between the top of the firebox and the bottom of the grate—some sort of magic happens in that space.”
Vantuyl was born and spent his early years in Peabody, Kansas, which is between Emporia and Wichita, fifty miles from each. His family lived a simple life of subsistence on a farm owned by his grandmother until she passed away and his father’s siblings forced the sale of the property.
“Never had no toilet, never had no refrigerator—all our meat came from a locker in town,” he says. “We hunted and we fished. Until we came to Kansas City, I didn’t know we were poor. Didn’t have a clue.”
They moved up to Kansas City using the little money they could cobble together, and his father got a job as a form carpenter while his mother took a job doing collections and office administration for a chiropractor. Vantuyl still lives in the house his parents bought in Pleasant Valley back in 1962 with his wife Sharon and a black cat named BP.
“Our grandmother had left us kids seventy-five-dollar savings bonds, and my parents sold those bonds to rent a truck to bring us up to Kansas City—that’s how fucking poor we were,” Vantuyl says.
He doesn’t remember eating barbecue for the first time, but he’s sure it was Arthur Bryant’s, which was near the old Kansas City Athletics stadium and his uncle’s house. His favorite childhood memories are from his time in the Boy Scouts, where he earned his Eagle badge. He says the idea of barbecuing in a barrel reminded him of campfire cooking: “I liked cooking over the campfire, and this is just a campfire in a can.”
Vantuyl spent a year at the Kansas City Art Institute before running out of money. He was drafted into the Army in 1968, at the height of the Vietnam War. Rather than being sent overseas, he got lucky and served his time as a field medic at Fort Riley in central Kansas. When he got out, he worked as a pinstriper and sign maker—his work still hangs at Leo’s Pizza and In-A-Tub. He stopped pinstriping when he lost use of his left arm for two years because of what a chiropractor later told him was a rib that’d slid out of place.
Today, Vantuyl is seventy-five and mostly retired from competitive barbecue, with the exception of the annual benefit for the Masonic Lodge in Raytown. He maintains an assortment of paying gigs: ”I’ve got a deal where I…” is how he tends to refer to them. Many of them involve his buddy Dale Cox, whom Vantuyl describes as “managerial.” Cox met Vantuyl while he was the vice president of a Northland bank. The two started hanging out, and Cox adopted the same hobbies of barbecue and African violets. “My big thing with him, when he starts screwing with me real bad, is I just look at him and say ‘Fix it,” Vantuyl says. “You can skin a cat fifteen different ways. Our minds do not work the same way, and that’s invaluable.”
“We went back and forth on the barrels,” Cox says. “Like with a hinge, you can move it an inch this way or an inch that way and it works.”
While Vantuyl has a laid-back attitude about others taking his design and putting a shiny coat of paint on it to sell thousand-dollar barrel smokers, Cox expresses some regrets. “Everybody saw these barrels, and then all of a sudden barrels just started showing up, and then all of a sudden everyone all over the country were building barrels,” he says. “We should have got a freakin’ patent on it. But who knew?”
A few years after the ironically named Snail’s Slow Smoking won its first ribbon in a barrel, they’d been commoditized by people who built their reputations and livelihoods off the design.
“What are you gonna do? Nothing. You can’t do nothing,” Cox says.
If you’d have gone to a barbecue competition in, say, 2005, you’d see a very different scene than exists today. At that time, the “sport” was all about technology and partying. Most teams at the competitions rolled up with offset smokers on a trailer and slept in an RV—if they slept at all between whiskey shots. Competitors used remote thermometers to carefully monitor the temperature of their meat throughout the night. Friday nights, especially, were one big party. At 9:22 pm, everyone took a shot.
Starting with the first American Royal in 1980 and continuing through the early aughts, barbecue was “more of a social thing than anything,” Hathaway says. There are now sanctioned barbecue competitions from Hawaii to New Hampshire, but the only ones that remain basically social anywhere in America are local: Lenexa, Shawnee and the American Royal. Things changed as the purse prizes grew and as more and more competitors started side hustles. “More and more people started getting involved in having their own products and all that, and as it got more and more serious, the party thing kind of went away,” Hathaway says. “Now, you go to a barbecue competition and people will be out a little bit on Friday night, but by eight or nine o’clock, it’s a ghost town.”
The 9:22 pm shot tradition has migrated to 9:22 am on Saturday. That’s due in large part to Vantuyl, who won his first grand championship on the can in 2003 and quickly started snagging ribbons at a brisk pace. Others started adopting the “stupid simple” design. Not long after, five out of six ribbons at the Royal were won on cans.
“I used to show up on Saturday at 7 am, light a fire and I could take ribbons home,” Vantuyl says. “The people who cooked all night liked to drink.”
“The can made everybody more efficient and it made it so that you really have to get your timing down,” Hathaway says. “You cook to a color. You don’t cook to a certain temperature anymore. You cook it to a color, you wrap it, and you cook it to a tenderness, and that’s it. You don’t use a lot of probes and all that stuff that you’d use if you were cooking on an offset and needed to monitor it overnight. My rib process is now two hours. It’s the greatest thing ever—it takes barbecue back to the roots, basically. It’s not about technology. It’s just about knowing how your cooker runs and old-school cookin’ barbecue. That’s what makes a drum so much fun.”
Or, as Snail says in keeping with his “Keep It Stupid Simple” motto: “I don’t care about temperature.”
When Snail cooks ribs—he and I spent a morning doing just that in his driveway—the process starts with a carbide sharpener. Rather than using a sharpening steel, he’ll run a thrift store knife over the $10 Speedy Sharp people typically use on garden clippers. He trims the ribs to a St. Louis cut and then carefully saves the excess into a plastic baggie to make fajitas. The ribs get a light rub of the same spice blend he uses in his sausages and go bone-side-down on a rib rack of his own design. Or they just lean against the barrel—that’s fine, too.
There is no wet rub, no spritzing, no water pan and no deflector. The firebox is stuffed with charcoal and a few chunks of persimmon given to him by a friend before he passed away. The can heats up to 270—or 250, or 295. Vantuyl’s not that particular. “If it’s in that brown area, I’m cool,” he says, pointing to an area that includes about a third of the thermometer’s range.
What Vantuyl does care about is the drawback of the ribs. It’s universally agreed that ribs are more desirable when the meat pulls back from the tips of the bone, but in the days before Snail’s Slow Smoking was ironically named, it didn’t always happen. Ribs won’t draw back unless the fire is hot enough. Snail credits his epiphany on this to the late L.C. Richardson, proprietor of his namesake pit on Blue Parkway.
“I revered him,” Vantuyl says of Richardson. “When I asked him about drawback on ribs the first time, he said, ‘White people don’t listen.’ When I asked him the second time, he said nothing. The third time, a few months later, he never even turned around and he said, ‘You’re not cooking hot enough.’ I said, ‘How hot is hot?’ He said, ‘You can’t hold your hand over it.’ And if you try to hold your hand on the lid of this, you couldn’t. You’d burn yourself. When I started cooking on the can, I was amazed at how close the fire could be to the meat and not burn it all to heck.”
Vantuyl—who does no advertising of any kind and maintains no internet presence—will make and sell the original barrel to those who track him down by referral. He sells the barrels for $350, and his cost is currently at close to a hundred and twenty bucks, so he’s not really looking to grow his business. There is one catch: You have to come cook with him to take the smoker off the lot. You can’t just hand him the money and leave—you first get a lesson on the nuances of the barrel from its developer.
“I don’t teach them how to cook, but I just show them how I cook, and if they like that they can use it,” Vantuyl says. “I don’t want anyone buying one unless they like how it cooks. If you like it, fine. If not, that’s OK, too.”
