Ring the dinner bell: Fiesta Days’ Chuck Wagon competition heats up

The annual Chuck Wagon Cook-Off competition hosted by La Plata-Archuleta Cattlemens Association is an annual part of Durango’s yearly Fiesta Days celebration. This year, four entrants put spoons to griddles to cook the best authentic pioneer meals they could muster.

Sandy Cooper, Chuck Wagon cook of 12 years, two times best wagon winner and 2020 Durango grand champion, was busy mixing a roux for her scalloped potatoes. The potatoes were laced with onions and layered with the roux, all spiced with salt and pepper, and with beans and sourdough biscuits on the side.

For dessert, she planned peach cherry crisp, she said.

For Cooper, once she started participating 12 years ago, she caught the chuck wagon bug and couldn’t stop. She participated on a friend’s team with their own wagon the first time around, but she soon decided that she needed a wagon of her own.

For the uninitiated, the Chuck Wagon Cook-Off requires an authentic, full-blown pioneer setting: Dutch ovens and coal, wooden wagons and flies or tents for shelter, and no electronic thermometers.

The required authenticity is what attracted Cooper to the sport of it.

“I just like the whole idea of keeping the past present,” she said. “I love our youth – (to) teach them about how the pioneers did it, how they took care of the cows, how they took care of the cowboys. How the cook actually pulled teeth and cut hair. How everybody had more than one job.”

As Cooper stirred her roux, she proudly showed off her spoon. She turned it over to reveal its flat bottom.

“This is my favorite spoon,” she said. “Look, it’s crowned off. So it scrapes the pan really good.”

She said she appreciated that the spoon had received so much previous use that it was worn.

“There’s so many little things that I have in the wagon that just make me happy. They just are not new and you can still use it and it still does an awesome job and you don’t have to plug it in,” she said.

Orie Mathews of Lamar has traveled all over to compete in chuck wagon events over the past eight years or so, he said. Before that, he competed in barbecuing competitions. He’s familiar with barbecuing because he owns a barbecue catering business, Lucky’s Barbecue and Catering, based in Lamar.

This weekend marks his third Fiesta Days Chuck Wagon contest in Durango.

Last year, Mathews and his team earned the grand champion title in homemade biscuits and gravy in Ruidoso, New Mexico. His group cooked for about 300 people there, he said.

Mathews reviewed the basics of cooking with a Dutch oven: hot coals beneath the pot and hot coals above. He was cooking peach cobblers and said they cook at 350 degrees to 400 degrees for about 45 minutes.

“We’re cooking beef, potatoes, bread and dessert,” he said.

The chuck wagon organizers give each competitor all the ingredients to use, but it’s up to the teams to make their best meals with those items.

“You can cook them different,” Mathews said. “Just depends on how everybody wants to cook. You can make anything you want with the ingredients they give you.”

Like Cooper, Mathews has earned the honorary title of grand champion at Durango’s Fiesta Days Chuck Wagon Cook-Off. He said his team won three years ago and they plan to do so again.

He said he wishes the cook-off had been advertised more. He ran into people downtown on Friday who weren’t aware of the event.

“There are less competitors this year,” Cooper said. “We either have six or eight but we’re down to four. I don’t know if that makes the competition harder or not.”

She said Fiesta Days has shrunk in popularity in recent years because people are forgetting history and there simply aren’t as many cowboys as there used to be.

“The cattle industry isn’t that great,” she said, adding that cattle industry titans are putting smaller ranchers out of business.

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