Chili contest adds more heat to fair

BANGOR – As hot as it was on Saturday at the Bangor State Fair, some folks had no intention of cooling things down. For them, the hotter the better.

At least when it came to chili, that is.

The weather was humid and temperatures reached into the 80s, delaying the horse-pulling competition by an hour Saturday afternoon, according to a fair staffer.

But the heat likely made little difference to the chili aficionado.

“It doesn’t matter,” said Laurel McKay of Charleston, one of four judges who taste-tested the chili concoctions during the competition.

A recipe that combined cayenne and cherry-bomb peppers, hand-raised by 12-year-old Nathan Rice on the porch of his family’s Glenburn home, packed the necessary heat for a first-place finish in the hot category. The recipe included the required lamb – the competition was, after all, sponsored by the Penobscot 4-H Sheep Club.

Caleb Guerin, 12, of Glenburn stuck to his tried-and-true recipe, a mixture that includes corn, to take top spot in the mild category for the fifth year in a row.

Guerin’s brother, Andrew Guerin, 14, took second place in the hot category, while Jason Fernandez, 10, of Orland took second place in the mild category and third place in the hot category.

Nathan had been attending a baseball game and was delayed coming to the 3 p.m. start of the contest, although his mother, Linda Rice, pinch-hit for him.

“It’s his thing,” Nathan’s mother said. “He just likes to see how hot he can make it and see how much he can make people sweat.”

Nathan took fourth place last year and learned from the comments of judges and others who sampled his chili. This year the chili simmered for three hours as he added the peppers and made it thicker. Last year’s batch was too soupy, he said.

And texture was one of the things the judges were looking for, especially McKay, who prefers her chili firm rather than mushy.

She was shearing one of her sheep in preparation for a show later this week when she answered the call to be one of four to judge the chili.

McKay raises sheep – at one time she had 90 of them – and said she thinks lamb absorbs more of the flavors of the other ingredients and therefore makes for a better chili than does beef.