Meat matters to the Warren County Pork Choppers.

These bikers turned barbecuers are revving up to hit the road for an Arkansas cook-off contest with $100,000 in prize money at stake. That is serious cash, but then competition barbecue is a serious endeavor, according to lead Pork Chopper Donny Bray, a Bowling Green electrical contractor by day, pitmaster extraordinaire by night.

The Pork Choppers got into competition barbecue almost a year ago, novices still by some standards. But they didn’t go about it timidly. They jumped from the frying pan into the fire pit, picking up some pretty impressive prizes so far, Bray said. But the Smoke on the Water USA Barbecue Championship on March 19 and 20 in Little Rock, Ark., which will be featured on the hot new barbecue show “Pitmasters” on the TLC cable network, will be the true test.

With $20,000 at stake for first place, cooks prep for this meat marathon like they are headed to the Olympics, and with the winners often decided by scoring differences as small as tenths of a point, the details and the meat have to be dead on because competitors have just one bite to impress the judges, Bray said.

But Bray and the Choppers have fun, too. And they take that aspect of the competition as seriously as they take their rib sauce, which Bray said “tastes like I just want to drink it.” The Bray home, just north of Bowling Green, also is known as “barbecue central,” with a new trophy room and test kitchen they have just constructed in an outbuilding behind the residence.

About once a month, Bray and his wife, Tracy, pack up the bikes, barbecue trailers and ATVs and hit the road to join the many others who have turned America’s favorite backyard pastime into adventure cuisine.

The Choppers are members of the Kansas City Barbeque Society, which claims to be the largest organization of barbecue enthusiasts in the world with more than 10,000 members, sanctions almost 300 barbecue contests throughout America and offers assistance to civic and charitable organizations that sponsor barbecue events.

There are six members of the Pork Chopper team, including Tracy Bray, pit assistant, and her brother, Jeff Nicholas, who said he provides “the moral and beer support.”

“Donny is proudest of his brisket because it is the hardest to cook,” Nicholas said. “His specialty is probably chicken because that is what has won the most, but the ribs are killer. He’s got barbecue down, no question.”

“This is the most fun you can have,” said Donny Bray. “It’s a weekend party with the best group of people, concert and food. I’d go every weekend if I could.” Some of the larger contests offer as much as $250,000 in prize money.

Raising money is one reason the Choppers got into cooking competitions. It started when a group of local biker friends become involved in helping a Bowling Green woman raise $35,000 for a kidney transplant. Bray ran into the woman in a store six months after the operation and she had regained her health.

“It gave me a lump in my throat as big as a basketball to know we had helped someone like that,” he said.

Their first competition was the Franklin-Simpson County Fair last year. The Choppers came in dead last. They may have been down but they were not out. By the time the contest was over, Bray, who can talk barbecue all day, befriended the winner – a rocket scientist from Boeing – and talked all of his secrets out of him.

By the time another contest rolled around in Owensboro a few months later, Chopper barbecue was good enough to beat him. The Choppers have attended seven competitions so far with some impressive wins.

“Heat, sweet and salty with an edge to get your attention,” is the way Bray describes the chicken, which melts in your mouth and leaves a little zing.

He uses hickory wood and monitors the fire like it was a newborn baby with a beeper that calls his cell phone if the temperature gets too far off the mark.

Internal temperature and the cooking process is the key to winning barbecue, according to Bray, and the hardest thing to completely control.

The Choppers compete in four meat categories: pork shoulder, chicken, ribs and beef brisket. And there are different barbecue genres such as Memphis and Carolina.

With some 129 cooking teams heading to Little Rock and a “Pitmasters” show in the works, the Choppers are spending even more time in the pit these days.

“When you cross the Mississippi, they get serious and mean about barbecue,” Bray said. “I mean you’ve got to have your fire just right.”

From the taste of it, the Warren County Pork Choppers have more right than just the fire.