Food Network star talks filming in 'the absolute middle of nowhere' Utah — and cooking a turkey with Shaq

ST. GEORGE — Susie Bulloch had a strategy going into her latest cooking competition on national TV.

Ahead of the first round of the new Food Network show "Pitmasters," which brought top barbecue cooks to southern Utah for a week of filming, Bulloch and her teammate, Christie Vanover, were committed to playing it safe.

They wanted to fall in the middle of the pack to avoid standing out and having a target on their backs early on.

"Turns out that was a terrible strategy," Bulloch said with a laugh. "Every other team was like, 'We are making the best food we've ever made of our lives on the first day.' Everybody wanted to win on Day 1."

So on the first day, after spending 10 physically demanding hours cooking a family-style barbecue platter while navigating an elevation of over 5,000 feet in the remote outdoors, Bulloch and Vanover landed in the bottom two teams.

The pair avoided elimination, but they didn't want to get that close to it again.

Fired up by adrenaline and their competitive spirit, they scrapped their original game plan and exited their comfort zone.

"It felt like we had to stage a massive comeback," Bulloch recalled. "It pushed us to do things that were more difficult than I think we probably would have been planning on that early in the competition. … It lit the fire."

Now, Bulloch and Vanover are one of six remaining teams in the competition. And somehow, amid an intense filming schedule that resulted in sometimes forgetting to change their clothes and sleep deprivation, they've been getting better with each round.

Bulloch, a St. George resident who created the online barbecue empire Hey Grill, Hey, chatted with the Deseret News about the roller coaster of a competition — and that one time she cooked a Thanksgiving turkey with Shaquille O'Neal.

Surviving an 'unbelievably grueling schedule'

Bulloch didn't know until roughly a week before filming that the show's location would be just 45 minutes outside of her home in St. George (contestants aren't allowed to share the specific location; during the show's premiere, host and chef Andrew Zimmern called it "the absolute middle of nowhere").

It was a welcome surprise, and gave her a slight edge when it came to navigating the elements — higher altitude can affect water's boiling point, temperature maintenance and baking chemistry.

"I feel like I had a little bit of a home-field advantage," she said, adding that she became a sort of "set mother" throughout filming. "I was reminding everybody the whole time, 'Drink electrolytes, drink water. You don't think you're getting dehydrated because it's not hot, but you are.' … It really does take its toll."

Scenes during the premiere episode showed the teams building their own fire pits. But what viewers didn't see during the episode, Bulloch said, was the hour it took to haul materials like cinder blocks, rebar and corrugated metal from the set's designated hardware store to their cooking stations.

Throughout filming, Bulloch logged 3 to 5 miles a day in steps just running to the pantry for cooking supplies — their cooking station was the farthest away, about a football field's distance, she said.

"It was very physically demanding, and I don't think I was quite prepared for that," she said with a laugh. "There's just a lot that went into even just being able to cook outdoors in a way that we wanted to."

And there was very little downtime when it came to cooking — fires are burning continuously until elimination due to the back-to-back challenges.

The second big challenge of the competition started right after the first, at 2:30 in the morning, and Bulloch realized while watching the first two episodes that she hadn't even changed her clothes in between the rounds.

She estimates she got a total of 90 minutes of broken sleep each day of filming.

It all made for an "unbelievably grueling schedule," Bulloch said. Yet, as the sleep deprivation kicked in, she and Vanover seemed to start hitting their stride.

During the July 27 episode, Zimmern called Bulloch's Thai beef waterfall salad "the best beef dish" he'd had on the show thus far. Bulloch and Vanover ended up winning the round.

"If you keep cooking that way, there's no reason you can't win this thing," Zimmern said.

For Bulloch, sharing this moment with her friend and teammate, Vanover, is especially rewarding since the two women established their respective businesses within a few days of each other back in 2015, and have rooted for each other along the way.

Starting an online empire — and cooking with Shaq

Although she hasn't always been a barbecue guru, Bulloch has always loved to cook.

Growing up, her family frequently hosted dinner parties, and Bulloch saw firsthand the power food had to gather and unite.

Years later, thanks to a part-time job developing recipes for a wood-fired grill company, she learned that she had a knack for barbecuing and that it could become her own vehicle for gathering.

She also saw a need in the market for accessible standardized outdoor cooking recipes, and a lack of female representation. So she created her own food blog and quickly started gaining traction.

Within her first year, she worked with Food Network and Ball Park Hot Dogs to earn a Guinness World Record for the longest grilling marathon by a team (34 hours and 35 minutes). Eventually, her husband left his corporate accounting job to become her CFO (and the lead parent).

As her company has evolved, she's had a top-ranked macaroni and cheese recipe on Google, competed on Food Network's "BBQ Brawl: Flay v. Simon," sold her line of products in major retailers and even cooked a Thanksgiving turkey with Shaq for a Facebook Watch segment, which still feels pretty surreal nearly eight years later.

"That was the craziest email I ever got," she said. "I thought it was spam. It was like, 'Shaq wants to cook with you at his studio in LA,' and I was like, 'Probably not. That's probably not true.'"

Read the full story on deseret.com.

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