STATE COLLEGE, Pa. — Take it from Penn State offensive tackle Andrew Nelson when he says he’s tasted the best brisket.
It happened in June when Nittany Lions’ offensive line coach Herb Hand invited his players over and cooked 27 lbs. of brisket, 20 lbs. of sausage, 100 grilled jalapeño poppers wrapped in bacon, and macaroni and cheese. This was to celebrate his son’s high school graduation and his daughter’s birthday. Belt buckles needed to be loosened in the aftermath.
“Literally his brisket is the greatest food I’ve ever eaten. The greatest meat I’ve ever had in my life,” Nelson said before a Penn State fall camp practice. “I remember I must have had like three plates of it and I was just sitting there afterwards like in a food coma.”
Hand’s passion for food rivals football. And he’s got TV credit to prove it having been on the popular Food Network show “Chopped.” If he weren’t coaching, he’d think about opening a restaurant.
“But the idea of actually owning a restaurant takes away from the romanticism of cooking,” Hand said. “You have to do it for a living, it’s a little bit different. Now if you’re a world class chef, that’s their deal.
“I do it to decompress.”
Cooking the barbecue feast for family and players this summer was a two-day process. He puts apple cider vinegar on top of three nine-pound briskets to give the meat those crispy burnt ends. The meat goes in the smoker for nine hours before he wraps the briskets in tin foil and injects braising liquid. Then everything goes back in the smoker for a few more hours to make it “extra juicy,” he said.
The brisket rests for two hours either in a cooler or in the oven to keep everything hot and the juice inside.
“You could drink that juice!” Hand said, proudly showing off a photo of his perfectly tender brisket. “But the smoke ring, that was one of the best I’ve had.”
Two 9-pound briskets smoked by Herb Hand. (Courtesy of Herb Hand)
Hand has coached football for more than two decades, but he’s been a chef longer. When he was about 11 years old, one of his rotating chores at home was to cook with mom.
Hand took a home economics class in high school and bought a wok in college where his hot pepper chicken recipe became his go-to. He also made breakfast and late night snacks for his fraternity at Hamilton (N.Y.) College on occasion.
Last season was Hand’s first at Penn State as one of seven coaches James Franklin brought with him from Vanderbilt. He inherited a young offensive line that would allow 44 sacks, tied for third-worst in the nation. This didn’t help an already weak running game, ranked 120th of 128 Bowl Subdivision teams, averaging just over 100 yards a game at 2.9 yards a carry.
Entering Year 2, Franklin said he hopes his linemen are the most rejuvenated and improved unit on the field, which will in turn help first-round draft hopeful quarterback Christian Hackenberg out of the slump he had last season.
These are all things on Hand’s mind. But rather than turn on ESPN when he gets home from work, he unwinds by cooking or watching the Food Network.
“That’s my life,” Hand says of SportsCenter. “I want to get away from that. So I watch the Food Network. That’s where I learned how to do all this stuff, by watching those shows.”
When Hand cooks for his linemen, it’s mostly meat and potatoes. But when he’s with family, there’s more variety. This summer at the beach Hand and his daughter Bailey had a French Macaron bakeoff. Bailey won because her dad had trouble dispensing the batter mid-race.
The home loss was surprising since Hand is a pro at food competitions. A couple years ago during a Vanderbilt bye week, he was a contestant on “Chopped,” where four amateur chefs battle to prepare bags of mystery ingredients into a three-course meal. He made it past the appetizer round, cooking potato-chip crusted sole with bacon and garlic red Russian kale, but his entree of lamb with Thai peanut sauce didn’t cut it with the judges.
Herb Hand working on his entree that must include: single malt scotch, lamb chops, rapini and tamarind paste on ‘Chopped.’ (Courtesy of the Food Network)
Though he filmed the episode while at Vanderbilt, it didn’t air until last year, about two months into his job at Penn State. It was an excellent way to break the ice with new linemen.
“I thought it was stereotypical that your OL coach knows how to cook,” joked starting center Angelo Mangino. “Cooking for the fat guys.”
“When we saw him in action, I was a little surprised. I was like, ‘Wow, I didn’t realize you had legitimate culinary skills like that,” guard Derek Dowrey said. “Definitely a lot of respect for that. Big hearty meals for big hearty guys.”
The “Chopped” opportunity arose via Twitter. One night while Hand and his wife Debbie were getting ready for bed, he was scrolling through his timeline and saw the Food Network tweet it was looking for chefs in Nashville. Hand thought this was a perfect recruiting tool to play for him at Vandy because players would also be in a place with foodie-respected restaurants.
But the link was an application for a “Chopped” episode with a “dads who cook” theme. He applied and after several back and forth emails with producers, plus a Skype interview, Hand got a response that said, “Welcome to Chopped.”
He never cooked for the producers, but did have to describe a meal. He chose one he made for a recruit and his family on an official visit: flat bread with bacon, blue cheese, grapes and a honey drizzle for the appetizer, crab-stuffed filet mignon with a bearnaise sauce, sautéed asparagus, and twice-baked potatoes for the main course, and a fudge brownie with a pecan-crusted ice cream ball and salted caramel sauce on top for dessert.
The tricky part was when to film. The network suggested September, which wasn’t going to work for a football coach. Franklin said it would be OK if they could work it into an open date.
The shoot was scheduled for the Saturday between the Missouri and Georgia games. But then Vanderbilt lost to the Tigers.
“And then I gotta go (into Franklin’s office) and be like, ‘Hey, just to remind you, I gotta fly to New York and do this cooking show,” Hand said, smiling. “And he’s like ‘Oh. Yeah.’ We wound up beating Georgia so it all worked out.”
Hand’s favorite meal is brunch. He loves doing crab cakes benedict with homemade hollandaise sauce and cayenne pepper. On Christmas Eve, he and his son Trey have a tradition of making chili. And he recently made charbroiled oysters a la the famous New Orleans restaurant, Dragos.
“On official visits, he wants to cook,” Franklin said. “We’ll be catering a dinner or a lunch or a brunch at my house and the guy will be cooking omelets and Herb will go kick the guy off the omelets because he wants to cook for the guys.
“He says he can do sushi. Eh, slow down Herb.”
With Hand being this master chef, players probably come over for dinner all the time, right? But the NCAA has rules for that.
Crab cakes benedict (Courtesy of Herb Hand)
Rule 16.11.1.5 is the “Occasional Meals” rule, which says “a student athlete or the entire team in a sport may receive an occasional meal in the locale of the institution on infrequent and special occasions from an institutional staff member.”
The conditions state “the meal may only be provided in an individual’s home, on campus or at a facility that is regularly used for home competition and may be catered.”
In general, Penn State compliance asks coaches to monitor the frequency of meals classified as “occasional meals” and as long as they don’t have more than one per month, they’re within NCAA boundaries. Hand said he tries to cook for his players once or twice a semester.
And when they come over, it’s a laid back, relaxing atmosphere with story telling and of course great food.
“To me, it feels like home when you have people around a dinner table eating together,” Hand said. “When I think about some of my greatest memories of my family, with my grandma, it was picnics or sitting around a dinner table and actually having human interaction.
“For me, to make a meal for somebody, it’s kind of like my way to express my love for them. It’s an expression of love.”
