First off, I was asked how often I’m going to update the blog. At
first, I’ll probably do several entries a day until I get stuff off my
plate that I wanted to write down. After that, it’s hard to tell. If
you subscribe to the blog or do the RSS feed, I think you’ll get
notified when there’s something new, though.
For those of you
that have made comments, emailed me or left notes on the Barbecue Bible
forum, thanks… I’m not an expert at barbecue, but I’m willing to
answer questions and help; I don’t think my way is the only way, and
I’m still learning a lot, but I also know where you can go to get some
answers if I can’t help.
On to the turn ins…
At the Carmel competition, the turn in times were simple:
Noon – Chicken
12:30 – Ribs
1:00 – Pork
1:30 – Brisket
Here
is mistake number… well, the next of many mistakes. I was pretty
careful about what meat I got for the competition. I even spent too
much on the pork, but I got it at a high end store near Dayton, Ohio,
called Dorothy Lane Market. Great meat products there. While there, I
still needed to get chicken thighs, so I thought, "They have free range
chicken here; that will be great to use!" WRONG!!! I learned very
quickly that, for competition, I’m more than willing to get the Tyson
enhanced version. What happened was that the free range chicken got
done just fine, but it’s not as tender as other chicken. When you’re
judged on Taste, Appearance, and Texture/TENDERNESS, go with TENDER!!!
So
we turned in chicken that wasn’t as tender as we wanted, and I panicked
(first time during the comp, actually) that I couldn’t do anything
about the rubber skin (free range has thicker skin, too!). So I just
decided to turn in the rubber skin chicken. We didn’t do horribly, but
not well, either, and one of the reps warned me that they thought it
might not have been done (though testing it showed it was). Funny
thing, though, one judge gave us something like a 564 score (that’s a 5
for appearance, 6 for taste and 4 for texture/tenderness.. out of 9),
and the next gave us 888. So we also got our first lesson in learning
the judges have very different tastes.
Chicken is finally done,
and ribs are coming out of the foil. I really liked the ribs, but they
were too dark looking, and maybe a little overdone. The thing I didn’t
like was that babyback ribs are curved, and it was hard to get them to
look really great in the box, but we managed. Turn in #2 went fine.
Pork
was next. Here’s where we find out of foiling and putting in a cooler
for 5 hours hurts pork. I got it out, and started pulling it, and, can
you beleive it, it’s hot as can be… the cooler thing works really
well. Here’s the next, though much smaller, mistake in a long line of
them… We pulled the pork and put it in the box, but I didn’t know
anything about spraying it down with sugar water/apple juice, etc. So
I think our entry ended up looking dry, even though it wasn’t. Trust
me here, the sugar water thing works great and doesn’t do anything to
the taste. So entry #3 was off and in on time.
Brisket was
last… I’d already done umpteen briskets over the prior 8 months, and
I’d been happy with each one. I cut into the first of the comp
briskets, and it was dry. I couldn’t believe it. I cut into the next
one… also dry. I must have had a temp spike that I didn’t catch that
dried everything out. So I just pick the best looking one, and cut
it. My wife did a great job on presentation (remembering we hadn’t had
any feedback from a comp on what to really do at all). After she got
everything arranged, we took drippings from the brisket and brushed it
on the meat so it looked less dry. Off it went to be turned in, again
on time.
We came in 28th out of 32 teams. For having no clue
about what we were doing, I was happy. We also did ok with the
brisket, believe it or not. But we had shown up to learn, and we
really soaked up a lot of info, had a great time, and met some great
people.
