End of our sophomore year

I was up early this morning, and I realized that Mark and I have just finished our sophomore season as competitive barbecuers.  Well, I don’t know how competitive we are, but we at least helped me one comp a Jack qualifier!  I thought this was a good time, though, to reflect on the last couple of seasons and how things have changed.

May 2005 gave us our first look at competition barbecue, other than what we’d seen on the Food Network.  We were already semi-fanatics about it.  We pulled up in Carmel, IN, with NO idea what was going on.  We had a great time, though, and met some great people.  We were definitely hooked.  Our first turn ins, though, weren’t all that great.  Our pork was a bit dry, our brisket wasn’t bad, actually, our chicken was rubbery and a bit tough, and our ribs were babybacks that tasted ok but looked bad, and they were a mess.  We’ve improved on ab
solutely everything, but our ribs in particular took the most drastic direction change.

Once we got home from Carmel, we started trying to tweak everything here and there.  We changed all of our rubs, some starting over, some just changing.  We only had one more comp in 2006, and it was 3 months away.  If you’ve read my earlier blogs, though, you may remember what a fiasco it was even getting to Madison for that competition at all.  And the heat was miserable… Some teams didn’t return this year just due to the heat.  We did much better in most things, though our ribs still suffered.  We were just happy to be middle of the pack overall. 

Over the fall and winter of 2005-2006, we got more serious about what we were doing, and my wife and I went to St. Louis for a weekend in January 2006 to become Certified Barbecue Judges.  We were blessed with friends that wanted to help us, and our current trailered Smokehouse was created.  It wasn’t ready for Carmel in the spring, and we ended up doing fairly poorly there, though we almost got a call for 10th place brisket.. we were barely behind in 11th place.  That was our best finish, but we had a lot of problems with wind and keeping our cheap Chargrillers from spiking temps.  We still had fun, and that’s the main point of doing competitions, really.

June seemed to fly by, and my wife and I went on vacation in early July, only to have another comp the very next week in Grand Rapids, MI.  The Smokehouse was ready, though, and we fired it up the weekend before and cooked with it.  It did a great job in GR for us, with some interaction from us and help from our neighbors, but we ended up with our very first call up for a 5th in brisket.  It was silly how much we were smiling, and we only got a ribbon!  We were much better organized in GR, and clean up and packing went much more smoothly than it had in the past.  Not having to lug the smokers around helped a bunch!  Now that we got a walk-up, we were hooked more than ever!

We didn’t compete in Madison, but my wife and I judged our first competition.  It was a bit eye-opening to be on the other end.  Man, those judges have to eat a lot!  The main thing I got out of the experience was that we were really doing things the right way; we just needed to continue improving and maintaining consistency.

Over the year, Mark and I got business cards, trying to drum up some business doing personal chef gigs.  We haven’t done much yet, but we did get the opportunity to teach a class at a local kitchen store called  Cooks’ Wares.  Maria is the class coordinator, and she was really a huge help.  It was kind of cool having mis en place done for us!  There were 18 people in the class, and they seemed to really enjoy themselves.  The theme was tailgating, and they got samples of everything we cooked, along with an 18 page handout with recipes and basic barbecue info (if anyone would like the handout, let me know!).  It was a tiring day, but very rewarding.

The next thing we were blessed with was the chance to cook with a local vendor for a festival.  Mark reminded me of talking with a guy that said he cooked for an event that had 30,000 attendees.  The Sauerkraut Festival in Waynesville, Ohio, had 342,000 this year!  We cooked 100 pork butts to make sandwiches.  We learned we could fit 50 butts on our smoker, and we learned a lot about just serving the public in general.  We had a great time!

The next weekend after that was the Ohio Smoked Meat & BBQ Festival.  I wrote that up recently, but I’ll summarize to say that we still have things to learn, but we’re also getting better all the time.  I think our third year competing will be the best yet!

As any readers that have been around here much know, this fall has also been very sad for me.  Starting around the time we were in Grand Rapids, my dog, Woody started having some problems.  He was ok until mid August, and we weren’t going to go to Madison to judge, except my very good friend Eric was able to stay with Woody overnight, and we got back to him as quickly as we could.  Unfortunately, he passed away, on my lap, the morning after our cooking class.  I miss him a lot still, and, from now on, if any of you happen to come by our competition tent, I’ll have a photo of him with me.

I think we feel we’ve grown up a bit.  We don’t pull into a competition nervous at all, but anxious to get started, greet friends that we’ve already met along with new ones, and just see how we can stack up against the other cooks.

I hope that I’ve been able to help some new or soon-to-be-new competitors.  I’m not an expert, but I like to share what I know.  The world of competition barbecue includes some of the best people you’ll ever meet, and they prove that over and over again.  The Jack Daniels was won by CancerSucksChicago.com, the day after Scottie’s father died.  I wasn’t there, but the whole world of barbecue cheered for the win.  If you’ve ever thought of competing, either just jump in and do it, or find a team that wants an ‘apprentice’ and join them.  We’re always ready and willing to take someone to a comp to be a member of our team!