from 43 Things

The Saga of BBQ2

We are no longer competition virgins.
We arrived on Friday and began prepping all our meats – 4 categories (chicken, brisket, ribs and pork butt). 2-3 hours later we finally munched down some leftover sandwiches from Mr. Goodcents and then started the charcoal chimney for the first smoker (pork butt takes the longest to cook: at an hour & half per pound this one needed over 10 hours).
Brisket went on second and by midnight we were well underway and the neighbors were well oiled. I took the first shift on smoker watch. I read through a stack of newspapers and munched on grapes and chips and tried like hell to stay awake. The second smoker was running very hot so there was some switching around at 1 a.m. —our internal temp on the brisket was already 141 degrees, not good. I almost dropped the pork butt trying to switch things around and I burned my hand on the Coleman lantern.
At 3:30 I finally collapsed exhausted: I slept for an hour and a half. At 5 a.m. Tim got up and refilled the water pans and started the ribs. I was up and down several times and got up for good at 8 for biscuits and gravy. After a long night of fighting the cookers and fending off drunks, I actually surprised myself by being in fairly good spirits. We pulled the pork, brisket, started the chicken last… in between I filled boxes with leaf lettuce for presentation.
At 11:30 we started arranging the chicken, giving everything a swipe with bbq sauce. Our first turn in was at 12, followed by ribs, pork butt and finally brisket.
After the turn-ins we spent some time cleaning up the considerable mess and at 3 we went up for the awards. Unfortunately we didn’t hear our name—at all. After taking a look at the scoring sheets, we discovered that we still have some work to do. We had problems with all our turn ins—presentation on chicken and brisket were not great. Our presentation on ribs and pork were much better. We got scores everywhere from 9s (perfect) to 3 (not very damn good). Overall we finished 37 of 43, much worse than we’d hoped. Afterwords, we took copious notes and decided to work on our recipes some more.We also went to Dairy Queen for ice cream and made a beer run, which we ended up being too tired to drink in the end. We went to bed and slept for about 9 hours. On Sunday we woke up to rain, so we packed up the camper and headed home, stoping off at Waffle House for breakfast. Sunday was our day to regroup—then back to the real world on Monday.

Next competition: Johnson County Fair, on my old home turf, Warrensburg, MO.

We DID IT! and we didn’t suck the most!