Naples BBQ Competition

This is another one of the posts that got deleted in the great Brain Fart of 2013. It was originally posted 10/24/13

Well, another one in the books. That’s about all I can find good from this one. It had all the potential to be a good competition, unfortunately it don’t go quite like that.

I headed out Thursday (the 17^th) around noon to travel to just outside Naples and the ‘Big Swamp Smoke Off’ competition. Full tank of gas, check. Tunes, check. James (GPS) dialed in, check. I’m good to go for my ~3.5 hours of travel. Down I-95, across SR-70, down US-27, some little CR, some other little CR, another little CR, one tiny little one-light town after another, miles and miles of orange groves and Bingo! I’m there!

This is the fairgrounds late Thursday afternoon. Not a whole lot going on, yet. Some of the vendors are getting set up.

Off in our own little area is Tom (Blitzkrieg BBQ) and me. We were joined a little while later by several other teams but the majority won’t show up until tomorrow morning. So I get electric/water/TV antenna/etc. set up.

The rest of Thursday night was spent doing chicken prep. Oh, how I so truly LOVE chicken prep. 20 thigh pieces that essentially get dissected, cleaned, veins & tendons removed (don’t get squeamish on me), skin scraped completely clean of all fat, trimmed down to uniform size. Mmmmmm boy! I just love me a big pile of chicken entrails right before dinner. I don’t get it, I hate chicken the very most, but it’s my best scoring meat.

The rules say that I can do any trimming I want before meat inspection as long as I keep the tags and don’t do any seasoning. I usually do the bulk of the trimming and prep on Wednesday or Thursday before the competition. That way when I get meat inspection about noon of Friday, I can go right into injecting, marinating, brining, etc.

Bright and early Friday morning I go to start working on the brisket. Here’s where the trouble starts. I bought a 13 pound brisket. It should have been way more than enough to fill up one turn-in box, always has been in the past. So I cut the cryovac wrapping off and Hmmmm, that’s an awful lot of fat on that sucker. I figure I’ll just trim away the bulk of the fat and see what I’m really working with. So I trim… and trim…and trim….and trim. Oh shit, this thing is virtually ALL fat! There was ridiculously little meat in it. That was one especially FAT and LAZY cow. Oh well, go with what I got ‘cause the nearest place to get a replacement brisket is probably 40-50 miles away. When I do competitions there’s almost always one ‘oh shit’ thing that happens, I figured this was it. Alright, I can live with it.

Next, I go to work on the pork butts (No, they really aren’t the backside of the pig. They’re actually the front shoulder) and everything seems to be pretty normal. Ok good, we’re back in the groove.

Next up is ribs. I buy one of those 3 slab cryovacs as I usually bring home at least a slab as leftovers after I turn in the best looking 10-12 ribs. I probably should do 6 slabs to be extra safe, but it starts to run into a lot of extra $$. I slice it open, take out the first slab, and wait a minute, what’s wrong with that slab underneath? Oh no! Somebody cut across all the bones right through the WHOLE SLAB! All of that meat is completely blood soaked and totally unusable. So now I’m down to just two slabs and that is the barest of minimum to go with. If ANYTHING happens to either of those slabs I won’t have enough to make turn-in. You have GOT to be kidding me, two ‘oh-shits’ in one comp and both really bad ones? Grrrr… Ok, alright, deep breath, count to 10 a few times, take a break, cool off and adjust plans. Fortunately, the rest of the day goes well.

It’s now O-dark-thirty Saturday morning and would you believe that the party down at the other end of the midway is STILL going on? Amazing (There’s a whole story within that but I was not involved). It’s time to do final prep on chicken & ribs and get them into the cooker. Ribs and chicken are more of a timing thing unlike brisket and butts which are very much a temperature thing. The goal is to have chicken and ribs finish about 10-15 minutes before turn-in. Not an easy thing to do, especially chicken, it does not ‘hold’ at all. So they get final prepared and put into the cooker at the well-practiced ‘right time’.

Now I’m coming up on the start of crunch time (~9:30A-10:30A). This is where all the meats are coming to the end of their cooking cycles and require a LOT of attention. I will check temperatures probably a dozen times in any 10 minute time frame, except for when I have to make a change. At 9:30 I have to take the chicken out of one pan and place them on a grate, in the same order that they were in the pan, and put them back in. 9:45 I have to wrap the ribs in aluminum foil along with a special basting sauce for an hour. I have to almost constantly check the brisket for that probe tender ‘buttery feel’. Keep the butts moist but covered. The list goes on and on.

Chicken gets turned in at 11:00, so at 10:30 I put the finish coat of sauce on the chicken and give them a quick temperature check via probe. Oh shit (#3 if you’re counting), they’re done now, in fact they’re already a little overdone and I have to put them back into the cooker to set the sauce. By 10:50 they are going to be WAY overdone. Can’t be helped, if the sauce does not get set, it will run right off the piece.

Ribs get turned in at 12:00, so at 11:20 I unwrap them, check for done-ness, turn them over, sauce, and put them back into the cooker to set that sauce. Oh shit (that’s right, #4), they’re already way overdone and I only have the 2 racks. They are literally falling apart and in competition falling off the bone tender is a very bad no-no. It means they are way overcooked. No fallback. The only thing I can do is pull them out a couple of minutes early, let them cool off a bit (sometimes ribs will tighten back up a little as they cool).

So after the rib fiasco, it’s pork butt at 1:00. I get them out of the Cambro (the big brown boxes in the one picture above) that I store them in after they reach final cooking temperature. Oh yeah, I need to heat up the sauce to go on the pork. Can’t put cold sauce on hot meat, it will seize right up. You guessed it, oh shit (#5) I didn’t bring the correct sauce. I had been experimenting with a new sauce for pork but it isn’t perfected yet. So in a moment of panic I reason that the ribs are pork just like the butts. So the rib sauce should work on the pulled pork too, right? Right? Please? Oh pretty please? Yeah, um, no.

Final turn-in of the day, brisket at 2:00. Alright, big finish, here we go! I wish. Turns out I was right about that brisket. I had to use almost every fiber of meat to get the box even close to full. Didn’t matter if it had a little fat on it or not, it went in.

Needless to say I was the proverbial good sport at awards. I knew long before they started that I didn’t need to map out a path to the stage when my name was called and I was correct.

Mehh, win some lose some. I figure it this way, I got 4 ‘oh shits’ already in the bag for the next competition, so everybody better watch out. I’m gonna be on a roll!