Tuesday, March 30, 2010

North Little Rock

The weekend of March 20, Big T'z kicked-off their 2010 season at the USA Barbeque Championship in North Little Rock, Arkansas. Hailed as the World's Richest BBQ Contest in history, this championship featured an all-out slug match between the best barbeque cooks in the country.

To prepare for the 11 hour drive, Sonya, my Father-in-law, Dan, and I loaded up the camper and headed out at noon on Thursday and drove straight to Branson, Missouri to spend the night. This worked out well both for our timing and the fact that Dan had the opportunity to do some fishing on Lake Tanneycomo, something he does several times a year.

Half-way down we had an unexpected delay when the cupboard that holds our BBQ sauce came open and many of our glass jars of sweet and sticky sauce crashed all over the floors and walls of our camper. Four rolls of paper towels and two canisters of clorox wipes later, we were back on our way. From that experience I learned that one, we need extra catches for our cupboards, and two, BBQ sauce goes much better on a finely cooked pieces of meat than it does on floors, walls and shoes.

We arrived to our the contest a little behind schedule, finding most teams had already arrived. It was quite the experience trying to get the camper in our space--I thanked God Dan was there with his superior towing skills to help us get in to our spot.

Before we knew it the smoke was rolling from our site and pork and brisket were on. We got a spare moment to stop by the potluck organized my Steph from TheSlabs.com and hosted by Early Bird BBQ. We had a great time visiting with everyone there and eating some delicious food.

It was 11 before we were able to wander from our site. Unfortunately, due to the money involved with this contest there seemed to be little carousing going on. I found several of my friends' sites only to find they were in bed. I did however meet up with my friends from Tippy Canoe BBQ Crew, which was fun.

The morning quickly came and before I knew it everythng was in a box and off to the judges. Things went off mostly without a hitch, save for in the middle of pork turn-ins my razor sharp slicing knife fell of the cutting board and caught my finger on the way down, and it wasn't a paper cut either. Luckily, I had two medical professionals right with me to attend to my battle wounds. It was quite interesting saucing and putting pieces of pork in the box with my left hand while Dan worked diligently to stop the bleeding on my right.

Like the contest itself the awards ceremony was huge; we could barely see the stage from where we finally found a place to stand. As there were 230 teams competing, they called the top 40 places in every category. We were lucky enough to hear our names called for 11th place in chicken, and 22nd in ribs. I was really happy with the rib call as I used one of our new pellet cookers to cook them, plus in that field 22nd in my mind was awesome for what is historically our weakest category. While we didn't hear our name for pork or brisket, our overall scores were good enough for 17th overall. For our first competition of the season against the best of the best, we went away very pleased with the result.

The highlight of the weekend was seeing friends Rod and Sheri Gray from team Pellet Envy win the whole thing. They have a history of doing well at this contest, and their performance this year was only different due to the fact they did better than normal. Their overall score was 701, which if you understand trends in KCBS scoring you know that is just plain ridiculous. Additionally, they had close to a perfect score on their 1st place chicken and a perfect score on their pork. They didn't get first place pork only because two other teams also got perfect scores, which is also ridiculous. Huge congratulations and thanks to them for putting on a great show!

This coming weekend Big T'z is on the trail again. We are headed down to Pleasant Hill, Missouri to compete in Smokin' on Big Creek BBQ Championship. There will be many of our friends there yet again competing and helping to raise money for March of Dimes. We are looking forward to it!

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