First Competition Results - Bedford Blue & BBQ Festival

[bvbull200]

It was my first my first comp also, I cooked with my uncle, Tim's Tailgate BBQ Team. We got 4th chicken. Lot of work for two guys.

Nice! Congrats on the chicken. I was sitting on the floor right in front of the stage (right side if you were looking at it) during the awards.

It sure was a lot of work, wasn't it? With an extra hand and some of the prep tips from this thread, I hope to be able to walk around more during the next comp.

For your first cook you guys did very good. You should try cooking LSBS or IBCA there are tons of them around all year long. I know Woody well and talk with him couple of times a week and comp cook with him at least 15 times a year. You can learn a lot from him. Only advice I would give you is to do all of your meat prep at home. It will make Friday so much easier.

Hope to meet down the road look for me Kevin Riley Circle R Cookers

Woody is a really, really awesome guy. When I told him we got 29th in brisket, he hugged me and made it feel like we won the whole damn contest. I really hope to get to cook alongside him again down the road.

We are looking for LSBS and IBCA events that work with our schedule.

Great performance, great wrapup! You've gotten a lot of good advice above, so rather than be repetitive can I just say how much I love the name Pitfaced?!! :thumb:

Thanks a ton! You are more than welcome to compliment the name. It might have been the best thing going for us last weekend :tongue:. Every once in a while, I get a stroke of creativity. :biggrin1:

WRONG,WRONG,WRONG !!!!!
This is a great opportunity to reach a large number of judges to try and correct a fatal flaw in judges thinking.
You NEVER score down for personal likes or dislikes. A judges job is to score each and every box AS PRESENTED. It doesn't matter if you think chicken balls don't look like chicken, only to score it as presented.
Ask yourself questions like did this cook do a excellent job making the chicken balls? Are they cooked well, is there symmetry in the presentation?
Do you want to taste it as it is because it looks like it might be good?

When you do taste it and it has an excellent combination of spices, the sauce seems to add to the flavor and it is juicy and has great tenderness.
At that point you realize that this cook did an excellent job with his chicken category and you cannot go back to the presentation score to correct it because you automatically dissed it with your personal dislike of chicken balls.

I for one, and probably more than us don't really care for chicken balls, but I make myself ignore that fact and reach a score based only on how the cook presented his category.

Please judges, learn to leave your personal preferences at home before coming to the contest.
Ed

Didn't mean to sound like an attack, but this issue is important for the cooks. They deserve a even playing field regardless of our personal likes or dislikes.

This was the impression that Woody and the other people that I talked with at the comp gave me. I get that some (many?) people don't want their chicken looking like that, but if I can make it look uniform with good color and otherwise appealing looking, I should go for it. For 1st timers, 8/8/9/9/8/8 wasn't bad on appearance, I thought. We want to be better, and ditching the balls may ultimately be the answer, but it was far from our achilles heel in this comp. But what do I know.

As a cook and a CBJ, I looked at the box and the questions that came to mind is, WTF is this, hamsters, mystery meat, etc? I'm not sure I want to take a bite of whatever it is so my appearance score should reflect this. Give it a generous 4 and move on! It may be the best thing since chopped liver but from the picture, it may be chicken because someone said that is the current category. I'll with hold judgment on taste and tenderness until I try to figure out how to bite it and do so without using a glass of water to take the pill.

Fortunately, this comp appeared to have judges that are able to discern the difference between hamster and chicken. Good luck on that whole "figuring out how to eat food" thing, though. I could see that being an issue for a CBJ.

 

[bvbull200]

correct. it's just one contest. Others will always say positive things to say about it. If I'm competing against you, i want you to keep turning in chicken like this. I'll think you'll learn pretty quick over more comps that these don't finish up front very often.

I'm perfectly comfortable with the fact that the chicken balls could eventually be a limiting factor for us when (if?) we get "good" at everything else. I'm very anxious to practice a more traditional chicken box, too. I need to get better. I saw some pictures of boxes from the other teams that were spot on for what I'd love to be able to do. None of them balls, either, so I get that.

I'm not quite ready, however, to suggest that the teams that offered their opinions on the chicken box were intentionally misleading us in order to give themselves an advantage. They offered us sample rubs, finishing sauces, and plenty of other advice that I don't think would be met with any resistance. They were good people that were very helpful to a couple of guys that were clearly a LONG ways from being on their level. I have heard that BBQ is a brotherhood of sorts and that some of the best people that others have met has been through BBQ. Our neighbors at this comp embodied that better than I could have imagined. I get not giving us any of their secrets, but misleading a couple of rookies by encouraging us to do the "wrong" thing would be quite the betrayal of that brotherhood. Maybe I'm being naive, but I'd like to give the guys at Meat Church, 3 Woody's, and Texas Select Seasonings a little more credit than that. They had plenty to say, both supportive and critical, of all of the practice boxes I showed them, so they weren't afraid to offer constructive criticism.

I wish I would have known you were on here and also cooking your 1st comp. We were there too but it didnt seem like I ever had time to walk around to see everyone or meet new teams. We cook on cans only and it would have been great to meet you and discuss can cooking. Great job on your first comp and all pics are great.

Too bad we didn't get to meet up! We were so busy (see: lack of prep) that we didn't get to see much of any other teams, either. I got a good look at the teams between our site and the bathrooms, but that was about it :-D.

What is your team?