Lake Dogs
Quintessential Chatty Farker
I'm getting ready to crawl back into my hole, but until I do so I'd like to talk about peoples over-arching opinions and ignorant (which is lack-of-knowledge, not stupidity) generalizations regarding "competition BBQ".
Over time I've seen just about everything in "competition BBQ" bashed, from scoring systems, presentation, judges, timelines, and of course their definitions of BBQ and how it's judged.
Please know this: there are many sanctioning bodies. They define their game (if you will) so that judges know what to grade/score to. It's their attempt at trying to provide some objectivity to something extremely subjective. They each define their games very differently. None are right, and none are wrong; just that they each set their perfect performance standard different. It's like when we had multiple professional football leagues defining what was a valid catch differently...
I'm not saying that one particular sanctioning body doesn't have/host the majoring of sanctioned contests across the land. KCBS does. However, please dont discount all sanctioned (and unsanctioned for that matter) BBQ contests by how KCBS defines their game.
To which I say, if you dont like their game, try another. If you dont like how MBN defines its ribs, try KCBS, or visa. versa.
Saying something like "I hate competition ribs because I like mine to fall off the bone" assumes that all competitions, sanctioned and un, define their tenderness to one single standard, and nothing is farther from the truth.
Same for everything else. Dont like having to get crispy or bite-through skin on chicken, I suggest competing in competitions that dont have chicken. Dont like having to cook a whole hog, dont, compete in another that doesn't have whole hog as an event.
JMHO. Rant over. <--- as I waltz back to my hole
Over time I've seen just about everything in "competition BBQ" bashed, from scoring systems, presentation, judges, timelines, and of course their definitions of BBQ and how it's judged.
Please know this: there are many sanctioning bodies. They define their game (if you will) so that judges know what to grade/score to. It's their attempt at trying to provide some objectivity to something extremely subjective. They each define their games very differently. None are right, and none are wrong; just that they each set their perfect performance standard different. It's like when we had multiple professional football leagues defining what was a valid catch differently...
I'm not saying that one particular sanctioning body doesn't have/host the majoring of sanctioned contests across the land. KCBS does. However, please dont discount all sanctioned (and unsanctioned for that matter) BBQ contests by how KCBS defines their game.
To which I say, if you dont like their game, try another. If you dont like how MBN defines its ribs, try KCBS, or visa. versa.
Saying something like "I hate competition ribs because I like mine to fall off the bone" assumes that all competitions, sanctioned and un, define their tenderness to one single standard, and nothing is farther from the truth.
Same for everything else. Dont like having to get crispy or bite-through skin on chicken, I suggest competing in competitions that dont have chicken. Dont like having to cook a whole hog, dont, compete in another that doesn't have whole hog as an event.
JMHO. Rant over. <--- as I waltz back to my hole