1st place brisket, 8th place chicken, and 2nd place dessert.
This weekend we travelled to Harrisburg, PA to the Keystone Classic Barbecue competition. This was our second trip to Harrisburg and we were greeted with the nicest weather we’ve ever had for a competition. Blue skies, temps in the mid 60’s, and barely a puff of wind all weekend. If we had a bad cook, we knew we couldn’t be blaming the weather! The first people to say hello were the same neighbors we had last year, the Thick N Saucy crew. They are some of the nicest people we’ve met in this sport and we will always look forward to cooking and competing with them.
Our "traditional" hot wings with home made rub and a Schmiggitty sauce blend.
We always enjoy the ancillary categories, and this year the Keystone kept us busy by offering four extra categories and we cooked them all. Yes, along with the four traditional KCBS turn in categories, we cooked a total of EIGHT turn ins! Friday night was wings and bologna. We kept our wings traditional by smoking them with our home made rub and then tossing them in a sweet and spicy Schmiggitty sauce blended with a touch of Jack Daniel’s which our friend and owner of Schmiggitty sauce personally delivered just hours before the turn in. For our Bologna turn in, we created a simple twist on a cuban style sandwich replacing the ham with the bologna. Neither of these won us a ribbon, but they were rather tasty!
Saturday morning the Big Green Eggs were lit several hours before sunrise. Our simplified cooking techniques had proven successful during our last two competitions and we were feeling confident as the cook progressed on Saturday. The third ancillary category was a chicken cook, “Best legs in town”, which we cooked just like we do our KCBS chicken. This was a peoples choice and although we didn’t get a ribbon, we did place 5th.
Our KCBS chicken had us slightly concerned as half of the thighs came out darker than the other half and they were a bit dry. Luckily, we had 12 good thighs remaining to choose from. We ended up with an 8th place call in chicken which seems to be our most consistent category this year; now we just need to bump that up to a top three!
Sorting our ribs to determine which were the 'keepers'
Ribs were next and we had put together what we felt was our best box this year. Flavor and texture were good, but not amazing. Turned out we were spot on with our thoughts because we fell short on our rib score getting 21st out of 47. The appearance scores were almost all 9’s but taste was all over the board from 9 to 5. Yes, somehow we got a 5 with a comment card saying ‘too sweet.’ It’s frustrating to get scores of 9 and scores of 5 from the same table, but that’s the name of the game! We need to find a way to please every judge at the table, and this batch didn’t cut it.
We were pleased with our pork, it had good bark and good flavor. We were frustrated at judging when we didn’t get a pork call. When we got the score sheets we realized just how close we were. We placed 11th. We were tied for tenth but Chix, Swine and Bovine beat us in the tie breaker and took 10th.
The last KCBS category was brisket. This has been our nemesis since we began competing. We have worked hard just to get our brisket in the top 50% of the field. Last year at this competition we placed 43rd in brisket. This year, Erin commented that she really wanted a top ten in brisket because we needed to prove ourselves in what many would say is the most difficult category to cook. At judging we’d lost faith when they called 10th – 5th and Peppermonkey BBQ had not been called. Both of us were stunned when we got the 1st place call. YES! Finally a competition where brisket didn’t bring us down!
Our brisket burn ends were so good I wanted to kiss them! They got us a 1st place call!
Erin created a fantastic dessert for our final ancillary turn in. We sat down and brainstormed what every BBQ judge would like in a dessert. Sweet, caramel, salty goodness with a warm brownie and ice cream. What did she create? A bacon brownie sunday with caramel and vanilla ice cream, drizzled with more caramel and topped with crumbled bacon which we smoked over hickory wood. A second place call was well deserved and it had to be close to 1st because the judges had literally cleaned out the inside of their jars with their fingers!
Bacon brownie sunday got a second place call in dessert.
We place 4th overall out of 47 good teams. Our best overall place this year and our first top 5. Congratulations to Aporkalypse Now on their grand champion with an impressive score of 680! We only have one competition left in 2011. We are looking forward to Smoketoberfest next weekend and are going to work hard to have a strong finish amongst a field of quality cooks a very competitive teams!