Dodge County Smokers

Great Bend, KS: Kansas Winter Q

2010-02-19T22:31:00.006-06:00

I meant to get something up about our first contest of the year a little sooner, but it's better late than never, right? Maybe not. Nevertheless, our first contest of the decade happened last weekend in Great Bend, Kansas.

We have become quite fond of Great Bend. We went there for the first time in 2008 for the inaugural Winter Q and have been back several times since, as organizer Kent Romine puts on a summer and winter contest.

We arrived fairly late - around 6pm - and set up shop inside the building. Due to the cold temps, teams have the options of roughing it outside or leaving their pit out in the elements, and setting up tables and prep areas indoors. We took our spot next to Steph and Kyle of TheSlabs.com, with our pit just outside the nearest door.

We had a good time, as we usually do at Winter Q. Kent organizes a pretty cool side deal where teams can make a little extra cash. It's a Calcutta where teams are auctioned off and payouts are based on a team's finish. With 60 cook teams at the contest, the auction took quite a while...and with Chris and I arriving so late, we were the second to last team to be auctioned off. There was some big money being laid down on some of the top teams. I believe the top bid was $230 or $240 for Munchin' Hogs (Rob bought himself). The big spender of the night was Donnie Teel of Buffalo's BBQ. I am not sure how much Donnie threw down, bought he bought Pellet Envy for at least $200, and added Parrothead Smokers and few other teams as well.

I thought we might have a chance to buy ourselves for a bargain basement $40 or $50, but the bid was up to $100 before we knew it and I barely had enough money to cover the toll for the turn pike on the way home. Donnie ended up buying us as well for $150 or something. That's more than we spent on the meat to cook in the contest itself! So much for scoring that bargain.

Despite the temps dipping into the low 20's, our cook went pretty well and everything stayed pretty much on schedule. I liked our chicken, but didn't love it and it finished in the top third...probably about right. Pork was great and we took 3rd place for it. Brisket was very good too and we won a 10th place ribbon for it. I thought the Brisket deserved better, but it was a real tough crowd of cooks so we'll take whatever we could get.

Now, onto our ribs. Ribs. Hmmm. How do I put this. The judges absolutely destroyed our ribs. They hated them. They must have spit them out and tried to clean wipe their tongues with napkins like Tom Hanks in Big when he tried the caviar. So Chris and I must have known the ribs were crap, huh? Nope. Not even close. I liked 'em. He liked 'em. We've had worse finish in first place. So where did these finish? 52nd. Ouch.

That rib score really cost us. We finished a disappointing 23rd overall. The guys from Reservoir Hogs bested the field, scoring an impressive Grand Championship. Rod Gray continues to dominate as Pellet Envy scored a Reserve Grand. We ended up making enough money to buy gas for the trip home and get a tasty burger and shake at DQ. And Donnie made a little money off us too, as that 3rd place pork was enough to score him some cash in the Calcutta.

Great Bend's own Kelly Wertz of 4 Legs Up BBQ pours shots for the assembled crowd of cooks.

Steph from The Slabs and rod from Pellet Envy pucker up for a shot of Gentleman Jack.

2009 Year in Review in Pictures

2009-12-31T12:32:00.012-06:00

I know we're well into January and hopefully you are have a pleasant start to 2010. I meant to do some sort of year in review post closer to Jan 1st, but never got around to it. So I guess I'm going with a better late than never theme here.

This is a BBQ year in review for Dodge County - in pictures. I am going to take one photo from each month of '09 and keep the captions to a few words. Some of the pics have been posted here already and some are new. I hope you enjoy them.

Late January - Cooking ribs in the snow for my boy Jack's birthday party...six racks of spares squeezed in to the Weber Kettle.

My brother made this really cool (functioning) little smoker for Jack's 2nd birthday on February 1st. Maybe the best present ever...

The month of March in Kansas City means St. Patrick's Day parades and partying. In North Kansas City it's also an excuse to BBQ. The Snake Saturday BBQ contest is the first contest of the season in KC. This is my favorite picture from that contest. This is Big Mo Cason of Ponderosa BBQ in Des Moines, IA. I just really like BBQ pictures like this one.

In April Chris and I had the opportunity to cook at Texas Motor Speedway in Dallas at a contest held on race weekend. It was a small contest with only 13 (top notch) teams and we were lucky enough to finish as Reserve Grand Champs. This is the cook's meeting. Some of the cooks pictured (L-R): Waldo from Lost Gonzo (pony tail), Bart Clark of Twin Oak (sunglasses), Jamie Geer of Jambo Pits (water bottle), Bill Milroy of Texas Rib Rangers (black hat sitting), Lee Ann Whippen from Wood Chicks and Tommy Houston from Checkered Pig.

In May Chris and I competed in the Great American BBQ Contest in Kanasas City - a big event with almost 200 teams. We didn't do well at all. In fact the only member of our team to win anything was my nephew, Kyle. He won 4th place for his pork chop in the Kid's Q!

Born May 29th, Megan June Nickelson made her first trip to a BBQ contest (Tonganoxie. KS) in June at just 13 days old. Here she is with Dad. We went on to win this one too. I think Megan needs to come to more of her Dad's contests!

Over the July 4th weekend Jack and I spent a few hours cooking some ribs on his little smoker. He kept trying to ride away on his tractor while we were cooking.

In August Chris and I cooked a whole hog for my sister's engagement party. It was a lot of fun and we fed just over a hundred or so hungry guests. My Dad is never content with eating cooked pork on a plate pulled from the whole animal. He finds it much more efficient to "graze from the running rear" of the hog.

In September we competed in our hometown contest in Mission, KS - where we cooked for the first time in 2005. Here Chris is walking up to accept an award with Megan and Jack thought he needed to go too. Our awards emcee stopped to talk to Jack...all we could make out was "BarQ meat!" and "Dodge County Smokers!" The emcee is Sports Radio 810 host Kevin Keitzman.

October always means cooking in the biggest contest of the year: the American Royal. The buzz at the Royal this year was all about the taping of the now-famous TLC reality show PITMASTERS. Here is the crew interviewing Johnny Trigg, one the show's stars.

5:30am on Thanksgiving morning. Cooking turkeys for Thanksgiving dinner.

Just about a month after the above picture was taken, we were hit with a Christmas snowstorm in Kansas City. The cooker is in the exact same place. But there's nothing cooking this time!

(Way more than)One Minute Monday (One Day Late)

2009-10-20T21:32:00.006-05:00

It's always good to end the year on a high note. At the same time, it kind of stinks too.

See, we have generally cooked so bad at the Royal (or I should say that we SCORED so bad), that we needed another contest to end the year on. October gets pretty late to find a good competition, but there are still ample opportunities around KC. A few years back we did a little unsanctioned one day bar contest and for the past three years we have cooked The Fountains Blaze Off in Independence, two weeks after The Royal.

Our scores at the American Royal have been so horrendous, that we needed a confidence boost so we didn't have to spend the next 4 or 5 months with a 350th place finish hanging over our heads. Even though we actually pulled out a respectable finish this year at the world's largest BBQ contest (16th place), we decided to cook one more contest anyway and we ended up finishing with a reserve grand at The Fountains.

The only problem is that winning (or just doing well) makes me want to keep cooking as much, or maybe more than performing poorly. When we don't do well, it's like I need to prove to myself that we can win. And when we do do well, it's kind of the same feeling - only we need to prove that we can win again and achieve that feeling of...um...triumph? Not sure what the word is, but you know what I mean.

So I guess we're done with 2009...maybe.

The Fountains Blaze Off and Senior Q

2009-10-18T22:34:00.009-05:00

Chris and I competed in what most likely may be our last BBQ contest of 2009. The Fountains Blaze Off and Senior Q is a really nice event held at the senior living community in Independence, MO - just about 30 minutes from home base.

This is the 3rd year of the KCBS contest held at the facility, and it's our 3rd time competing there as well. We were fortunate enough to come out of the weekend with a reserve grand championship. That finish was a big surprise to both Chris and I as we weren't exactly blown away by anything we turned in on Saturday.

An even bigger surprise might have been our 1st place score in chicken. We were struggling to get our chicken right that morning, and I guess we did better than we thought. Funny thing is our neighbor at the contest, Todd from Ployboys BBQ, said his chicken didn't come out the way he had planned either and he ended up with a 2nd place bird. Todd also ended up winning the contest, putting the hurt on the rest of the field by a 15 point spread (that's a lot).

We flew solo for this event - no family on Friday or Saturday until Chris' wife Jenny came just in time for the awards along with his two daughters, Emily and Baby Megan. I shouldn't say we were completely on our own - we did have my chocolate lab, Sue Dog with us. This is the first time Sue has stayed at a contest with me since May 2006. Interestingly enough, that was also our first grand championship. I guess she is good luck!

Here are a few pictures from the contest. I hope to have some more up on the picture page of our site in the next few days.

(photos below courtesy of Todd Johns - Pork Pullin' Plowboys)

Busy or Lazy?

2009-10-14T23:01:00.003-05:00

I'm not sure if I'm really busy...or just a little lazy. I had some ideas for a few posts to make this week and I haven't gotten around to them. I spent last week decompressing from the Royal along with work, normal chores and starting a Halloween costume project for the Boy. This week it's more of the same...only I have been ramping up for one more contest.

Chris and I will be reporting for duty to cook The Fountain Blaze Off in Independence, MO Friday. I have been slowly but surely knocking off items from the "to do" list in preperation for the weekend, but stuff just keeps getting in the way preventing me from getting it all done. Tonight it was my soon-to-be brother-in-law's car dying on I-35. I had to go meet up with him and tow his Neon back home. Not a big deal...just another thing to do.

Hopefully we'll be ready for the contest. I am looking forward to the potlock on Friday night organized by Steph from TheSlabs.com. It's all soup. That will be a nice treat for a cold weekend.

The American Royal

2009-10-07T22:24:00.004-05:00

I can’t really write much about the American Royal that hasn’t been written before. It’s was big. It was loud. There was a lot of action and a lot of people. Beyond that, I can’t really explain it. You really pretty much have to see it yourself to get a feel for what the Royal is.

I think Chris and I may have been the last team to arrive to the contest and I am nearly certain that we were the last of the invitational teams to check in. When we called for meat inspection around 4:15 on Friday afternoon, we were told that all inspections were complete. Really?

We didn’t do a party this year and that was nice. It was good to not have to worry about bringing extra stuff to feed everyone. Instead, we just had my wife, little boy and my sister and soon-to-be brother-in-law along with Chris and I. Chris’ wife was not feeling well so she stayed at home all weekend along with the kids. We spent time at a few other team parties and that was quite enjoyable. Friday night we ate and visited with the Pork Me Purple gang and Saturday enjoyed a fine meal from the Ribs 4 U boys (what a great steak!)

As for our results in the contests, they were mixed.

In the Invitational there were 119 teams competing from all corners of the country. In our opinion, this is the most prestigious event to compete in and win in competitive BBQ. You had to have won a Grand Championship in the past 12 months, and they take champions from all sanctioning bodies. The best competition in BBQ is at this contest. Our lone award in this one came in the pork category where we placed 15th. We checked in at 31st overall.

We expected to do a little better, but there was nothing left to do but concentrate on the Open the next day.

The Open contest saw 473 teams. I thought it would be hard to top the food we cooked the day before, but we did. I had a weird feeling in the pit of my stomach that got worse as each box was completed and turned in, with each category coming out better than the last. So as we sat through the Open awards, not receiving a call, we were both feeling a little down. I might even say we were borderline disgusted as we fruitlessly waited to hear our name called.

Adding to the frustration, this is our 5th year of cooking in the Royal, and we have yet win anything in the Open. In fact we have gotten progressively worse each year we have competed there.

We were just about ready to get up and head back to our site to finish cleaning up when the top 20 overall teams were announced. What a relief to hear our name called in 16th place. Turns out we just missed calls in brisket (24th place) and pork (27th).

So while the monkey might not be completely off our back as we have yet to get an Open call, we do now have a nice overall finish to hang our hat on.

One Minute Monday

2009-10-05T23:27:00.000-05:00

I plan on having a more in depth recap of the American Royal in the next few days. But until then, I just wanted to get a quick post up here. Chris and I finished 16th in the open out of 473 teams. That’s far better and feels much nicer than our 353rd place finish last year! We received no category calls in the open, so when we heard our name in the list for the overall finish at 16, we were pleasantly surprised. The invitational contest was OK for us. We received one call, squeaking in at 15th in pork and finishing 31st overall. All in all, we had a really nice weekend. Pics and more on the weekend coming soon.

BBQ & A

2009-10-01T00:27:00.005-05:00

We are in the middle of preparing for the biggest contest of the year – The American Royal. When I say big, I mean it too. They will probably end up with around 500 teams, tens of thousands of people on the grounds and one of the most prestigious contest titles if you do win.

Whenever we are getting ready for a contest, we go through the checklist of what we need as we prepare. I also go through the other list in my head…you know the one, the list of things that we don’t actually need to compete, but we like to have anyway. I don’t record them on my checklist sheet, but I gotta have them anyway.

That got me thinking…let’s ask some other big time cooks what are the few things they bring to a contest they couldn’t live with out. Here are the answers we got from three very good cooks.

Mike Wozniak - Quau
I would never go to a contest without all of my contest meat, with the chicken and ribs already trimmed. I would worry that what I find on the road may not be up to snuff. I also make sure I have my garnish. Again, I've seen it where stores close to a cookoff are sold out. Finally, my BBQ notebook. I have my time schedules written down and anything I change from week to week to see if it is a plus or minus.

Steve Ferrin – I Smell Smoke
Various good luck charms (lucky wood, Indian Medicine Bag)
Second, my GPS. I don't think I can get around the block without it now! Lastly, my Blackberry, for so many reasons I won't even go into it. How did I ever live without it ?

Mike Davis – Lotta Bull BBQ
Three things I couldn't leave for a contest without are my wife, the girls (Aggie and Gabby) and asking the good Lord for his Blessings for a safe trip.

Amen! Good luck at the Royal, everyone! Stop by and see us in 738.

One Minute Monday Royal Prep

2009-09-29T01:11:00.001-05:00

It’s only Monday and I already feel like I am behind. This weekend is the American Royal, as most people who might actually ready this dribble already know. The task of preparing for a contest is made even more challenging in that we have two events to get ready for: the Open and the Invitational.

Double the meat we have to buy and trim.
Double the rub and sauce we’ll use.
Double the charcoal and wood we’ll burn.
Triple the beer we’ll drink.

Chris and I have been through our check lists, been to a few stores, and still need to visit a few more. I think we have about 95% of what we need for the upcoming contests, but getting the last 5% and then packing it all up and getting everything ready to go is a real chore.

We’re in space 738. Stop by and say hello. I’ll the be the guy passed out in the corner of the tent.

1:10

BBQ & A: Round Six

2009-09-23T21:50:00.002-05:00

Every competition cook is in constant pursuit of the big one. That one win that overshadows all the others. For some it's a signature grand championship, like the Royal or the Jack. Others have sentimental reason...and some may not even be a grand championship or even a first place call for that matter. Sometimes just getting that first call is biggest call you'll ever get!

This week we ask a few cooks to give us their biggest wins, with contributions from:
The always entertaining and insightful Steph Wilson of TheSlabs.com teams up weekly with Kyle Laval to cook championship BBQ and brew up award winning sauces and rubs.
Teacher, cook and BBQ pitchman Rod Gray of Pellet Envy - fresh off his amazing 3rd straight win in three years at Smoke on the Water in Hot Springs, AR.
Finally, a cook from a team that maybe becoming just as well known for their clairvoyant pork bone-pickin' pooch, as they are for their awesome brand of competition BBQ, Greg Anthony from Ribs 4 U.

Steph:
1st place chicken at Jack Daniels. We didn't have a vehicle to pull our own stuff down there. We rented a trailer that was bigger than the Jeep that pulled it. Our buddy pulled the pit. Good times!

Reserve Reserve Grand American Royal Invitational 2003. (3rd overall). Didn't get one call. We were flabbergasted! I remember my Dad saying 'Holy $#!&! They did it!' He passed away unexpectedly later that month, I'm glad we had that time.

Laurie, MO Grand Champion...It might have been 2000...it was our first win. My Dad promoted a dirt track in Warrensburg, MO and he and Mom came down to watch the awards and they were running late. Mom thought they should get to the track and Dad said out of five years it wouldn't kill them if he was 'late'...we won! I'm glad they were there.

Rod:
In no particular order, the 2003 Mandalay Bay Heatin' Up The Bay event in Las Vegas, Nevada because it was filmed by the Food Network and still airs.

2007 Smoke On The Water in Pine Bluff, Arkansas because it's far and away the largest grand champion prize we've ever won.

Lastly, the 2006 World Pork Expo/Great BBQlossal in Des Moines, Iowa because it was a collaborative effort with Steve Farrin of I Smell Smoke and Scottie Johnson of CancerSucksChicago.com and none of us had every cooked a hog before.

Greg:
Our biggest win was last year at Butler, MO. There were 41 teams and we won the chicken, ribs and brisket categories and finished 10th in pork. We were Grand Champion with a 30 point spread over the Reserve GC.

Of course our first ever GC was big to us, at Shawnee, KS in 2006.
I suppose our last big win would be our first ever category win at Laurie in 2005 (in chicken), and also finishing 2nd in brisket that year at the American Royal.

One Minute Monday...The weekend that was: Lettuce reflect.

2009-09-21T23:35:00.006-05:00

Some people who stumble upon this goofy collection of ramblings might not be aware of all of the little intricacies that are involved in competition BBQ. We cooks can get pretty bent out of shape pretty easily when it comes to changes to our routines and the rules we know. I guess that is one of the nice things about competing in KCBS contests – we know what to expect at every contest, every time, no matter if we competing in Maine or Missouri.

So when the edict came down late last week that we couldn’t use parsley in our boxes for presentation in last weekend’s contest, a lot of folks were upset. I am not going to go into what I think about how the ruling came down, or how the board arrived at this decision or even that the tainted parsley that led to this whole thing was pulled long before last week.

I immediately thought of one of the answers Donnie Teel gave me for one of the previous “BBQ & A” posts. He basically said that when the unexpected pops up, that is when the good cooks separate themselves from everyone else. So a major congratulations goes out to all the cooks who competed and succeeded last weekend. I also have to say that the lettuce-only boxes that Chris put together for us looked almost as good as our parsley boxes! Maybe I’ll even post a picture of one of them if anyone wants to see one.

1:49

Battle of the Brisket VI: Mission, KS

2009-09-21T22:09:00.012-05:00

We’re back on track for this week, after I took last week off. I was busy getting ready for our upcoming contest in Mission, KS so I didn’t get my posts up last week…thing is, the contest is just a few blocks away from my house – so one would think I could get my stuff together and be ready to go by Friday afternoon…but not so much.

Chris and I put together a pretty nice little party on Friday night – lots of friends and family stopped by to see us and that was pretty nice. We like to do a party at this contest because so many of our friends live near the contest site, in and around Mission.

The party was a hit, but unfortunately for us, not all of our contest turn-ins were. We won this one last year and we finished in the reserve grand spot the year before, so our sights are set high at this event. We did pull out a first place call in brisket and coupled that with a 9th in pork, but we bombed our chicken and rib turn-ins. When the smoke cleared, we had a nice 7th place finish out of 60 teams.

I also have to mention how proud I am of my wife, Jammie. For the first time ever in five years of cooking in BBQ contests, the Dodge County Smokers team turned in an entry for the dessert category. Jammie prepared a really good white chocolate raspberry cheesecake. She did not get a top 10 call, but she came as close as you can get - 11th place!

We have a little bit of work to do before our next contest in two weeks…it’s the big one – The American Royal Invitational followed up by the Open. Stop by and see us if you are out there – space 738.

two stooges

Old timey sepia tone pics by Val Wilson...

Dessert prep

presentation

off to the judges

Jack decides to run up and help Chris and Megan claim our award for the pork category

First place brisket

BBQ & A: Round Five...Are you ready?

2009-09-09T21:59:00.007-05:00

Be Prepared. The Boy Scouts base everything they do on those two words. Hey, four million kerchief clad scouts can’t be wrong!

You don’t have to be a successful competition cooker to realize the importance of being prepared for a contest. This week we found three of the top cooks in the country and asked them about their precontest routines. Once again, we got some great, honest answers from some really good guys.

This week our contributors include the chief cooks of three of the top KCBS teams competing today and all have competed for Team of the Year championships:

Mike Wozniak – Quau - Brimfield, IL
Joe Amore – Smokey Mountain Smokers – Seveirville, TN
Kelly Wertz – 4 Legs Up – Great Bend, KS

Mike: Sunday is a relaxation day. By Monday or Tuesday we are looking for meat for next week’s contest. This can mean a trip to several stores. By Wednesday or Thursday I trim up chicken and ribs and make up any sauces or injections that we might be low on. I don't want to do to much prep work at a contest, mainly just cooking. I don't do a lot of trimming on pork or brisket, so I leave them in the cryovac until we get there.

Joe: My routine runs like this: I return home on Saturday night late or by noon on Sunday. That is when my week starts for the upcoming weekend. I first start by washing my trailer and truck. My wife cleans up the living quarters in the trailer and I take care of the kitchen. It gets cleaned, stocked and ready to go for the next weekend. I pull my butts and briskets out of the freezer (yes I cook frozen butts and briskets). The next step is to make my injections and marinades and put them in the trailer. It’s about an 8 hour day to do all of the above. On Monday I empty my holding tanks, fill fresh water and clean my smokers. On Tuesday we prep parsley and take care of the yard work around the house. Wednesday we load the trailer with all the meat including the chicken and ribs and have everything ready to go for when we leave on Thursday morning. So, I would say I have about 18 to 20 hours in getting ready for the contest.

Kelly: Tuesday or Wednesday morning we head to store for a few basic supplies. By Wednesday afternoon, during a restaurant break, we prep parsley and get that put in trailer fridge. Then we make our brines and injections if needed and prep for extra categories or Friday night meals. Wednesday evening, between grilling steaks and restaurant work, I prep sauces and rubs and load trailer and complete our checklist. Thursday morning, I buy my chicken and Thursday night, it’s more work in the restaurant kitchen and I prep my contest meat and get that in trailer fridge. Friday morning, load ribs for restaurant, fuel up the pickup, give the checklist a final check, then help with restaurant lunch run before I head off to the contest. All totaled we probably spend around 4 hours prepping for contests - of course that is with a lot of restaurant work thrown in the middle of all that.

One Minute Monday...Holiday Edition

2009-09-07T21:42:00.004-05:00

So I've had a long holiday weekend to think about the Jack Daniels draw. As I reviewed the list of teams that did and did not make the cut (for lack of a better term), I found myself happy for for some of those guys and dissappointed for others.

Sure, there is some amount of self pity involved, but we're 0 for 4 in the draw...so I think we are entitled to feel that way...at least for an afternoon. By this time, some four days later, I am passed it and looking forward. But I will say that we are not doing ourselves any favors, cooking contests mainly in Kansas and Missouri. With nearly three dozen qualifiers in each of these states, we can't expect much.

I may also be somewhat biased, but I think the difficulty a Kansas or Missouri team faces in getting to The Jack is reflected in the difficulty it takes to win in this region. I really respect the competition in the Southeast, New England, out west and in Texas. But a the same time, not only do we have to worry about the top notch teams from our area, we often face the challenge of very good teams coming in from our ultra-competitive surroundings like Oklahoma, Iowa, Colorado, Arkansas and one pretty pesky guy from South Dakota.

Winning here is hard enough, but then getting the luck of the draw? Very tough.

Good luck to the teams we butt heads with on a regular basis who will be heading to Tennessee in late October. We'll be rooting for you. Guess we'll just have to go for 7 next year!

1:52

Goin' Whole Hog

2009-09-06T22:07:00.008-05:00

Last weekend (8/29) Chris and I cooked this whole hog for my sister's engagement party at my Dad's shop in Nebraska. We had a blast and cooked a pretty good pig when it was all said and done. We served well over 100 people with a 135lb hog that took just about 14 hours to finish.

Here are some pictures...

Chris removes the loin for slicing.

Hungry guests waiting to eat some pig.

The guests of honor: Smelly and Braq.

BBQ & A: Round Four...The Jack!

2009-09-02T00:23:00.014-05:00

It's Wednesday and time for another installment of the wildly popular BBQ & A!

In honor of the Jack Daniel’s World Invitational Draw happening tomorrow, I thought we would focus this week’s BBQ & A on former Jack winners. You’ll find two cooks who have already been a part of the weekly BBQ & A, and an additional pair of competitors that I am really excited to have featured here. That's right...this week it's 4 for the price of 3!

I am honored to count the last four winners of the most coveted title in competition BBQ as contributors to this site:

Donny Teel is an accomplished competitor and has won dozens of Grand Championships as Buffalo's BBQ, but in 2005 he teamed up with fellow Okie Bart Clark of Twin Oak Smokin’ Crew under the banner of Boys from Tornado Alley to claim the top spot at The Jack.
Scottie Johnson took The Jack Grand Championship honors home to the Windy City in 2006 for his team, Cancer Sucks Chicago.
Chad Hayden of Taylorsville, Kentucky - known simply as “Podge” - cooks under the name Moonswiners and won the 2007 Jack.
Kelly Wertz scored the big win in the most recent Jack Daniel's Invitational last year, and came home to his restaurant, 4 Legs Up BBQ in Great Bend, Kansas as the best BBQ cook in the world.

I want to once again thank everyone for so willingly answering my silly questions. Guys like Kelly, Chad, Donny and Scottie are the real deal and I can’t thank them enough for getting back to me so quickly.

This week’s question is something that not a lot of cooks think about…and even less really have to worry about it anyway. So…how did you get that big Jack Daniel’s Grand Championship trophy back home with a long road trip ahead of you? Where is your trophy now?

Donny: Our trophy from the Jack got transported home in the front seat of the truck with Mr. Jack seat belted in. Now days the Grand Champion trophy is really small compared to the one that I have. The one I have is approx 4 ½ feet tall, made of barrell slats.
Who Kept the trophy? You or Bart?
I have it. Before we left, Bart said that if we won that I could have it since he had one already (Twin Oak Smokin’ Crew won in 2001).

Scottie: I had Jack right next to me for my drive home. He was my co-pilot. I had to get back home, so we could start making arrangements for my dad (who had passed away the Friday of the contest). I even put the seat belt on for him!!! I now keep it in my family room. I had a special base made for it from a Jack Daniel's half barrel. I am not big in displaying trophies, but I have Jack, my TOY medal, my first GC and my foundation's award for 5 years of raising money for cancer research. Everything else goes into big Rubbermaid containers.

Jack is Scottie's co-pilot

Podge: I laid it down in the back seat of my truck, and wedged some things in there to keep it from moving around. Here it is, sitting in the corner of my living room.

Podge's Jack trophy

Kelly: We usually travel to contests pretty light so trophies, if we are lucky, they usually just go in the back seat of the pickup. The Jack trophies got wrapped in blankets and stuffed in all the safe places we could find in the trailer and they made the 900 mile trip just fine. They are now proudly displayed on the Jack Wall in our restaurant..

Got a good idea for a question to ask our featured BBQ & A cooks? Shoot me an e-mail! neal@dodgecountysmokers.com

One Minute Monday...almost

2009-08-31T21:40:00.004-05:00

Last weekend Chris and I drove four hours from home, stayed up too late cooking, slept outside and froze our butts off (temps dipped in the low 50's! It's August, right?) and tried like hell to make everything we cooked perfect for a discriminating set of judges. No, we didn't cook in a BBQ contest. We cooked for a party of almost 150 people at my Dad's shop in rural North Bend, NE.

We had an absolute blast. We cooked a 135lb whole hog, a few racks of ribs, sausage, chicken and mess of stuffed jalepanos. We had as much fun cooking for this crowd as we do cooking a contest. The occasion was a combination preharvest party and my sister (S)Melissa's engagment party.

I'll have pictures up soon. I don't get a chance to cook for groups of of this size where I know almost everyone there, so this was a pretty cool experience for me. Competition cooking is still my favorite reason to light up the smoker, but this was a pretty cool experience.

1:09

BBQ & A: Round Three

2009-08-25T23:10:00.008-05:00

Before we get started this week, I would like to thank all of the interested cooks and BBQ followers who have sent me notes expressing their enjoyment of the new "BBQ & A" feature. I started this as a trial idea and it seems to be working out. I'll try to keep it going and feature the best BBQ cooks with an emphasis on competition cooking.

This week I received contributions from three cookers that I really admire. All of these guys are top-notch competitors and extremely versatile cooks. I asked them if they ever had a nightmare experience or if things just ever went sideways while they were at contest and how did they react?

Our three featured BBQ'rs this week include Rob "Rub" Bagby of the extremely successful Florida BBQ Association team Swamp Boys, Steve Farrin, best known for his work with perennial New England BBQ Society championship contenders I Smell Smoke and finally, one of the best cookers from a state that boasts more than a few quality competition teams, Donny Teel of Buffalo's BBQ in Sperry, OK.

One note...you will notice two more in-depth answers and one answer that could be considered...well, less than wordy. So far I have found all of the cooks that have taken part in this deal to be extremely honest and their answers reflect their personalities. This week is no exception.

Rub: I have had my share of misfortune. I had a grease fire at 5:30 AM Saturday in 2005, and came so close to packing up all my stuff and heading home. It threw my timing off and charred parts of my butts and briskets. I was able to salvage some of it, and it turned out not to be as bad as I thought; I came in 6th overall. Two other contests I was DQ'd in chicken for having blood present near the bone. Came in DAL in both of those. If you've never been DQ'd at a contest, it's kind of like taking a kick in the nads. I don't recommend it.

Steve: Oh I've had a few of those. In Harvard Mass in 2008 I was short handed, it poured all weekend, our site was a total mud pit and around midnight the ground fault on the contest generator kept tripping every 15 minutes. I run an FEC100 without any battery backup or generator of my own. The FE was just not going to work out so we lit my Backwoods smoker moved all the meat over and finished the contest on it. We were the Grand Champs that day. I actually wrote about it on my blog (click here).

Donny: I really have never had that many problems at a contest. ‘Course some things go wrong - but that is when the real good cooks separate themselves from everyone else, knowing what to do to overcome the situation.

One Minute Monday...a few minutes late

2009-08-25T00:06:00.003-05:00

I am typing this just a few minutes into Tuesday morning...so this is technically not titled correctly. But who really cares? Me neither.

We arrived back from Bristol, TN and the Prilosec OTC BBQ Shootout Series around 5am on Sunday morning. Sunday was spent resting and cleaning up and we were back to work on Monday. As for the results, I'll go into more detail in a later post, but there were 9 teams and we finished 7th. I would be lying if I said that finish didn't burn me up a little bit, but there were some other parts of the scoring that did take the sting out of it...again, more on that later.

As for the trip - we had a blast. Pictures can be found here: BBQ Shootout Photos

BBQ & A: Round Two!

2009-08-18T22:52:00.010-05:00

This week's BBQ & A features 3 very good cooks that I feel fortunate to have participating in my little experiment.

Barbecuers really are great people. All three of these guys got back to me right away when I reached out to them. They all needed a little time to answer their questions, but each of them got back to me right away to say they would love to be a part of this and that they would shoot over their answers as soon as they could. Within a few days, I had heard back from all three of them.

The Round 2 instalment features Greg Anthony, who teams up with Eric Westervelt to form the team Ribs 4 U. I am also proud to have Scottie Johnson, the winner of the 2006 Jack Daniels World Championship Invitational and pitmaster for the Cancer Sucks Chicago team. Lastly, John Nilges of the Parrothead Smokers team from South Dakota is the third cook you will hear from.

I asked each of these champion cooks if there were two or three people in the BBQ world that they really admire or have learned a lot from. Their answers were as varied as the cooks themselves...

Greg: I admire Don and Sharon Will of Smokers Wild because of their attitude about KCBS and our sport. Although as competitive as all of us, they always have a positive attitude, and understand the results are not always as wanted or even as deserved. I am very fortunate to have Don and Sharon as very good friends living in the same small town I do. And having them mentor me in my early years was/is invaluable. I also admire Rod Gray of Pellet Envy. I think Rod has achieved the bbq’rs dream, in being able to support himself and his family by doing what he loves to do: cook, and teach others to cook barbecue. Rod and Sheri are good friends. Finally, I admire Steve Marrs of Denver Cajun BBQ Krewe. Steve entered competition bbq a year or so earlier than I did. After I started, we met and became very good friends and he taught me a lot. Not only has Steve been successful in competition barbecue and achieved the Grand Champion award more than once, he has became one of the Denver area’s most sought after barbecue caterers.

Scottie: Man, I have befriended a lot of great folks in comp cooking. From the likes of Bill Milroy, Ray Lampe, Eddy Maurin and Jumpin Jim Woodsmall. First I would probably be remiss if I didn't mention The BBQ Forum and Ray Basso. While Ray didn't teach me anything per se, it is from his website that I learned how to cook my BBQ. But probably the the biggest influence was cooking with Rod Gray and Steve Farrin at the 2006 Qlossal. I got to see how to win a championship from those guys. They are 2 of the best cooks going out in the KCBS still today. I also learn a lot from Darren "Clone" Warth. Darren can just plain old cook. You know if you are at a contest with Darren, you better bring your 'A Game'... So while I haven't cooked with him at a contest, I have learned a lot from him. Not "shigging" learning either. ;-)

John: It is hard to narrow it down to just a few as there are so many that I look up to. But If I can just name three they'd be:

Quau...Mike and Beth (Wozniak) are great people and very innovative cooks. No one puts in more time, travel and effort than Team Quau.

Johnny Trigg...Even after all the years that he's been out there competing Mr. Trigg still seems to have a passion for competition cooking.

Finally, anyone that cooks alone. I do it and I know how hard it is. So I admire those guys who go out and cook alone. I'd also have to throw in that I admire the wives of those cooks too, mine included, as they sure put up with a lot because of our little hobby!

One Minute Monday

2009-08-17T06:54:00.003-05:00

This week we are heading out east to Bristol, Tn for the Prilosec OTC BBQ Shootout. This should be a blast and we have been looking forward to it for some time. Since this is an invitation only event, we will recieve no KCBS Team of the Year points, which is really not that big of a deal - but by the end of the year we will have cooked in 4 events that will not count for TOY. I do like to see how we stack up, but when we only cook 14 or 15 contests, using up resources on 4 that will not count toward the end of the year standings really adds up.

BBQ & A: Round One

2009-08-12T18:40:00.008-05:00

Here is the first installment of the soon-to-be wildly popular "BBQ & A" series.

The concept is pretty simple: I am going to ask three respected competition cooks one question each week and they will share all the juicy details right here. Oh, and for those of you wondering if you can troll out some winning secrets from this...I doubt it, but you can try!

I am going to try and update this each Wednesday with new cooks and questions. I am going to try and keep the questions relatively short and the answer will be too I imagine, so it should make for a quick read. I hope you enjoy it.

This week's featured cooks are David Bouska of Butcher BBQ, Steph Wilson of the The Slabs.com and Rod Gray of Pellet Envy.

Q: Are there any teams out there that you find particularly hard to beat? Could you name two or three?

David: That list shouldn't be limited to 3, when we compete in Oklahoma there is always Twin Oaks, Buffalo's, Head Country II, Little Pig Town, and all the teams that come in from Kansas, you know who you are. I have said a hundred times, "I'm scared of all of them!"

Steph: We were taught by Smokin' in the Boys Room that no matter who or how many teams are there.....they have to beat you. There's a lot of good teams out there and quite a few are our friends.....we cheer just as hard for their accomplishments as we hope to accomplish for ourselves.

Rod: This is an interesting year. Munchin' Hogs at the Hilton, 4 Legs Up BBQ and Pellet Envy have butted heads too many times already. We've traded blows, each of us coming out on top. Iowa's Smokey D's BBQ is another team that's hard to beat. In fact, I predict that Darren will win the KCBS Team of the Year. As for as beating teams or being beat by teams, any given weekend, especially when you cook over 30 events each year, it's all a blur. One thing that nobody, and I mean nobody, is going to beat us in though is cleanliness. When you're sponsored by Greased Lightning, cleanliness leaps past godliness.

One Minute Monday

2009-08-10T17:51:00.004-05:00

In a few weeks my sister is having an engagment party. We are supposed to cook a whole hog for it. I am really looking forward to it but I am not sure if I know exactly what to exect. Hogs we have cooked have all been a lot smaller like 50-80lbs. Looks like we'll be getting one close to 200. Give me a shout if you know how long this will take to cook!

Trying to spice it up just a bit.

2009-08-09T21:48:00.002-05:00

This week I have decided to try and ramp up the content of this site. I enjoy writing recaps of our contests, but I rarely get much of anything else on here, so I have been searching for some new ways to make the stuff found here a little more exciting.

I am working on a quick Q&A series featuring some of the best cooks and teams competing today and I hope to make this a weekly deal. I am also going to force myself to write a little more than the contest recaps that I currently put up here, since we don't compete as frequently leading to less content. I will keep ramblings short and sweet, giving myself a limited time to type. We'll call it "One Minute Monday" and it will be just that...one minute to type my thoughts - no spell check, no editing. If a minute runs out mid-sentence, so be it.

We'll see how it goes strating tomorrow.

Laurie Hillbilly BBQ

2009-08-04T23:10:00.006-05:00

The last weekend in July brought the Dodge County Smokers to the Lake of the Ozarks for the Laurie Hillbilly BBQ contest. We were just one of 77 teams to converge on the fairgrounds of this sleepy lake town to compete with some top-notch talent along with several local teams.

I should also mention that this was a unique event for us in that my wife’s family has a deep history in the area. Jammie’s grandfather was born and raised here. His family farmed and scratched out a meager living in the Osage River Valley before it was damned up in the early 1930’s to form what is now The Lake of The Ozarks. The family was forced out of the valley, moving above the water line, some of them even settling on the land making up the present day fairgrounds of Laurie and the location of this contest for the past 16 years.

Chris arrived to the park just a few hours after I did and Jammie and our boy, Jack, also drove down with her parents to join in on the fun. We enjoyed a nice dinner on Friday night and Chris and I got to work prepping our competition cuts and gearing up for the night of cooking ahead.
One would only assume that you would be reading about oppressive heat and out-of-this-world humidity when taking in the account of a BBQ contest happening in late July or early August in south Missouri. Not so this weekend. The weather was really the star of the competition, with extremely mild temps in 70’s. In fact, I was down right cold as I tried to catch a few winks over night.

Precipitation was in the forecast for Saturday morning – some reports even calling for showers right at turn-in time. I even wondered out loud if we should put up the sidewalls on our tent. But our resident amateur meteorologist, Chris “Thunder Head” Nickelson put a wet finger to the air and declared dry conditions moving forward. Indeed, he was right. Other than a light 5-minute sprinkle, nary a drop was felt. I did notice that panic set in over at the Pellet Envy cook site. Rod was ready and waiting for the rain, with his sidewalls up and at attention!

Saturday’s routine went off with out a hitch – right up until it was time to select our turn-in samples. I thought out chicken was pretty decent. We pulled out our best pieces, boxed them up and sent them off. Ribs, however, were an over-cooked disappointment. Chris performed a little cosmetic surgery on a few of the individual ribs and we turned them in, not holding out much hope for an award in this category.

Pork and brisket were next. I thought our pork was OK. Chris did a good job of getting the box presentation in order before running it in. Then I pulled our brisket from the hot box and began my battle with that over cooked slab of beef. The flavor was there…but getting it sliced and in the box looking the way we wanted it was a challenge. We finally got it boxed and Chris took off for the judging tent with just a few minutes to go. He returned several minutes later, and I was really relieved to see him not carrying our box back to our site. He had made it with a few seconds to spare. A few other teams were not so fortunate.

Larger contests like this (77 teams) always have more interesting awards. They always seem to be spread out over more teams and it’s harder to predict a grand champion. Well, most of the time. Andy Groneman took the suspense right out of the afternoon. Smoke On Wheels was the only team to claim top 10 finishes in three out of the four main categories. Andy also celebrated his birthday over the weekend, so he was blowing out the candles on his cake in fine fashion!

We were able to muster out calls to the stage for awards in the pork and brisket categories. A 6th place finish in pork was a nice pick-me-up, and our 5th place called for that brisket was a big surprise. As usual, the category that I personally liked the most, scored the worst. Our chicken was down in the 40’s overall and our overcooked ribs were some where in the 20’s. Total it all up and that will get you a 7th place overall finish.
I felt pretty good about the finish, considering that we really didn’t feel like we put our best foot forward. We did OK, and I know that we have room for improvement – so that is encouraging. We hope to keep getting better as we approach a few pretty important events in the coming weeks and months.

Chris drove back home Saturday while my family stayed the night. Jammie's dad, Jim, drove us around the next day visiting old cemetaries, school houses and homesteads where past generations of the Silvey family once lived. Observant cookers may have noticed that they turned on to Silvey Road in order to get to the contest and the fairgrounds. It was a nice end to very pleasant weekend.

Central Kansas BBQ Cook-Off

2009-07-16T22:56:00.004-05:00

Hot.
That one word just about sums up our weekend in Great Bend, KS.

Temps reached the mid to high 90’s on the pavement at the Barton County Fairgrounds with some competitors reporting sweltering conditions topping 110 under their canopies.

We are no strangers to competing in the heat. If you are going to cook in June, July and August in the Midwest, you are going to get hot. But it still never makes it any easier. We even overheard several folks who work out of air conditioned RV’s and trailers comment that their A/C couldn’t keep up during the heat of the day.

All that said, I don’t think this was the hottest we have ever felt. The temp under our tent topped out at around 92 or 93, a few degrees cooler that the air temp outside – which is a change for us. We are used to much warmer conditions under our big top – sometimes 8 to 10 degrees hotter than the air temp outside. The change can be attributed to our new shelters, which were used for the first time out in Great Bend. Our old white tent with a thin canopy let the sunlight right through, leaving us with a sort of heated shade.
Our new black tent completely blocked the sun, kept the tent a few degrees cooler and, in our opinion, looked pretty sharp too. The new tent blocked the sun so well that we had problems getting enough light to complete our turn-in boxes on Saturday between Noon and 1:30pm. We’re already looking at investing in a better lighting system.

As for the contest…things went surprisingly well. We finished 6th overall out of 41 teams in a relatively tough field. I think I counted 13 or 14 teams who have won grand championships over the past few months. Our chicken was very good, even though it finished in the middle of the pack. We scored a top 10 in ribs with a 7th place finish and took a surprising third place ribbon in brisket. But an even bigger surprise was our collapse in pork. 36th place…ouch. After looking over the final results, several very good teams were at the bottom of the results sheet in pork. I am not sure if it was bad luck or a bad judging table, but I am fairly certain that it wasn’t bad pork.

We had a pretty good time hanging with a bunch of our BBQ buddies. It was great to see Andy Groneman win the Chest to Chest brisket cook-off on Friday and Rod Gray deserves a big congrats for turning around a sub-par performance in the CtC contest and winning the overall KCBS event on Saturday for his team, Pellet Envy.
Chris and I are growing increasingly fond of Great Bend and organizer Kent Romine’s contest. This was our third trip to the Central Kansas Championship and every trip is better than the last. We’ll be back in February for the 3rd annual WinterQ.

We’re headed back to Laurie, MO in a few weeks and we’re already looking forward to cooking again. I’ll hold out hope for more mild temps, but the odds are against us I’m afraid!

Jack's First BBQ Award!

2009-06-30T23:05:00.008-05:00

It wasn’t a BBQ contest, but a junior member of the Dodge County Smokers scored a big BBQ award!

Last weekend our family took a trip back to my home town in North Bend, Nebraska. The occasion was the annual Old Settler’s Days – it’s your basic small town community event, complete with a carnival, baseball games, a parade and lots of other stuff going on at the city park.

Part of the festivities included a “Kiddie Parade,” which is basically just a bunch of pretty cute kids strutting their stuff about a half a block down the street. Some dress in costumes, others ride decorated bikes and some kids showed off their pets.

My sister told us that our nieces would be riding their very stylish pink pedal tractor in the parade, so I figured we should bring our 2 ½ year old boy Jack’s tractor as well. Both tractors came courtesy of Uncle Eric and Aunt Laura last Christmas. For good measure, I threw Jack’s mini-smoker in the back of the pick-up. Some of you may remember that little cooker that Jack got for his birthday from his Uncle Kurt back in February.

We weren’t sure what all was involved in the parade. Some of the entries were really good. Turns out there were three categories. Jack and his cousins were in the “Bike and Wagon” category. Jammie dressed Jack in a pair of overalls (no shirt, thank you very much!), and his cowboy hat and I hitched the smoker up to his Oliver and lit a fire in the firebox.

Jack is still learning to pedal his tractor, so to keep things moving in the parade we tied a rope to the tractor so I could pull him through the route. You can’t see it the pictures very well, but his pit was smoking pretty good. About halfway through the parade I think he finally "got" what was going on and started smiling from ear to ear. He loves the attention. Then he started yelling "Dodge County Smokers!!!," something he has been doing a lot lately when he hears people clapping (as they were when he rode by). I think he associates the applause with the awards at a competition and he knows we wait to hear our name!

Before and after the parade several people asked me what I did to “make smoke come out of that BBQ grill?” When I told them there was a real fire in there, some were shocked! Others were surprised. And some were just plain confused. A real fire? The horror!

He ended up with a third place ribbon, but just like a BBQ contest, the judges don’t know anything and he was robbed! We’ll back next year, and maybe we’ll be more prepared. I’m thinking a few ribs for the judges should do the trick!

Tonganoxie Days BBQ Contest

2009-06-19T00:56:00.000-05:00

After the throttling we took at the GAB, Chris and I were both looking forward to cooking again. We had set our sites on the contest in Tonganoxie, KS but when I contacted the organizer I was promptly told they were full. Bummer.

You see, Chris and his wonderful wife, Jenny, recently had a beautiful baby girl named Megan. So we were hoping to minimize the time away from home and cook a nice, low key contest. Tongie fit the bill, as it is just minutes from the front door of Chris & Jenny’s house and it’s one of those great, small town events. So when they called me back to say they were opening up five more spots due to an overwhelming response…well, we jumped on it!

Chris and I both worked a full day before heading up to the contest. This has become a fairly common practice for us. We have become pretty good at rolling in later than usual and getting set up.

Since we got in and set up late, we didn’t have much time to walk around and visit until later in the evening. As we made our way around the grounds, we sized up the competition – 48 teams, and it was stacked! We were set up next to Rubbin’ It and Lovin’ It and they have been very good lately. Jeff from KC Can Crew was there with his trash cans and he’s always tough. Captain Gary and his Bare Bones crew were smokin’ with their WSM’s and just across the row was T’s Smokin’ Pit. Smokin’ Guns were all set up and we spent a good amount of time talking to our friends from the legendary Rib Stars. One thing I wish I would have gotten was a picture of John from Parrothead Smokers’ new Jambo pit. The color of the pit matched his new Ford pickup and it looked sharp! It won’t be long before John has that thing dialed in – lookin’ and cookin’ good!

As for our entries - they were good. Neither of us were all that happy with our chicken, and our ribs were just OK. Chris really liked our pork (and I did too) and I thought our brisket was pretty damn tasty. So it’s only natural that our chicken scored (7th) and we really hit with our “just OK” ribs, nailing down 1st. Of course our brisket and pork both fell to 14th place.

Not hearing our name called in the final two categories was a little hard. I had accepted the fact that we had a pretty good day with the 1st place call in ribs, but didn’t think we had enough for even a top 5. Usually when the top 10 overall places are called out, by the time you get down to Grand and Reserve, there is really little doubt who they are. I wasn’t so sure on that day. I thought we either won it all or finished 20th.

Turns out we won it all…but just barely.

We held on for the win by .0004 of a point over the guys from Burnin’ Down the Hog. Watch out for them…they are knocking on the door of a grand championship and it won’t be long!

We had a great time in Tongie. We are very proud to have won this event – our 6th grand championship in about 50 or so contests, give or take a few. The staff was great, the setting was really nice and the competition was top notch.

We have a new record!

2009-06-19T00:43:00.003-05:00

At just 15 days old, Megan June Nickelson is the youngest guest to a Dodge County Smoker’s BBQ contest. Megan and her sister Emily along with Mom, Jenny came to visit Dad (Chris) on Saturday at the contest in Tongie.

Megan is getting her BBQ experience early! She beats out our previous record holder, Jackson Dunker, by 21 days (36 days old at the North KC BBQ in 2007).

Congratulations, Megan! I am sure that your parents are very proud…well, I know that your Dad is, anyway!

All the cool kids are doing it!

2009-06-15T23:10:00.009-05:00

While we didn’t do so hot at the GAB, there were a few new members of the team who did.

Every so often my wife Jammie and I invite her cousin’s boys to come and stay the weekend with us. They are a great bunch of kids and we really enjoy them. Even though they are Jammie’s cousin’s kids, it just easier to call them our nephews. Saves a lot of time and words.

Last year our “nephews” Luke and Kyle came down one weekend and it happened to be the same weekend as the Lenexa BBQ contest. Chris and I already had plans to go visit friends of ours at the event and Luke (the older of the two) came along. He had a great time at the contest, eating until he was stuffed, asking lots of questions about cookers and BBQ, and making plenty of new friends.

A few months later Luke and Kyle visited us in Excelsior Springs and once again enjoyed themselves. I knew then that I wanted to get them into a Kids Q contest if they opportunity ever popped up. That turned out to be at the GAB. While time of the contest presented us with some challenges (it happened on Saturday morning, during the Invitational), Chris held down the fort and I helped the boys with their entries.

Kyle (who is 8) competed in the younger age group, cooking a pork chop, and Luke (11) in the older group cooking steak. We practiced our techniques on Friday night, before the contest the next day and both of the boys were really in to it.

On Saturday morning both Luke and Kyle cooking their entries and turned them in. I was proud of them and they were proud of themselves. It was a lot of fun.

I prepared them both before the awards that they may not win anything, but to my surprise Kyle won 4th place for his pork chop! Luke didn’t finish in any of the top spots with his steak (a somewhat shabby piece of beef if you ask me – but that is neither here nor there), but he was just as happy when his name was called for a consolation prize drawing and he quickly hopped up from his seat and ran to the stage to claim four tickets to renaissance festival. Hazzah!

I really had a great time and both of the boys did too. I can see why they do these Kids contests now. It really is a great way to get boys & girls interested in something other than all of the garbage out there that can pollute a kid’s mind.

When Luke told me that he wanted to go home and cook a steak for his Mom, I was pretty happy – for him because he learned something new and exciting, and for his Mom because that boy can grill a pretty damn good steak!

The Great American BBQ (Collapse)

2009-06-15T22:33:00.005-05:00

It’s time to play catch up. When last we spoke, Chris and I were gearing up for the Great American BBQ contest. Well…there wasn’t a lot that happened for us worth writing about, which is probably why the recap hasn’t shown up until now.

Chris brought the cooker out on Thursday night to scope out our spot and save us some set up time, allowing us both to work most of the day on Friday. Then we got down to business cooking for the Invitational. We also had an extra brisket on board for the Oklahoma Joe’s World Brisket Open. Our stuff came off in pretty decent shape with the exception of our briskets for the invitational. The taste was solid, but quite honestly, the rest was pretty crappy. Over cooked. Bad presentation. All around pretty poor.

I thought we had a chance for a call with any or all of our other entries. We ended up with two calls, but I’ll only claim one. They gave ribbons down to 20th place - which was nice - but with 44 teams in the Invitational, what is a 20th place call really worth? In our case, it’s worth a yellow ribbon for our pork. Our high point was a 10th place finish in ribs, but we ended up a lowly 35th place overall. Ugh.

The brisket-only contest sponsored by Oklahoma Joe’s BBQ restaurant recognized the top 10 finishing teams, all of whom made a second round cut and had their entries re-judged. We finished 13th, missing the cut by 1.1426 points. That was a good brisket. Maybe the one of the better ones we have cooked in a long time – so that felt good, but it still stung to miss that cut by such a slim margin. Chris Cox and his Brew N’ Bar-B-Que gang claimed the best brisket in the work title (just a couple weeks after taking grand champion in Lansing) and our buddy Doug from Toad Hollar BBQ in Maryville, MO finished a close second.

After the dismal finish in the invite, we regrouped and were re-energized to do well in the open. I’ll spare you the details. We crapped all over the place again. For the second year in a row, we didn’t earn a call. And for the second year in a row, I thought we had decent stuff. But it just wasn’t going to happen for us on this day.

The recovery of the weekend didn’t happen for us. However, it did happen for the Habitual Smokers crew out of Arkansas. They finished one spot below us in the invite at 36th and ended up winning the open, putting the hurt on the rest of the field and winning by 9 points over the next closest team. Those guys are real competitors and have done it before, winning the American Royal and Great American contests in years past.

We did have a good time, enjoying the new venue (Sandstone Amphitheater) and spending some time with our families and a few friends. We be back next year and hopefully we can put together a better performance then!

A Long Overdue Update...

2009-05-18T23:06:00.011-05:00

It's been a long time since we have had a new post here...not that anyone has been beating down our demanding updates. Still, I wanted to get a quick recap of our last contest up and preview our upcoming competition as well.

We have been extremely busy the past few weeks, providing BBQ Dodge County style for graduations, first communions, birthday parties, church fundraisers and corporate events. Add to that a couple of contests, the day job and family stuff and that's made for a pretty busy late April/May.

A few weekends ago (May 1/2) Chris and I went to Lansing, KS to a contest that we won last year. We did OK, finishing in the top 5 overall and snagging 4 awards for top ten finishes in brisket (3rd), pork (5th), ribs (7th) and chicken (8th). I would not be telling the truth if I said we were not hoping for a better finish, but 5th is respectable and there was some good competion at this one. Congrats to Chris Cox and his Brew n' BBQ team for a solid win.

This weekend we'll be setting up shop at the Great American BBQ contest. This will be the first time that this event will be held at Sandstone Amphitheater and I am excited to see how it will work out. Chris and I have a few things to grab this week, then we'll be ready to cook. It's acually three contests in one weekend with the GAB Invitational on Friday/Saturday, the open on Saturday/Sunday and the Oklahoma Joe's World Brisket Open happening this weekend as well.

We'll wrap this one up with a few pictures from the Lansing contest. Enjoy!

Prilosec OTC BBQ Shootout

2009-04-09T22:49:00.008-05:00

We are finally back from a long and rewarding weekend at the Texas Motor Speedway in Dallas/Fort Worth. We’ve actually been back for several days, but work, sleep and family all needed some extra attention before I could get to an update…but now that I am somewhat caught up, it’s time to fill in the blanks.

As I mentioned late last week, Rod Gray of Pellet Envy asked us to compete for him at this event. Rod is one of the country’s top competition BBQ cooks and also teaches an equally successful cooking class with competition BBQ legend Johnny Trigg. Rod and Johnny’s latest class fell on the weekend of this invitation-only event and prevented them both from attending, so they had to round up a few stand-ins to compete under their banners.

Chris and I were both surprised and honored when Rod made the call asking us if we would be willing to travel to Texas for him. We had been planning on cooking that weekend anyway, but had not yet registered for an event, so it was really an easy decision. We just had a few loose ends to tie up and then we were good to go.

The Prilosec OTC BBQ Shootout is a new series of competitions taking place at NASCAR tracks on race weekends across the country. The events offer a unique experience for race fans to get a little taste of competition BBQ when they visit the track. All of the cooking teams were invited to participate by the event organizers, a combination of marketing folks from Prilosec and SMI Properties, the operators of the speedways involved in the events.

The venue offered a few challenges for some of the teams, especially those who chose to vend their product. Some teams were placed in an area with much higher foot traffic, closer to the judging tables. Most others were a pretty decent hike away from the action. A lot of the concerns of the teams were addressed and resolved in the cook’s meeting, including transportation to turn-in. But the less-than-desirable location offered smaller crowds and the vendors suffered.

In all, 13 teams were part of the competition - and they included some of the best in the country. I would be lying if I said I wasn’t a little intimidated, but we stayed focused and on track and executed our game plan just like we wanted to.

I was most happy with our chicken. It has been struggle for us for a long time now, but I think we are getting closer to a recipe that can help us win. Placing 4th there was a thrill. Chris and I were both happy with our ribs (5th place) and pork (1st place), but there was still room for improvement. Our brisket was good, but Chris and I disagreed on which one of the two we cooked to turn in. In the end we settled on my choice, and we didn’t score with it, so it has been bugging me all week me that we should have went with the other one. Ugh.

Even though our turn-ins began at 11am on Saturday, our awards were not announced until Sunday at 10:30am. A portion of the awards were shown on the Speed channel’s pre-race program Sunday morning. We were not featured on the show, but I hear they are going to play other portions of the awards later on. I don’t have Speed, so if anyone sees anything, let us know!

With the awards happening about 22 hours after the last turn-in, that left a lot of time to just hang out and shoot the breeze (and share a couple of drinks). We got passes into the track and caught the last half of the Nationwide race, after finally getting our area cleaned up. We made our way back after the race, and spent the rest of the night hanging out. We had a great time getting to know a lot of the cooks and teams that we had only briefly met or read about over the years. We opted to stay close to our cook area, while some of the other guys ventured into the infield where a lot of wild parties were going down. Their stories kept us laughing for the next day.

I have lots of pictures posted from the weekend at Dodge County Smokers.com

In all it was a great weekend for us. I can’t thank Rod enough for the opportunity to compete in this event and we certainly wish him the best as he travels and competes in the remaining three BBQ Shootout contests.

Next up for Dodge County is the Blues, Brews & Bar-B-Q contest in Lansing, KS. We won this one last year, so hopefully we can go back and do well there again.

Contest results (overall):

Grand Champion - Twin Oak Smokin' Crew
Reserve Grand Champion - Pellet Envy (Dodge County)
3. Cool Smoke
4. Checkered Pig
5. Lost Gonzo
6. Texas Rib Rangers
7. Lotta Bull BBQ
8. Smokin' Triggers (Jamie Geer)
9. Backstreet Blues
10. It Ain't Prime
11. Jack's Down Home BBQ
12. Wood Chicks
13. Texas Thunder

Next Stop: Texas Motor Speedway

2009-04-01T21:01:00.004-05:00

Tomorrow Chris and I will be hitting the road for Fort Worth, TX to compete in a unique BBQ contest being held at the Texas Motor Speedway.

This weekend the first contest in the Prilosec OTC BBQ Shootout Series will take place during race weekend in Texas. Saturday the speedway will play host to the O'Reilly 300 Nationwide Series race and on Sunday, the Sprint Cup Samsung 500.

We'll cook in a small, invitation only event that will feature just a dozen or so teams. Our slot in the contest actually comes courtesy of Rod Gray's Pellet Envy team. Rod will be schooling future BBQ champions in his "Old School vs. High Tech" competion BBQ course this weekend in Shannon, IL, so he offered his spot in this event to us. We'll cook under the Pellet Envy banner for this event and Rod will continue to compete in the remaining series stops through out the rest of the summer.

We are really looking forward to competing in this event. I will try to make some updates as the weekend progresses (if I can find a wi-fi connection at the track). In the mean time, here is the website for the series: http://www.bbqshootoutseries.com/

Note: rumor has it that the awards for the contest will be featured on the Speed channel's pre-race show, Sunday morning at 10:30.

North Kansas City BBQ Missouri State Championship

2009-03-18T23:04:00.011-05:00

Midgets dressed as Leprechauns. Green beer. Those awesome oversized foam shamrock hats. Oh, it must be St. Pat’s Day in Kansas City. Or to be more specific in our case, it’s Snake Saturday in North Kansas City.

As far as I can tell, North Kansas City, MO is the only community in America that celebrates this very unique Irish holiday. Every year, come the weekend prior to St. Patty’s Day, Northlanders honor the legend of ‘Ol St. Pat banishing all those nasty, creepy crawly, slimy snakes from the Emerald Isle. Never mind that snakes probably never even inhabited Ireland in the first place, (most accounts credit the “snakes” to actually being serpents – symbolizing paganism, evil and all-around no good-ness) but that’s certainly no reason not to have good old fashioned Irish hooley!

This is one of the old school contests in Kansas City. It’s been around for over 20 years and, like a lot of the other grandfather contests in the area, they don’t offer a lot of the new glossy amenities like some of the newer competitions. No, this is a throw back to the days of judging tables filled with city councilmen and members of the local chamber of commerce. They don’t offer big payouts or free electricity…heck they don’t offer any electricity. What they do offer is a pretty big contest (73 teams this year) at the beginning of the year, making them the only game in town.

While this may not be the best contest we go to every year, it still is a lot of fun. It has also gotten much better since our first NKC experience several years ago and they have taken a lot steps to make the contest better. I really do enjoy it and we have had some decent success here.

This year also marked the first time that NKC had some competition for their competition. A handful of KC area teams decided to fly south to Little Rock for a big money contest held at the Clinton Presidential Library. About 10 teams from the area made the trek to stake their claim for the $50,000 purse (and four of them landed in the top 10). We chose to stay close to home, but counted many of our friends among those competing in Arkansas last weekend.

We set up shop next to Jerrod and his Dad, “Birdman Bill,” of Pork Me Purple. Friday night we enjoyed some nice smoked salmon, as we have for the past few years with this event usually falling inside Lent. Chris and I arrived in the afternoon and our families and some additional guests followed soon after. We were heartily partying by sundown and sent everyone packing by 10:00 or so.

It got cold Friday night, but we kept our working space under the tent relatively warm with the help of our propane heaters and our cooker. But boy did it get cold when we ventured out to walk around the contest. I did bring my heavy bibs, but I guess I was either too cold or too tough to put them on.

Everything seemed to cook pretty much on schedule through the night and into the early morning. We did kind of mess up our chicken and didn’t stick to the recipe like we should have. It showed in the results too (59th of 73). Neither Chris nor I were happy with our ribs either, but they faired OK, finishing 12th. I liked our pork, but we were late boxing it up and Chris just barely got it in on time. It’s a good thing too, as it snagged us our only award for the day, finishing 4th. Our brisket was just plain over cooked. It tasted good, but it was nearly falling apart as we boxed it. I have learned one important thing in competition BBQ: if you can’t hit it spot on, err on the side of overcooking. This is especially true when you have judges who might not be certified and trained, like a lot of the “celebrity” judges in NKC. Anyway, our brisket was 13th which we were pleasantly surprised with.

We only had the one call in pork as they started to name off the top 10 overall, so we weren’t sure where we’d fall. We were disappointed to not hear our named called in the top 10. After I got the overall results, I was really pleased to see our name in 11th place. We missed 10th by .0004 of a point.

Damn chicken.

A Good Luck Shot...Over the Phone

2009-03-17T21:38:00.009-05:00

For the past few years The Dodge County Crew have shared 11:00am Saturday shots with our pals from The Slabs.com. Many a jigger of Gentleman Jack have been consumed by Kyle, Steph, Chris and I along with several other weekly guests. The 11 o'clock shot is nothing new for competition BBQ teams and it's become a staple at many contests across the country.

Last weekend Kyle & Steph made the trip to Little Rock, AR for the Presidential Smoke on the Water contest while we stayed home to compete in North Kansas City. When we can, we usually set up side by side with The Slabs, making our good luck ritual pretty easy. But when you're 450 miles apart, the only way to go is over the phone.

Here is a "shot" of the action from our end...

...and 7 hours away in Little Rock...

By the way, the shot must have helped us out. Pork category calls to the stage came for both of our teams...we had a nice 4th place call in NKC, but Kyle and Steph scored a big win with a 1st place finish (and $2,000)! Nice job, guys!

Kansas Winter Q - Great Bend, KS

2009-02-18T20:09:00.007-06:00

As I loaded up and prepared for the 2nd Annual Kansas Winter Q in Great Bend, I wondered to myself several times if this was really a good idea. With forecasted temps in the teens and possible rain and/or flurries in the area, to say cooking championship BBQ in those elements would be a challenge is an understatement.

But we went anyway. The call to compete again was too strong and even a few set backs leading up to the contest could not keep Chris and I away. In fact my wife, Jammie, and my little monster, Jack, came along as well. I always like having them around at a contest.

Sure, the weather was a major factor in deciding if we should make the four hour drive to Great Bend, but when you take into account the planning and effort that organizer Kent Romine puts in the event, you know you will be well taken care of when you enter the gates of the Barton County Fair Grounds.

We knew that we would arrive at the contest late, but a call to Kent had us right on track as soon we arrived. Chris had to put in a longer day at work than he had originally planned, and I was running behind as usual anyway. We hit the I-70 around 3:00 in the afternoon and, after a few potty breaks for Jackson along the way, we rolled in to town around 7:15pm. That is officially our latest contest arrival time yet.

One of the many unique parts of this event is that you can choose to set up outside (burrrr), or you can take advantage of the offer to set up your working area inside of a nice, big and warm expo building, with your cooker just steps outside the door. Our earlier call to Kent paid off as he had saved us a prime spot for our smoker and great area inside the building for our tables.

Arriving late did mean that we had to sacrifice taking part in much of the other cool stuff happening on Friday Night. There was an appetizer contest and everything we saw looked great. We took part in this last year and it really is fun. There were also some real, live auctions going on too. Not your typical fund-raising silent auction stuff, but honest to goodness auctioneers and ring men pushing bids. And they were bidding on the teams in the contest! There was one auction to sell off donated pork butts that we were to cook and have ready on Saturday Morning.

There was another auction to distribute the teams for the Calcutta contest with-in a contest that Kent set up. Teams were bid on with the hope that they would place 1st, 2nd or 3rd in any category or in the overall so their “owner” could cash in on the purchase. It was a pretty interesting way to get side action going in the contest and I think it put a little extra pressure on some of the teams too.

Despite the weather, we actually stayed pretty much on track with our cook. I heard that it got down 15 over night and I believe it. We were checking our fire every 45 to 60 minutes and every time I went outside, all I could hear was the rumble of diesel engines idling as a lot of guys choose to sleep in their pickups with the heater on. We had the smoker set up inside a tent and we used our insulating blankets to hold temp and the cooker performed just as we are accustomed to. As usual, a few cuts came off a little early, some stayed on a little longer, but come morning we were in good shape.

Jammie and Jack spent the night in our little tent. I pitched it close to our working area and we both fought Jack for a couple hours in the middle of the night as he refused to go to sleep or lay still. I am not sure if it was harder keeping our fire going or keeping him down. But it caught up with him later as he took a nap for a few hours come mid-morning.

Several teams contributed to a nice Saturday Morning breakfast, which kicked off the beginning of crunch time for us. Chicken went on, then everything came off. We put our boxes together and Chris ran them in, just barely beating the clock more than once…in fact he was the last one to the window three times.

We were happy to hear our names called three times at the awards: 9th in chicken, 7th in ribs and 4th for brisket. We also just missed a call in pork, finishing 11th. We were tied for 8th with four other teams, but after tie breakers we finished just out of the money at 11th.

Kent also recognized the top ten and, on the strength of our three calls, I full expected to hear our name called as he started. But he got to number five, and our name still had not been called. I started to think that we just really tanked our pork entry and it cost us. The 5th place team was called, then we were called to stand in front of the group at 4th place. Then Kent explained that teams finishing in the top five are invited back to compete in this summer’s Barton County Fair contest (in July) and next year’s Winter Q at no charge! That was a big surprise to us and a pretty cool prize. I have always wondered why more contests don’t do things like this. Kent Romine really “gets it.”

Great Bend’s local BBQ rock star Kelly Wertz and his 4 Legs Up team finished in the reserve grand spot. Kelly and his family run a BBQ restaurant in town, also called 4 Legs Up, and they are the reigning Jack Daniel’s World BBQ Invitational Champions. Munchin’ Hogs at the Hilton took the top spot as Rob and his crew keep the train rolling after claiming the KCBS Team of the Year title in 2008.

We are pretty happy to have faired so well against such a solid field of teams. I counted it up after we got back home and I think, out of 33 teams in attendance, there were 13 teams there that had won grand championships and another pair that have won reserve grands. It’s a good way to start the year, and we are looking forward to getting back out and cooking again. Next up - the Snake Saturday competition in North Kansas City, March 13th and 14th.

Jack's New Smoker

2009-02-03T09:19:00.006-06:00

Last weekend was my son Jackson’s 2nd birthday and he and I were both surprised to see the mini smoker that my brother decided to build for him. Amidst the dump trucks, toddler’s clothes and Cars movie toys, without a doubt, this stood out as my favorite present…I guess I mean his present.

A few months ago my brother, Kurt, and I talked about building a mini sized replica of my big smoker, but nothing really came of it. Then, true to his word, Kurt started putting the project together…about the same time we were leaving KC on Friday. The late start is really nothing new for Kurt.

There are many more stories like this involving my brother. They all pretty much go the same way…he has 6 months to think about a project, he waits until the last moment and when it’s done it looks like he has spent all that time working to make it perfect. I think he once completely remodeled a bathroom in less than 8 hours, simultaneously wrapping up laying the linoleum floor and texturing the ceiling as the door bell rang and the first of my sister-in-law’s guests for a party were arriving to their home.

So my Dad wasn’t all that surprised when Kurt came back from the metal shop with the supplies to put together this little smoker. As I mentioned, he modeled it after the big cooker my Dad built for us to use in competition a few years ago (cooker #000001). You can see the general similarities between the too. I was blown away when I saw it being put together in the shop. Kurt did a great job of representing the larger cooker in his work and my Dad helped add a few final touches like the smoke stack dampner, which works just like the one on my stack.

After a fresh coat of high temp paint Saturday afternoon, cooker #000002 rolled out of the shop at the Dodge County Smokers assembly headquarters on Sunday Morning, February 1st.

Jack was excited for his new custom cooker. When his present was rolled in to the living room after he opened all of his other presents, he ran over and lifted the lid right away. Then he told his cousins “HOT! No touch!” I guess he does listen to his mom & dad when the smoker is going outside.

We got home Sunday night in time to see the end of the Super Bowl and on Monday we wasted no time in lighting the first fire. It took a couple minutes and about 15 coals and a few sticks of wood to get the chamber up to 250 degrees. We cooked a hotdog, which Jack ate for a pre-dinner “naaaack” (that’s a snack, by the way).

We’ll spend some more time learning how to cook on our new “toy” and hopefully we can bring it out to a few contests this summer where you can see it in person. It really is cool!

See more pictures here: Dodge County Smokers.com

Butcher BBQ: New Sponsor for '09

2009-01-29T23:06:00.005-06:00

With the start of the 2009 competition season here in the Midwest just a few weeks away, we are proud to welcome a new sponsor on board for the Dodge County Smokers BBQ Team. We will join a select assembly of competition teams supported by Butcher BBQ of Chandler, OK.

David Bouska is the head cook of the Butcher BBQ Team. He also owns and operates David’s Processing, a small meat processing plant in Central Oklahoma, so it goes with out saying that this guy knows his stuff. More than 25 years of working in meat markets and plants gave David the know-how to produce some very good products. And we’re not talking about rubs and sauces here…these are specific marinade and injection blends that really do make a difference if producing flavorful, juicy, tender beef and pork.

Actually, using Butcher BBQ products will be nothing new for us. We started using David’s brisket marinade not long after it was introduced and added the pork injection a few months after that. It was part of our arsenal for the entire 2008 season and we are looking forward to upholding the high standards set by Butcher BBQ.

I am a real believer in this stuff. Case in point: In 2007 brisket was our worst category. In 2008 (after we started using Butcher) it was our best, helping us snag 7 Top 5 finishes. And our pork was equally impressive, helping us win 2nd place in whole hog, 3rd in shoulder and 4th overall at the World Pork Expo’s BBQLossal. For even more winning examples, including David’s first place pork entry at last year’s Jack Daniel’s Invitational, visit the Butcher BBQ Winners Circle.

Competition and backyard cooks alike can benefit from checking out the brisket and pork marinades from Butcher BBQ. Check out the website: http://www.butcherbbq.com/.

Winter Ribs on the Weber

2009-01-29T20:17:00.020-06:00

This weekend is my son Jack’s 2nd birthday, which this year, happens to coincide with my cousin’s wedding. So this weekend we’ll be heading north for a short drive to Nebraska. We’ll take in the wedding on Saturday and have a birthday dinner and some cake on Super Bowl Sunday with Jack’s Nana and Papa along with my brother and sisters and their collective families.

In preparation for this fine family feast I decided to burn some ribs. Only one problem…it will take at least 6 racks of spares to feed everyone and my big cooker is up at my Dad’s shop getting some off season work done (we’ll be pulling it back home on Sunday). My only means of cooking these ribs will be on my standard Weber grill. And I decided early on that I am NOT doing this twice. It will be all 6 racks at once or we’ll just settle for something else.

I never use those vertical rib racks…unless I’m squeezing 6 racks of spares into a space that should hold about 2. But I knew I had a few of things around somewhere…

Now I find that my wife doesn’t complain (as much) about all of my BBQ stuff if I keep it spread out. Kind of like a kid who tries to make it seem like he has eaten more off of his dinner plate by knocking down that pile of peas and hiding some of those carrots under a mangled piece of pot roast. So I have a stash of stuff in the garage, another in the basement and some stuff under the deck in the back yard…oh and some other stuff in the shed out back. The true beauty of my plan is that you can’t see one pile of stuff from any other pile. So when she asks, I just tell her “Oh yeah…that’s the stuff from the garage. I brought it out back yesterday.” It all looks the same to her.

Back to the subject at hand: rib racks. I checked the garage and couldn’t find them there. Out back in the shed? Nope. In the basement? Bingo!

Now I’m ready to cook. I trimmed the spares down just a little and seasoned them with some of The Slabs "Perk Up Your Pork" rub. It was about 15 degrees out and snowing (albeit lightly) when I started cooking on Tuesday morning. But I knew the Weber would hold the heat fine. I threw one chunk of hickory and one cherry on the coals and dropped the lid. It took a little negotiating to get the lid on tight with the ribs sticking up, but it all worked out.

With such a big load I knew it would take a little longer than usual to get everything done so I planned for 4 hours before I would wrap them in foil. The Weber cruised between 250 and 300 the whole time. I wasn’t too concerned about the temp swings or the fire getting too hot. I never really worry about that when I cook at home. About 2 hours in, I flipped the ribs over and rotated their positions in the rack to make sure they cooked as evenly as they could.

A couple hours later I wrapped them in foil and stacked them up in a pan to. They turned out pretty good. Since we aren’t eating them until Sunday, I vacuum sealed them and put them in the freezer and I’ll reheat them in Mom’s oven. I made some mac & cheese and a roasted red potato salad with smoked bacon for sides. It should be a good Super Bowl meal…except we’ll be on the road back home by kick-off.

Finally, a 2008 Wrap Up...

2009-01-28T14:44:00.005-06:00

It’s been awhile since I have logged a post here, and I figured as Chris and I put together our 2009 competition schedule, that I better at least put a little effort into a wrap up of 2008. So here it is…

We had a great year. In fact, I am not sure that we can do much better! We had a lot pretty cool moments in 2008. Competing in the Butt to Butt Invitational in Shannon, IL (and finishing 3rd) was awesome. Then turning around and winning a Reserve Grand Championship in the KCBS contest the next day was just a great feeling. Being awarded 5th place in Pork at the American Royal Invitational was pretty cool and winning a Reserve Grand in Fairbury with our friends finishing at the top with us was a lot of fun too.

But the highlight of the year had to be our two Grand Championships. First I have to explain that I live in Mission, KS and Chris lives just south of Lansing, KS (even though his address says Leavenworth). So Mission and Lansing are our two “home town” contests. So what are the odds of us winning those two events? Probably pretty slim, but we did just that. It’s pretty cool to open up the paper in your town and see a picture of yourself with the grand champion trophy. It one thing to see that stuff in publications and websites dedicated to BBQ, but when your neighbors and coworkers see it and say “congrats,” well, that's pretty cool. Organizers and contest officials seem to really like the fact that a team from their town won their contest as well. We’d have to agree.

Also I would like to touch on some of our overall accomplishments for the year. In 2008 the Dodge County Smokers BBQ Team finished in 37th place out of more than 4,000 BBQ competitors who took part in KCBS contests (full results here). In our individual categories, our worst was chicken at 149th place (I happening to be cooking some practice chicken as I type this entry…hmmmm). Ribs seem to have been our most consistent entry since the very beginning and we did well there again, finishing 40th. Brisket was out worst category in 2007. In fact, we only won one ribbon in brisket all year and that was 9th place finish in a 20 team contest. We were able to turn that around (with some help from our friends) and it was actually our best meat last year, finishing 32nd.

We also finished 84th in Pork, but our two biggest Pork wins didn’t even count toward the final points standings. The first one was a 3rd place win at the World Pork Expo’s BBQLossal contest. We teamed up with our buddies from Pork Me Purple to form the Dodge Cou nty Purple Porkers, so the points from that win went to that team name. Our 5th place win in the Royal Invite does not count either, as it was not a contest that any team could enter – you had to be invited to compete, therefore making those point exempt from the total count. If those two wins would have counted, it would have put us somewhere in the top 30.

But I digest…these are just numbers and although it’s fun to take a look at websites that track this stuff, what really matters happens at the contests themselves. We performed much better than I thought we would in 2008 and we’ll hope to keep it up ‘09.

The Fountains Blaze Off and Senior Q

2008-10-21T09:49:00.008-05:00

After 16 barbecue contests in 2008 stretching from Great Bend , KS to Shannon , IL starting in February and ending last weekend, we wrapped up the year with a fun contest in Independence , MO. It was the Fountains Blaze-Off and Senior Q held for the second year at the Fountains at Greenbriar – an independent senior living community.

We won this contest last year in its inaugural event and we returned this year hoping for a repeat. It didn’t happen for us, but we still had a pretty good time.

Jon and Clara Williams and their family run this event. Jon and Clara compete as Second Line Smokin’ Krew in KCBS contests and they are also KCBS Reps at quite a few contests around the Kansas City area. Jon is also the food service director at The Fountains. He puts this contest on as a tribute to the residents of the facility and most of the teams cooked an extra brisket for the residents to enjoy at dinner on Saturday Night.

Last year we met one of the neighbors named Eva. Steph of The Slabs wrote a real nice article about our new friend Eva that ran in the November 2007 Bullsheet (you can read it here). Our cook site was literally in her back yard both last and again this year. Eva was back again (see her picture with Steph). She watched us for nearly the whole contest out of her back door and came over for a few visits, but she declined a shot of Gentleman Jack, so Chris and I had to share with Kyle and Steph (below).

The event itself is very well run. It’s one of the rare contests that we do that is just that…it’s just a contest. There is really nothing else going on at the event except BBQ cooks cooking meat. No bands. No vendors. No expos. No carnival rides. Just cooks. Sometimes that is kind of nice.

I wish I could say that not having any of those distractions helped us cook our best and finish well. We didn’t finish as well as we would have liked and I don’t really have any complaints about that. For the most part, I think we were judged accordingly.

It was a strong field of cooks, with 28 teams competing. I think 11 or 12 of those teams have won a grand or reserve grand championship this year. We've made a lot of good friends in that group from cooking at many of the same contests together, so it was fun to cook the last one of the year with many of our BBQ friends like Squeal of Approval, D-Dons Pit Crew, The Slabs, Early Bird BBQ and many more, including a few teams that weren't cooking, but just stopped by for a visit. We were looking forward to the competition and the chance to end on a high note, but we ended up placing 14th overall.

Our one bright spot from the awards was an 8th place call in Chicken. That felt pretty good.

Chicken has been a struggle for us all year. We tried a new recipe for the first time in the Mission , KS contest a few weeks ago. We missed out on a call in the bird category that day, but it didn’t hurt us as we still won the contest. We cooked it again at the American Royal and just missed out on a ribbon in the Invitational and finished somewhere in the middle of the pack in the open. That’s still OK. I liked our chicken last weekend. I thought it was good enough for a call, but I also thought it could have been a little better. I was pleased with the award (only our second of the year), and knowing that we have some room for improvement is also encouraging.

On the other hand, I was miffed by our ribs. We cooked them the same way as we usually do. Neither Chris nor I liked the results. I thought they tasted dry, Chris thought they lacked the “pop” they usually have. Either way you go, it showed in the results.

Our brisket seemed like it could go either way. I was holding out hope that, even though I knew it wasn’t the best it could be, that we’d still get a call. No such luck. We didn’t really deserve it anyway. It’s wasn’t a bad product to in, but it was not the best we could do either. We knew that when we sampled it before turn in.

Pork was actually the category that I think Chris and I both thought we had the best chance in. I guess that’s the kiss of death as we finished 15th. Everything seemed to turn out just right for us in that category. From start to finish, it was on schedule and tasted great. The box looked good and I can say that the entry itself was every bit as good as our 5th place pork in the Royal Invitational. So that was a little disappointing.

Munchin' Hogs at the Hilton claimed the top spot and the Early Family of Early Bird BBQ landed as reserve grand champs. One of the residents at the Fountains made the grand and reserve grand trophies in a ceramics class and Rob from Munchin' Hogs and our buddy Chris from Early Bird had the opportunity pose with the young lady who made them. Rob's GC trophy was even filled with cookies!

Finishing 14th in a 28 team contest was not the way that we wanted to end the year. That said, we still had the most successful year of competition in our short run so far. We cooked more than ever before with 16 contests and we won more than ever before. I think there is a direct connection there. The more you cook, the better you get, the more you win. We’ll be back at next year. I plan to maybe work on a season recap too to post here too.

The American Royal

2008-10-07T10:35:00.008-05:00

The Royal came and went. It was a long weekend for us and we cooked some good food. We also turned in some stuff that we didn’t think was quite up to our standards…but that was bound to happen as we’ve had a pretty good run leading up to this one.

We have traditionally gotten beat up by the judges pretty bad at the Royal in the open contest. Seems the more experience we have and the better we get, the worse we finish in Royal Open each year.

Our first year out there we had no idea what we were doing. We finished in the 190’s overall and had top 100 finishes in two categories. Since then it’s been a steady decline into the abyss, culminating with a finish in the low 300’s last year. Well, we must be back to our first year form in 2008, but we still just can’t crack the top 200 as we finished 201st.

Our brisket, which has been our best category all year, was awful. True to form, it was our best scoring product. Awesome!

But we still had a great time and we did do pretty good in the invitational. It’s a goal to be in the American Royal Invitational every year for us and this was our second go ‘round in that dance.

We improved on our ’07 Invitational finish, ending up in 17th place this year (100 teams). We just missed calls in chicken and ribs (22nd and 20th places) but did score a nice ribbon for 5th place pork. That was a real accomplishment for us in that field of cooks…the best of the best, with every one of those teams having won a grand championship in the past year. Our brisket pulled us down, finishing 76th, but I can’t say that I disagree with that. It was not the same product we have been turning in lately. The judges got that one right.

We have already qualified for the 2009 American Royal Invitational, so we’ll be back to take another crack at it next year. But until we hear our name called for a ribbon in the American Royal Open - in any category, I think we will always feel like our list of accomplishments, however large or small, will be incomplete. In fact, as I am writing this, I decided to check the sausage results…that was the one ancillary category that we entered. The result: 59th! We’re getting closer!

Getting Ready for the Royal

2008-09-29T22:58:00.008-05:00

Getting ready to cook a BBQ contest takes a lot of work. The more we compete, the more streamlined it becomes, but there are some things that have to be done and you just can’t cut corners with that stuff. This week it's time to get ready for the big one...The American Royal.

We probably spend 10 to 15 hours the week before a contest getting ready. That includes shopping, checking off to-do lists, packing supplies, trimming meat, double checking to-do lists and getting the cooker ready for competition.

Part of getting the cooker ready means cleaning. I clean every part of our smoker inside and out before every contest. Once I cleaned it the day after a competition, but I learned that doesn’t work very well. If I fire up again between that day and the next contest, it just gets dirty, greasy and grimey again. Probably not as dirty, greasy and grimey as it does after a full contest, but I need to have that extra clean feeling to know that the cooker is ready for the challenge ahead.

We cook ribs, pork butt and brisket in the smoker in competition. Ribs…not that messy. Pork and brisket…messy. BBQers know these are cuts loaded with fat and can lose as much as half of its raw weight when that fat renders. And it renders all over the grates, drips down onto the tuning plates and settles in the bottom of the cook chamber. After a cook, it’s black, it’s thick and it’s gross. (This picture was taken at one contest when it was still cold outside...I accidently forgot to close my drain valve under the belly of the chamber and the result was this 12" tall stalagmite of grease and fat...
YUMMY! I am glad it wasn't warm...that would have been a mess!)

As usual, we had the cooker clean and ready to go for our last contest in Mission. We did the normal routine, then went home Saturday afternoon and threw another 85 lbs of meat or so in the smoker for a catering gig we had later in the week. Four butts and five briskets went on around 6pm and came off the next morning. After cooking for a contest then turning around and loading it back up again, a huge mess was left behind in the cooker.

Yesterday I started the process of getting ready for the American Royal.

Earlier this summer we received a few sample bottles of Greased Lightning all purpose cleaner in a goody bag at a contest. I used up a couple of those little samples on various things and we’ve got a bottle in the closet at home, so I know it’s good stuff. Then, a few weeks ago, I was talking to Rod Gray from Pellet Envy. Rod is sponsored by Greased Lightning and offered me some free product. I jumped on the free stuff and today I put it to use.

My normal routine is to get as much of the solid stuff out of the cooker first, then finish with a visit to a car wash. I got rid of the big stuff with a putty knife then a wire brush, scraping the grates and tuning plates inside. During a contest or other long cook, we’re bound to collect some grease and ash in a few spots on the exterior of the cooker. The exterior only gets worse when stuff inside flies out as I’m cleaning it.

After a few long cooks then sitting and settling for a week before I got to it, that Greased Lightning did wonders on the tough, built up gunk, grease and ash. I gave it the initial once over in the drive way and scraped and scrubbed a bunch of stuff away. Then I went to the car wash.

It was early in the evening on Sunday and I noticed a group of guys standing around a pick-up in the parking lot of the hotel across the street from the wash bay. When I started to get ready to wash, I noticed them making their way over. An immediate feeling of dread overcame me. I knew a guy that was once held up at a car wash. But the closer these guys got, the less scary they seemed.

Turns out they were just a bunch of guys in town from Central Wisconsin for the NASCAR race at the Kansas Speedway. They were capping off their day with a few cold ones in the parking lot and they thought my smoker looked cool so they came over to check it out.

I filled them in on how it worked and what I used the smoker for…contests and cooking at home, etc. They were a great bunch of guys, really nice and respectful…but still having a lot of fun after watching a great race that day.

The cooker’s clean and ready for action…The next task at hand will be buying meat, garnish and supplies for the invitational and open. My job really gets in the way of my hobby sometimes.

Grand Champs: Battle of the Brisket - Mission, KS

2008-09-24T11:35:00.009-05:00

I spent the last week leading up to the Battle of the Brisket in Mission, KS really looking forward to cooking again.

Two weeks ago Chris and I scored a reserve grand championship in Fairbury, NE. That competition kicked off a string of contests for us where we’ll cook every other weekend leading up to the American Royal and beyond. That is a pretty frequent pace for our team, but it’s our hope that we can really hit our stride and do well as we approach the big one.

With that reserve grand champ finish in Nebraska we were off to a good start, but Chris and I both felt that we could have performed better and there was plenty of room for improvement. We took good step toward being where we want to be last weekend in Mission as we finished on top of the heap at a 57 team contest – by far our biggest win.

It was more than four years ago when I got the mail one afternoon and opened up the city newsletter that’s sent to every household in town. I saw one little article about a small, unsanctioned contest being held at the Sylvester Powel Community Center, which stood less than three blocks from my front door. It was the perfect first foray in competition barbecue for me and my little smoker. My neighbor, Chris, showed up and gave me hand and we scored a 4th place ribbon in brisket that weekend…the rest is history.

Fast forward a few years later…last year the city decided to hold another contest at the same location and this time it was sanctioned by KCBS. We jumped right in and even ended up in the same spot we had that first time out. We lucked out and finished in the reserve grand champion slot and we could not have been happier! That is, until we finished in first place!

I can’t say enough about the Mission Arts & Eats Festival and Battle of the Brisket contest. I am really very proud to call this my (adopted) hometown contest. I think the coolest part about the contest was the attention they gave to recycling. There were receptacles every where you turned for cans and plastic bottles. They even sponsored a contest with-in the contest, offering $50 to the team who turned in the most recycled materials (by weight) at the end of the weekend. I wish more contests would do this. We end up throwing away so many plastic bottles and aluminum cans, just because we have nothing else to do with it.

Because the contest is so close to home and my office, I ran down and set up our spot over the lunch hour. I worked almost a full day and got back down to the contest in time to get ready for our guests on Friday night. We had a nice crowd and much food was consumed and many beers drank. It was a lot of fun.

Unlike a few of our most recent contests, Chris and I stayed pretty much on track as far as our timeline went. Trimming, injecting, marinating and seasoning all happened right on time. The evening weather was perfect, allowing our cooker to perform just as we expect and all of our categories went on and came off the smoker on time.

We both had that uneasy feeling as mid-morning came and went...nothing had gone wrong. We've had that feeling before. If nothing goes wrong during the contest, then it must mean it's gonna happen at the awards.

Our chicken was OK. We are trying to achieve a few things with that entry and I thought we did them all - just not as well as we could. Ribs were not quite there in my opinion. The presentation was lacking a little. Pork came out pretty good and our brisket was also good. Overall I thought we had a decent chance at getting some calls.

We collected awards in three of four categories at the awards ceremony. We just can’t seem to nail down our chicken. Our last chicken call came back on May 3rd in Lansing, KS. It’s been a pretty dry spell since then, but I think we’re improving. We did score a fourth in ribs, third in brisket and second in pork and it all added up to a Grand Championship on this weekend!

Little Blue BBQ - Fairbury, NE

2008-09-08T15:23:00.009-05:00

This is just the type of competition I like. It’s a small contest in a small town. The prize money is pretty small too, but we’ve never been into chasing the big scores anyway, so that hasn’t ever mattered much to us. It’s just a nice place with a nice feel and we’ve always done well there.

Back in 2006, Dodge County Smokers scored a Grand Championship here and last year we finished fourth. We were really looking forward to the trip up this year and we were primed for strong finish.

Last year we recruited my brother-in-law, Eric, to cook chicken and ribs as a separate team, just in case the contest needed him to reach the 25 team “qualifier” mark. Eric chose the name Czechland Smokers, a tribute to his polka-dancing, beer-drinking, kolache-eating heritage.

Eric was back this year with his Bohemian buddy, Doug, set up right next to us - and this year they went all in, cooking in all four categories. Last year he did pretty good, scoring Top 10 finishes with both of his entries. This year Chris and I brought the meat, rubs and sauce for him and he supplied a couple of modest smokers along with some seasonings of his own. We put a plan together for cooking his brisket, pork, ribs and chicken and Czechland Smokers were off and cooking!

Set up on the other side of our tent was Pork Me Purple …that’s our buddy Jerrod and his dad, Bill. Last month Jerrod was looking for one last contest to cook for the year and I threw out the possibility of him coming up to this one. It worked out with his schedule and we were happy to have him along side of us. We even co-hosted a good sized Friday night feed complete with some awesome rib eye steaks and really good smoked sausage from Jerrod. We cooked a pretty damn good pork loin and we had loads of great sides too. It was a great meal and a very fun evening.

The cooking part of the weekend went pretty smooth. I had a few time & temp mistakes, but nothing that we haven’t run into before. It got COLD too! We had all of the sidewalls up on the tents and we keep it above 65, but it was chilly every time we’d step outside.

When it came time to box our entries, Chris and I each took turns running over to Eric and Doug’s tent to give them an idea of how to arrange their meat in the box. I have to say that from what I saw, they did an excellent job on their presentations.

I felt pretty good about our brisket entry. I thought pork and chicken were OK and our ribs just didn’t have the pop we are used to getting out of them…although they were still good. But what we think about the product doesn’t make any difference. It’s all about the judges’ scores.

The top six in each category were recognized at the awards, and we did OK with a 2nd place brisket and 3rd place pork. I was hoping for a chicken and a rib call as well, but it wasn’t going to happen for us this day. I may have been more excited to hear Czechland Smokers’ name for 2nd place pork. What was that? They beat us?! I have to say we were pretty proud of those guys. They worked hard and I hope they had fun.

Pork Me Purple also came up big with huge 1st place chicken call and when it was all said and done, Jerrod snagged the very cool Grand Championship trophy!

Chris and I didn’t do so bad ourselves, earning a Reserve Grand Championship, but the surprise of the day may have been the 3rd place overall finishers…

At the conclusion of the awards, we all took our place in line to get the results and scores on paper. Chris grabbed ours and Eric took his. We all walked back to our seats and Eric flipped open the overall scoring page and started looking for their name, reading from the bottom of the 25 team list and going up. As he was reading closer and closer to the top of the page he said “I think they forgot about us…”

That’s when Doug looked over his shoulder and pointed near the top of the page. I’ll be damned if those guys didn’t take 3rd place! And they finished just three points behind us too! Eric seemed pretty stunned.

That strong 3rd place showing meant we all finished the contest in the order we were lined up. I guess it was a “Winner’s Row” of sorts, with Jerrod set up to on our west side and Eric and Doug on the east side. 1st, 2nd and 3rd. Pretty cool!

BBQ on the River - Excelsior Springs, MO

2008-08-18T14:42:00.005-05:00

A few years ago this was one of our first KCBS sanctioned contests. It was also the first time we cooked on our current smoker…The first (and only) Dodge County Smoker to roll off the assembly line. My Dad pulled it down from Nebraska and we never even had the chance to practice on it. It probably didn’t matter much. We would have sucked on that or any other cooker back then.

But I digest…

It’s always fun to go back to Excelsior Springs. It’s a contest that is well supported by the community and they have a strong contingent of area teams every year from the Clay and Ray County area, which I always think is cool.

The competition is tough too.

Any number of the 68 teams in attendance could have won this contest and the field was stacked with names who have visited the stage to accept grand championships numerous times.

We were once again set up next to our good ‘ole pals, The Slabs.com. Steph, Kyle and Val are always a blast to hang with and talk to. I even got some gratis baby-sitting services out of Valerie when she took Jackson for a walk on Friday evening, allowing me a couple of free moments to finish setting up our camp, as we arrived after 5pm. Chris was even later than I was in getting there, but we had no problem in setting up and getting our meat prepped on time.

Dinner was a treat as we participated in a Friday night pot luck with more than a dozen other teams up at the Boys Night Out camp. Everyone brought Mexican food and it was great! Chris made some killer Spanish rice and there was all sorts of other good stuff to choose from on the buffet line as well.

After dinner it was back to HQ to finish up prep work and get our big cuts on the cooker. The rest of the night was pretty uneventful and the weather was cool, maybe even a little chilly – but we’ll take it over the hot days and nights we’re used to when cooking in the middle of August. The rain also stayed away and weather-wise, it turned out to be just a perfect weekend.

Saturday brought another great day with the sun shining and temps in the 70’s. We started the morning off right with a world class breakfast back the Boys Night Out camp. Bacon, eggs, biscuits & gravy and more. It was all fantastic.

After breakfast we got down to business, getting boxes ready and sticking to our rigid competition plan. Turn-ins came and went and we were happy, but not ecstatic about our food. We packed up pretty quick and had about an hour to kill before the awards at 4:00, so we kicked back and stayed cool in the shade of the buildings on Broadway Street in downtown Excelsior Springs.

The awards kicked off and we saw a steady stream of solid teams making their way up to the stage to claim their awards. Unfortunately for us, we weren’t one of them. After not hearing our name through 3 categories, I had pretty much accepted that we were going to be in for a disappointment when we got a look at the score sheet.

I was blown away when I heard our name for first place brisket. Turns out we also took 5th place overall in the contest, and a not-so-great performance turned out to be pretty good. We improved on our chicken (which we have been consistently tweaking from week to week) and ended up just out of the top ten in ribs and pork with an 11th and 14th place respectively.

We were able to come home with a little money in our pocket and we’ll be getting ready for our next run up to Fairbury, NE for the Little Blue BBQ contest the first weekend in September.

Road Trip: Kreuz Market - Lockhart, TX

2008-08-12T06:59:00.010-05:00

Last weekend I traveled to Texas with my wife & son and her folks to see some family. We drove to Houston, then San Antonio and back to KC. We did all kinds of family stuff on our trip and even watched Finding Nemo in the car two dozen times (and that is not an exaggeration).

I made it a point to put Lockhart, Texas on our agenda and we were able to veer off Interstate 10 for a cool side trip that included a pretty damn good lunch on the way to San Antone.

A few years ago I caught a television program that profiled Kreuz Market. You can read the history of the place here. But there is a little more to the story…In 1999 the owner of the market passed away and left the business to his son, but he left the building to his daughter. They failed to work out an agreement and Kreuz Market moved to a new building. A new BBQ joint called Smitty’s sprung up in the original building, where Kreuz started in 1900.

Even though Smitty’s is housed in the old building, I wanted to try Kreuz. From all I’ve read, heard and seen, it’s the best in Texas.

We arrived at about 12:30pm on Saturday afternoon and the parking lot was full. The building is huge, and less than 10 years old – but it looks and feels like it has been there much longer.

We walked in and took our place in a line that stretched from the back of the building nearly to the entrance. While in line, we were able to look at the menu. It was pretty straight forward…brisket, shoulder clod and big pork chops along with ribs and sausage all sold by the pound.

At the end of the line were a set of double doors that opened up into a large room with 4 big brick pits heated by open fires, burning 100% Texas post oak. I should also mention that outside of the building, sat the largest collection of cut and stacked wood that I have ever seen. No gas pits here. A smokey haze lingered inside the building and out from the fires.

In front of the pits were two counters, each staffed by cashier, a pit man/meat slicer and scale operator. It must have been at least 110° inside that room…it was hotter than the temp outside and that was measuring 98 when we got there. I placed my order for brisket and sausage and watched the pit man lift up the heavy iron doors on the pit to get the sausage, then stab a whole brisket which he brought over to his cutting station, slicing off just the right amount. The scale operator threw it all on a few pieces of butcher paper and cashier rang it up.

We carried our lunch out of the pit room and into the dining hall where drinks and a limited number of sides (German potato salad, some peppers and ice cream...not much else) are sold separately. Two notable things you won't find anywhere in the building are forks and BBQ sauce. The reasoning...you don't need a fork to eat this food and you don't sauce to hide any mistakes. Fair enough.

The brisket was good. I thought it might be dry, as it was being held in a pit which I thought might cause it to continue to cook. But it was juicy and full of flavor. They do not season their briskets with a traditional rub, but rather a salt & pepper blend only...more salt than pepper. The brisket was very salty...but not too salty. But still much saltier than you'd find around KC. The highlight of the meal for me was the jalapeño cheese sausage. Man, that was good! We also got some regular sausage, which was just OK. Tasted like mediocre bratwurst.

Overall, the lunch was delicious and the atmosphere was awesome. It was well worth the side trip and definitely tops the list of the coolest places I have sat down to have a meal. I am working on a page to post more pictures of Kreuz Market. Until I get that done, here are just a few more.

Laurie Hillbilly BBQ

2008-08-04T22:09:00.005-05:00

A week or so ago Chris and I decided to make a quick run down to the backwoods of Laurie, MO for the Laurie Hillbilly BBQ Contest. It was a last minute decision…I got a hold of the contest organizer, found out they still had room for a few more teams and we made our plan and left town around 3:00 pm on Friday.

Early in the week we enlisted an old BBQ friend of ours to be a part of the team. Richard Sterling is from the Laurie area, but he most recently called Nebraska home - living not far from my home town up there. He had quite a bit of success cooking contests around Nebraska and Iowa a few years ago. Rich has since relocated back to Missouri and sold his cooker. Actually it was Chris who bought his H&S Trailer Smoker a few months ago.

Our plan was to have Rich cook chicken and run boxes. We’d cook our regular ribs, pork and brisket and see what turns out.

We pulled in to the cook site a little after 6:00 pm and quickly set up camp. We had a pretty good spot, not too far from turn-ins and right under a shade tree. Not that it mattered if we were under a tree or not – it was 90+ degrees most of the weekend and the air was humid and thicker than molasses.

We cooked our four categories with little incident and got everything turned in on time with Rich’s help. We packed up quickly and cooled down (temporarily) by rinsing off in a cold shower and throwing on a change of clothes. By the time the awards rolled around I was just as hot as before.

We were sweating at the awards (literally) as we didn’t get a call until we hit 4th in the last category of brisket. When we don’t get a top 10 call in a category after the end of a long contest, my immediate thought (and hope) is “well, maybe we finished 11th.”

That was almost the case here. We ended up 13th in ribs and 11th in pork. Three of our four turn-ins faired pretty well with some solid scores. But the judges beat us up pretty bad on our chicken. As we tasted it in preparation for turn-in, I think we all thought we had a chance, but it wasn’t going to happen for us this day.

Out of 76 teams, we finished 18th and enjoyed sharing in the success of many friends including The Slabs, Early Bird BBQ, Smoke on Wheels and Pork Pullin’ Plowboys, all of which celebrated top category and overall finishes.

I will say that I did miss having my little buddy at the contest with us. This is the second contest in a row that my 18 month-old son Jackson was not there to share some time with us. Jack is my little good luck charm and when he wasn't able to go to Shannon, IL with us last month, at least Chris and I had our wives there. I have found that it's just a lot more fun to have our family with us when we're cooking.

Next up is a contest that we have done for four years. We'll be smokin' on the street in downtown Excelsior Springs, MO. If you're there, be sure to stop by and say hey!

Illinois State BBQ Championship: A Pretty Good Weekend (Part Four)

2008-07-23T08:36:00.008-05:00

This is the fourth and last in a series of posts from our trip to the Butt to Butt Invitational and the Illinois State BBQ Championship. For part one, click here, for part two, click here and for part three, click here...or just scroll down to the posts below.

Chris and I were feeling good about our third place finish in the Butt to Butt Invitational. Third place was pretty solid in that field of cooks…I felt like if we could turn in the same pork in the contest the following day, that we’d be in good shape come awards time Saturday afternoon.

We knew that we would need all the help we could get with the group of teams at this event. With over 60 teams competing, including five teams that finished in the KCBS top ten along with several past Jack Daniels Invitational Champions, this was some of the stiffest competition we’ll face all year.

I did think we had a small advantage over several other teams in the contest because we were able to get in, get set up and do a full cooking session a day ahead of time. It allowed us the opportunity to get everything ready to cook on much more relaxed timeline. The downside is that doing back-to-back contests is a grind. Tending a stick-burning cooker, dealing with the storms and not sleeping in your own bed can take it out of you. We were feeling the effects of it all on Saturday Morning.

We got all of our meat in the cooker with out incident. We were a little behind on our Friday night timeline due to some of the excitement that we experienced earlier in the evening, but it all evened out and we got back on track with out a problem. I was starting to worry a little bit about our briskets. They seemed to be cooking pretty fast and one was even pegging a temp of 200+ at 8:00am . That is a little hotter than we want it…and it’s a few hours earlier than we want it to get there. We pulled the brisket and threw in our warming box to hold until turn in at 1:30pm.

Ealier in the week we had caught wind that a special gathering of cooks were taking part in a special mid-morning shot of Jack Daniels. Now, this is nothing new...we have many times shared a shot of Gentleman Jack with our fellow competitors. But it seems the fellas heading this effort up were trying to break a record...and I believe they did. We were part of 59 contestants who held their shot glasses high as the Right Reverend Randy Twyford of the team Ulcer Acres gave a 9:22am toast to a hastily assembled but charasmatic congregation. This was the first time we had been a part of one of "The Rev's" toasts, and it was a treat. He puts some real thought in to his toast...err, sermons. We had a blast...how could you not, drinking whiskey at 9:30 in the morning.

Following that bit of nonsense, it was back to cooking BBQ. Chicken, ribs and pork all finished up just fine and I think we were pretty happy with our final product. I felt like we could have had a bit better turnout in chicken and brisket, but ribs and pork were good. I felt that we had our best chance for a call with our pork. After cooking that category two times the day before, it seemed like we had it dialed in.

We had a long trip ahead of us, so we packed up camp pretty fast following the final turn-in. It was a huge help to have Jenny and Jammie there. They have seen Chris and I pack up enough times to know what to touch and what to leave alone. They also tackled the dishes and washed them all. It’s always a good feeling to know that you don’t have anything to clean up when you get home.

We set up our chairs to watch the awards along with the rest of the cook teams, which started right on time at 4:00 . It’s always a welcome experience when the awards are on time at a BBQ Contest…But I wouldn’t expect anything less when it comes to this event. Everything seemed to run flawlessly (except for the rain).

When contest organizer Mike Lake announced at the beginning of the awards ceremony that they would call the top ten in each category, but only the top two overall, I have to admit that I was a little disappointed. I thought we cooked some pretty good stuff and that we had a decent chance at the top ten overall.

Our first call was for ribs. We have been lucky this year in that category and we were again stoked to hear our name called for 6th place. Pork was next and we were disappointed not to hear our name called. I thought we had some good stuff there. I also thought that we would be going home with a lone 6th place ribbon.

Instead, we were extremely excited to hear our name called for 2nd place brisket. As it turns out, we actually tied Rod Gray of Pellet Envy for 1st, but Rod won the tie-breaker and that was just fine with us. Brisket was a tough one for us last year. We’ve had some help with it this year and it’s coming around.

Next up, the Land of Lincoln Award was given out, as it is every year at this contest, to the highest scoring team from the state of Illinois. That award went to Joey Mac’s Smoke Stax - and it wouldn’t be the last time he’d be called up (the suspense is killing you, isn’t it?).

When the time rolled around to call Reserve Grand Champion and Grand Champion, we were really surprised to hear our name called out for the reserve slot! We didn’t know how the other categories shook out yet, but it seemed like there were a few other names who had more calls and higher placings than we did too.

We jumped up and strolled to the front, excited for the great finish. I would have been happy with the rib and brisket calls, but to have snagged Reserve Grand in that field just made our weekend! It makes the 8 hour ride home a lot easier to take too.

Joey Mac bested the entire field with a solid performance and he and his crew took home the Grand Champion’s plaque. As I mentioned before, they are an Illinois team – so I’m sure this win is extra special for them, with this contest probably being the most well-known event in the state.

We ended up leaving Shannon on a high! Jammie and Jenny had made reservations for us to stay the night in the Quad Cities, but we passed up those reservations as we made good time getting out of the contest early. We ended up staying the night about 100 miles east of Des Moines, which made for a pretty easy drive home the next day.

All in all, a pretty good weekend.

Illinois State BBQ Championship: Butt to Butt X Invitational (Part Three)

2008-07-17T22:37:00.009-05:00

This is part three in a series of posts from our trip to the Butt to Butt Invitational and the Illinois State BBQ Championship. For part one, click here, for part two, click here...or just scroll down to the posts below.

Following the storms, lightning strikes and fires, it was time for the Butt to Butt Invitational awards. Now these are not your normal awards. They are conducted at the cooks meeting for the regular KCBS contest, which was held at 8:00pm on Friday night. This meant most, if not all, of the cooks competing in the 63 team contest were present...and it seemed like even more people were there.

Mike Lake went through the basic rules of the contest, but most everyone was there to see who would win the Butt to Butt competition. Mike called each of the Butt to Butt teams to the front of the tent and introduced them. One by one we would walk to the front. And one by one we would be asked to sit down again.

It's a process of elimination, resulting with the winner as the only contestant left standing. But instead of starting at last place and working his way up to the winner, Mike starts at second to last. Meaning at the end there are two people standing up...one is the winner and the other finished last.

I had been warned by several people what was about to happen. Most of the former Butt to Butt contestants I had spoken to said we should just hope to finish 4th or 5th and avoid the nerve-racking feeling of standing in front of the assembled crowd.

As Mike began reading the names of the teams I was a wreck. I could hear Rod from Pellet Envy and Chris talking. Both were wishing (loud enough that I could hear) to be the next team called to sit down. We were still standing as they called 6th place...then 5th place...then 4th...just as I thought "maybe we won this thing," I heard our name and happily took our seat, very proud of a 3rd place finish among the countries best cooks!

Rod got his wish too and was the next team called to sit down, in 2nd place. Mike Flach of the team Weekend Smokers wound up with a great upset win over a very strong field that included past grand champions of the American Royal, The Jack Daniels World Invitational and top finishers in the Kansas City BBQ Society's annual year end rankings. Congrats to Mike.

Illinois State BBQ Championship: Field of Terror! (Part Two)

2008-07-17T21:50:00.011-05:00

This is part two in a series of posts from our trip to the Butt to Butt Invitational and the Illinois State BBQ Championship. For part one, click here...or just scroll down to the post below this one.

Every July, the baseball and softball fields of Shannon become the setting for the Illinois State BBQ Champions. Smokers, tents and RV’s dot the infields and outfields and the backdrop of the park surrounded by corn fields has earned this contest the nickname “BBQ’s Field of Dreams.”

After we were done devouring the steaks at Mike & Teresa’s house on Thursday night, we enjoyed a few more drinks but noticed the skies turning dark again and thought it best to get back to camp and ready ourselves for a storm. Being just a few blocks from the park, we hit the street and walked back, getting there just in time to put up the rest of the sidewalls on our tent and pull everything inside so it wouldn’t get wet. Then the sky let loose dumping buckets of rain on us, leaving ankle deep water in and around our site.

As it rained down, water started to collect in the corners of our tent. This is pretty common and we normally just get up every so often and push up the corner of the canopy were the water has collected, dumping the rain water down onto the ground.

Chris, Jenny, Jammie and I were all relaxing, staying relatively dry when I noticed one of the corners filling up pretty rapidly. I got up slowly (as always, being careful not to spill my Budweiser) and walked over the corner of the tent. Just as I was reaching up to push the rain water off the sagging canopy, we heard and felt a huge clap of thunder that literally shook the ground, accompanied immediately by a bolt of lightning that lit up the whole park. It felt entirely too close - like that strike was going to go right through my out stretched arm. I jumped back and maybe even screamed a little…If I had hair on my head, it would have been standing straight up.

It wasn’t until a few hours later, after talking with some other cooks who happened to have seen the strike hit, that we learned the lightning did in fact hit just a few hundred feet away from our camp site, in the corn field directly to the east. Surprisingly, this would not be the scariest moment of the contest (more on that later).

After the storms died down and Jammie and Jenny left for the night and Chris and I began the process of prepping our meat for the Invitational Butt to Butt contest. We caught a few hours of sleep before firing up the cooker and throwing the meat on, then napped for another couple of hours before daylight hit and spent the rest of the day babysitting the cooker then prepping and turning in our pork boxes.

It was pretty enjoyable day – sun shining, pretty dry and teams arriving for the KCBS sanctioned contest. It felt like we should have been doing more, but I really liked the no-stress feeling of letting those butts sit in the smoke and not having to worry about any other category.

This was the tenth year for the Butt to Butt contest, so in addition to the teams competing for the Butt to Butt X title, several of the past Butt to Butt winners were invited to take part in a second contest where they would compete in a Tournament of Champions. Our turn in for Butt to Butt X was at 3pm, followed two hours later by a second turn in at 5pm for the Tournament of Champions. We all turned in a second entry, just in case we won the first contest, but only the winner of the first contest would be included in the judging for the second. We wouldn’t find out until 8pm if our second entry was judged or not.

After the turn in at 5:00, we had a few hours to run out to Jammie and Jenny’s cabin where Chris and I were able to shower, change clothes and freshen up. We turned on the TV in the cabin and caught the weather report to see if any more storms were headed our way. As is usually the case in the Midwest around this time of year, you can’t predict the storms…50/50 chance they say. What you can predict is the heat. On the color-coded scale displayed by weather man during this local newscast, we were well into the red “oppressive” zone, with highs in the 90’s and humidity off the charts. Sticky.

Then we drove back to town and had a quick bite to eat at a café on Main Street. On our way back to the park we saw one of the Butt to Butt Tournament of Champion contenders, Mean Dean’s BBQ, walking uptown – several blocks from the contest.

We didn’t think much about seeing Dean away from the contest, until we went walking by his cooker in the park.

I think Chris and I both saw it at about the same time along with a few other people including Todd of Pork Pullin’ Plowboys and contest rep Mike Lake. We all converged on a pretty dangerous situation within moments of each other and found a big fire raging on the back of Dean’s trailer. It was a huge pile of charcoal burning near the back of his cooker and making matters potentially worse, the fire was burning right next to two large propane tanks. Remember that “scariest moment” I mentioned before? Well, this was it.

Chris and Todd sprang into action right away, trying to get the tanks out of there while Mike tried to put out the fire with extinguishers. I ran to get more extinguishers including ours along with those from several other teams. Some folks threw bags of ice on the hot coals to contain it and we were then able to knock the source of the fire off the trailer and onto the grass and the tanks were removed.

When all was safe again we found out that a basket of charcoal lit off, possibly by a leftover stray ember or maybe even just the heat of the basket it was sitting in. However it happened, it took a long time to light and resulted in lighting another four bags of charcoal on fire that happened to be sitting nearby.

It was quite a site. We didn’t know whether to try and put out the fire or run away. When all was said and done, we went though several gallons of water, a few bags of ice and 10 or 12 fire extinguishers. Best news of all was that there were no injuries were reported, no damage to Dean’s cooker and only slight damage to his trailer.

Later in the weekend the storms would return. Friday night/Saturday morning around 3:00am I had just woke up to start helping Chris do the initial prep work on our boxes. We were pulling parsley for garnish when a huge gust of wind hit our tent. The sidewall bulged in and knocked our pan of garnish to the ground. Chris and I both jumped up and held on as tight as we could to the tent, to keep it from flying away. As we were holding on, we heard a crash and knew exactly what it was. It was the unmistakable sound of a tent toppling over at BBQ contest.

We peeked outside and just two spots down from us, saw the wreckage. Tent legs in the air, tables on their sides and supplies on the ground. Chris ran out into the storm to try and help the Chi-Town Smokers clean up and get things restabilized, but there was no saving their tents. After a few minutes in the pelting rain, he ran back inside and we held on again as a few more gusts hit the tent. The wind eventually died down, but the rain continued for a while longer.

We had an early morning visit from our contest neighbor, the aforementioned Todd of Pork Pullin’ Plowboys. As we were talking we agreed a new name was order for the park. With the lightning strikes, buckets of rain and gusts of wind – not to mention raging fires and that “oppressive” heat thrown in for good measure…This year the park would not be known as “BBQ’s Field of Dreams,” but instead a Field of Terror!

Illinois State BBQ Championship: Shannon, IL (Part One)

2008-07-16T01:01:00.013-05:00

Our trip to Shannon, Illinois for the Butt to Butt X Invitational and the Illinois State BBQ Championship was an actioned packed weekend. It’s taken a few days to get my thoughts together, but here is the first in a series of posts that I’ll make about the trip.

This was a trip that I had been looking forward to for over a year…Ever since we qualified for the Butt to Butt Invitational by scoring a first place pork call at the Great American BBQ contest in May, 2007. Since that day I’ve been mapping out routes to Shannon, Illinois (pop. 900) and we’ve been trying to perfect our pork recipe.

Our original plans including renting an RV so both Chris and I could bring our families. After much consideration, common sense prevailed and we ended up leaving the kids with family, but taking our wives. We found a nice cabin at a little resort not far from Shannon for Jammie and Jenny while Chris and I camped out at the cook site Thursday and Friday Night.

The drive up to Shannon wasn’t hard. Maybe a little long (about 450 miles)…but not hard. We arrived around 3:30 in the afternoon and quickly set up. We ran into a few storms on the way up and one had just hit the grounds before we got there. The ground was wet, but not (yet) muddy.

We started to unload our gear, with the sky still dark and cloudy to the east, but the sun shining in the west. After we got situated, we took the short drive out to the cabins to check in, then came back to town.

Thursday night we enjoyed a fantastic dinner at the home of Mike & Teresa Lake. Mike puts this contest on and really does a great job. Hosting a ribeye steak dinner for the Butt to Butt cooks complete with all the trimmings at his home is the perfect example showing why this competition is so special.

We had just gotten back to the park and made sure our camp was secure, then set out for a nice evening walk to Mike & Teresa’s place. We weren’t even out of the park yet when Johhny Trigg pulled along side of us with Rod Gray of Pellet Envy riding shotgun. Johnny offered us a ride in the back of his pickup up to dinner. A ride from the only two-time Jack Daniel’s World Invitational Champ? How could we resist? That may be as close as we ever get to Lynchburg, Tennessee. We put the tailgate down and rode and rode the “Old School vs. High Tech Express” up the street just in time for the dinner bell.

This was truly a gathering of BBQ legends…all sitting around modest tables in a two-car garage enjoying steak and potatoes. And those steaks were incredible! They tasted great and nearly covered our whole plate. I was looking forward to eating Jammie’s leftovers…but she ate the whole thing! (Side note: my favorite cut to grill at home is a ribeye…she has yet to eat a whole steak of mine).

Nights like this are something that can only happen in a small town in the Midwest and it’s an evening that I’ll never forget.

Whole Hog for the Fourth

2008-07-06T13:50:00.010-05:00

This 4th of July, Chris decided to cook a whole hog for the party he hosted at his place. It was a great time and everyone enjoyed some damn fine BBQ.

Chris picked up this 82lb pig at Steve's Meat Market in De Soto, Kansas. This was the third hog that we've cooked (Chris did the work cooking this one) - the first two being at the BBQlossal contest in Des Moines in June and our practice pig getting for that event a few weeks before. Both of those were much smaller projects in the 45-50lb range.

I came over around 5:30 in the morning and togehter we seasoned and injected the hog, then put him on Chris's 48" H&S Smoker, which he already had heated up with smoke rolling for a while by the time I got there. We loaded the pig for a long cook and I took off, leaving Chris to tend the fire and get ready for the party.

I returned home to start a cooking session of my own...

Earlier in the week I got a call to provide some food for another party on the fourth. The menu included sliced brisket & burnt ends, chicken thighs, legs and whole leg quarters, beans and cheesy corn. I got home and got started on the brisket and later threw on the chicken, corn and beans. We wrapped up around 4pm and my Dad (in town visiting for the holiday) helped me deliver the food to the party around 4:30.

We then made our way out to Chris' place just in time to pull the hog out of the cooker. We capped off the day with some pretty good BBQ, beer and some fireworks. These guys didn't even head inside to eat any of the other food - they just picked the remaining meat off of the cooked carcass.

Next week we are finally back on the competition trail. We'll be heading to Shannon, IL for the Illinois State BBQ Championship and the Butt to Butt Invational. We are really looking forward to it and should be a great time!

Dodge County Purple Porker Power Ranking

2008-06-23T08:21:00.011-05:00

The guys from the team The Pickled Pig have a pretty cool website with lots of good info and some neat features that track KCBS contest results and standings. One of the very cool things they feature on their site is a Do-It-Yourself ranking feature and their very own Power Rankings feature. They have also developed a very cool option that allows teams to display their Power Rankings on their site by way of a "widget" that updates itself everytime new data is entered into the Pickled Pig Power Ranking Data.

We have displayed the ranking for Dodge County Smokers in the right hand column of this page for several weeks. It's a very cool way to track our progress throughout the year. A few days ago I wondered what the rankings for our Dodge County Purple Porker team would look like - especially since we only entered one contest under that name. Well, here is the result:

What you see there is the result of one contest. It's probably not a great representation of the Power Rankings, or our finish in the contest for that matter. Two of the categories listed didn't even apply to that contest...brisket and chicken were replaced with whole hog and pork loin. But seeing as this is only contest where those two categories count toward the grand champion for the competition, it wouldn't make sense to keep track of them.

Our 4th place overall finish does count for something though. As of June 24th at 9:40am, it ranks our performance as 213 of 525. It will be interesting to see the numbers change as the summer goes on and the contest season hits full stride.

The Great Pork BarbeQlossal!

2008-06-09T23:30:00.009-05:00

It was a multiple team effort last weekend in Des Moines, Iowa as Chris and I traveled north to compete in the Great Pork BarbeQlossal at the World Pork Expo, held on the Iowa State Fair Grounds. The Dodge County Smokers were to team up with Jerrod Caton and his Pork Me Purple squad for this unique all-pork BBQ competition. Our team is collectively known as the Dodge County Purple Porkers.

As chronicled here a few weeks back, we did a practice run in the drive way to cook our pig along with loins, pork butt and ribs. Things went smoothly and it seemed that we had it all down. We made supply lists, plans for cooking and our tested recipes. We were really looking forward this one.

But early last week Jerrod learned that he would not be able make the trip to Iowa with us. Family comes first and when Jerrod and his wife, Abbey, learned that their surgeon in Oklahoma could get her in to tend to some serious back problems that she has been experiencing, they hit the road for Tulsa. But before he left town, Jerrod equipped us with the supplies, ingredients, and a few cooking tips that might help us out. He also arranged for his father-in-law to lend us an extra set of hands...and we were sure glad he was there!

When the smoke cleared Saturday afternoon, the Dodge County Purple Porker team claimed 2nd place in the Whole Hog category, 3rd in Pork Shoulder and 4th place overall - just edging out another team who capitalized on a combo effort as BBQ legends Ray Lampe (aka Dr. BBQ) and Fast Eddy Maurin teamed up under the name Sugar in the Raw and scored 5th place, just .0005 of a point behind us.

We were very lucky to have the services of Jerrod’s Father-in-Law, John Riley, all weekend long. John lives in Des Moines, so this was a home game for him…and he was integral in the success of the team, doing everything from building turn-in boxes to selecting which cuts of pork we would turn in to the judges. John was a tremendous help all weekend (as was his wife, Joanne) and we were very fortunate to have him on our side.

Jerrod was in constant contact with us all weekend. Between text messages and phone calls, he was in the loop every step of the way from the set up...to our prep...to the cook itself and the turn-ins and awards that followed. Chris and I were joking that Jerrod would be mad that he missed out on all the fun - but when we spoke to him, he was happy and relieved that we scored a few calls and we didn’t make a trip for nothing.

While we always feel like we have a chance to do well when we show up at a contest, we are also always surprised (and excited) when we get a call. The biggest surprise of the day was our 2nd place call in the whole hog category. We cooked a 49lb pig that we purchased from Mike Lake (of Rock River BBQ and Lynch Livestock). Chris, John and I went to work prepping the pig Friday afternoon and he went in to the cooker Friday night along with our pork butts, which turned out to be another award winning entry for us. We cooked 2 butts the Pork Me Purple way and 2 the Dodge County way. In the end it was a true team effort as we used elements from both styles to snag 3rd place. Every year the folks from the QLossal select a state and recognize the top scoring team that hails from that state. We didn't know it, but this year the selected state was Kansas. So it was another very cool surprise as we were singled out, being the top scoring team from the Sunflower State.

In addition to the contest, there was so much more going on. We saw a 123 lb pork burger, watched fellow teams compete in the Big Green Egg Scramble and mingled with pork producers and industry folks from all over the world attending the Pork Expo. I can see why this contest is so highly regarded among KCBS competitors. Organizer Anne Rehnstrom does a fantastic job. I don't know how she does it, but I am happy to say that we were a part of it!

SKUNKED! at the GAB

2008-05-28T01:07:00.004-05:00

After a little less than a month off, Chris and I were really looking forward to the Great American Barbecue contest in Kansas City, KS.

This was the third time that we have had the chance to cook in an invitation-only contest, meaning a team must have won a grand championship at some point during the year leading up to the contest to get in. The invitational was followed by the open, meaning it was "open" for anyone to enter and compete. These double contest weekends are extremely tiring. And couple that with the addition of the World Brisket Open to the line up of contest categories at the GAB and you have one heck of a busy weekend.

Weather-wise, we saw it all. It started off cool, then the winds came (wind sucks), then rain (and lots of it - see the pic above of a bucket catching run off in to our tent) all followed by heat and humidity.

I wish I could blame the weather on our poor finishes in the invitational and open. We got beat up pretty bad by the judges. We didn't even sniff a top-twenty finish. The hardest part to accept is that I wouldn't have hesitated to turn anything we cooked into judges at any other contest. I thought most of it was good enough to score something.

We did have on semi-bright spot in that our brisket fisnished in the top 30 among 125 or so entries in the World Brisket Open. This was our first go-round in the brisket-only side competition. I liked it and I think we'll try it again.

Overall, we did have fun but the weekend was dissapointing in the end. We are already looking forward to jumping back on the horse and cooking again.

Next up...The Dodge County Purple Porkers team invades Des Moines, Iowa in just a week and a half. We are all looking forward to this pork-only event. The competition will be tough, but we are looking forward to the challenge!

This Little Piggy went to My House...

2008-05-21T22:23:00.014-05:00

In preparation of entering the Great Pork BarbeQLossal in June, The Dodge County Purple Porkers got together last Saturday to cook a whole hog - one of the requirements for the Des Moines, Iowa contest.

Actually our weekend project would not be considered a hog, but rather a pig. An oinker "on the hoof" under 180lbs is a pig...over 180, a hog. Our piggy weighed in at 48lbs. The minimum weight that we can cook in the contest is 45. That would put our new pet somewhere in the neighborhood of 75lbs before being butchered.

Jerrod and Chris came over to the Dunker house early Saturday Morning. We got the pig out of my cooler, where it had been chilling out since I had picked it up from Bichelmeyer Meats the day before. Then we got to work cleaning it up and getting it ready to hit the heat. I can say that I pretty much sat back and let Chris do the cutting. He is dangerous with the blade and had the swine ready to cook it in no time.

In order to fit it the cooker, we had to trim a little here and there. Four hooves and a head later, we laid down a little seasoning, injected the shoulders and hams to keep it moist and wrapped it up in chicken wire to help us handle it a little easier. After much discussion, research and a few morning beers, we decided to cook Porky belly down, rather than on its back.

Our purpose for cooking this pig was three fold... First, we had never done one before, so it was practice. Second, we needed to make sure that we could cook all four QLossal categories (pork butt, ribs, loin and hog) on one cooker. And finally, Jerrod's father-in-law is throwing a little get-together and this will be the main course.

Twelve hours after going in to the cooker, we pulled out our test pig. We didn't expect much...maybe that's why I liked it so much. It was surely some good eatin'!

I am really looking forward to heading up and cooking in the QLossal. It will be a great time and something totally new for us. But we before we go we have another pretty big competition here in KC.

Next up for Chris and I will be the Great American BBQ this weekend. We did well at this one last year. We just hope we can keep it up and hear our name called at the awards. But even if we don't, I'll sleep OK. The worst day cookin' is still better than a good day at work!

Teaming up for the QLossal!

2008-05-12T20:54:00.009-05:00

For the past couple of years Chris and I have thrown around the idea of going to the Great Pork BarbeQLossal in Des Moines, IA. The QLossal happens every June and it's a contest that is unique in that it is the only Kansas City Barbecue Society sanctioned contest where cooks only deal with pork. No beef. No chicken. No other ancilaries. Just pork.

Pork butt. Pork ribs. Pork lion. And the big one...whole hog. The last one is the category that has scared us off until now. We have never cooked a hog and it seems like a pretty big undertaking.

So while we considered it, we never really considered it. That is until we started kicking the idea around again early this year when a friend of ours, Jerrod Caton of the team Pork Me Purple, brought it up. Jerrod talked us into it and now we're teaming up to cook this exciting event.

We are actually quite lucky to have Jerrod on our side. He's put in over a decade in the pork industry and took first place in pork at the 2007 American Royal Invitational.

Our first order of business: team name. We decided that we'll combine our names for this contest. So, for the first weekend in June, the Dodge County Smokers and Pork Me Purple will be known collectively as the Dodge County Purple Porkers.

We're hoping that our combined success in the two regular KCBS categories of pork butt and ribs thrown in with a little luck in loin and that whole pig will result in a successful day for us all.

Oh, and about that whole hog that has scared us off before. Well...we'll be doing our practice run on a small pig this weekend. Official QLossal rules state that we must cook a pig with a minimum weight of 45lbs. Given the small size, we're hoping we can manage it and we're looking forward to the challenge. Win or lose, it should be fun weekend and learning experience for sure!

Lansing, Kansas: Grand Champs!

2008-05-04T22:12:00.020-05:00

Behind the strength of two first place calls and two more top tens, we are proud to report another successful Dodge County Smokers finish this weekend with a Grand Championship in Lansing, KS!

Back in January Chris won a free entry to the Brew, Blues & BarBQ event in Lansing at the KCBS awards banquet. It worked out well, as Chris, Jenny and Emily had just bought a new home and moved to an acreage about 5 miles south of town. In addition to being close to home, it was going to be nice cooking in a contest with mild spring weather. Well, we didn't get the weather we had hoped for.

Our tent was up for all of about 5 minutes when a gust of wind whipped up and snapped a leg. We didn't even have sidewalls up, coolers unloaded or anything else unpacked. Chris and I spent much of the next 2 hours or so standing around debating how to set up our tent, where to put the cooker and how to anchor everything down. I felt like we were at our first contest again...not knowing what to do or how to do it.

After we finally got everything unloaded, set up and situated, it felt like we were working from behind the rest of the night. We eventually got caught up on everything and the wind died down around 8 or 9pm. I thought it was going to be an OK night. After the family left Friday night we decided to take a walk and spent a few minutes at the Squeal of Approval camp. Around midnight it was time to head back to home base and just as we made our way into our crippled temporary abode, a gust of wind hit almost as if it was set on a timer for 12 am...and it kept blowing through the night and into Saturday morning with out a break.

I hate the wind. I can deal with rain, the cold and even excessive heat...but wind just turns an otherwise good day into a real drag. Wind sucks. Or blows...whatever.

So other than the damn wind, we had a great time. Turn ins went well and we really only pushed it to the time limit on our last box. Our brisket slices were too wide to fit in the box...adjustments were made, last minute touches applied and Chris hit the road with what turned out to be our second top call of the day and the entry that propelled us into the #1 spot overall for the day.

Over the years I *may* have developed just a few little quirks when it comes to our routine. If something works...why mess with it? I guess I just thought maybe no one would notice. Well, my dirty little secret was thrust into the open by Chris's wife, Jenny. In addition to being just a tad embarrassed (but not really...), I was more afraid that the mystical powers that are somehow harnessed by my tendencies would be erased if and when I acknowledged them. As my sister's boyfriend, "Braq," pointed out, they all knew...but you don't talk to the pitcher in the middle of a no hitter.

So when we sat down at the awards and Jenny

invited Jackson to leave my lap and come sit with her...I had to refuse. Hey...that kid has brought me a lot of luck over the past year! So there it was...and Jenny called me out on it! Right in the middle of the awards, no less! But in the end, it all ended up the way we wanted...Though Jenny may have opened up a can of worms...she's going to have to bust my chops at every awards ceremony now. Something tells me that won't be a problem!

The Great American BBQ Invitational and Open are up next. Memorial Day Weekend. Should be a blast!

Pleasant Hill

2008-04-09T20:26:00.005-05:00

The first weekend of April could not come soon enough. We were really looking forward to getting out to Pleasant Hill, MO and cooking again after a strong finish in North Kansas City last month.

For the third time in as many contests, we set up shop next to our very good friends, Steph, Kyle and Val - better known as the Slabs. On the other side of our camp was Mike Wozniak, the head cook of the very succesfull team Quau. Steph had organized a pot luck dinner for Friday night at the Slabs tent and we ate very well thanks to the dishes brought by 10 or 12 other teams. Chris contributed one of my favorites, a cheesy corn bake.

A small crowd gathered 'round The Slab's fire pit to keep warm and the night was capped off with a old fashioned jam session and sing along as Kyle strummed his guitar joined by Rich and Bunny of K-Cass BBQ on harmonica and guitar. Nights like this are what make me love BBQ contests.

Temps dipped pretty low over night...not sure how low...I was too cold to go out side of out tent to see. We kept it around 60 or 65 in the Dodge County Smokers compound, with the help of our propane heater and the firebox from the cooker. I can't wait until we can cook in a contest where we don't have to worry about putting up all of our sidewalls on the tent to keep the heat in.

Saturday rolled around and most everything went as planned. We had some friends and family hanging out with us and enjoying the day, which is always nice and the awards were right on time at 3:30 in the afternoon. The volunteers putting on the show in Pleasant Hill ran a tight ship.

We did pretty well. Brisket has been an anchor, pulling us down for over a year. We broke out a new recipe and scored 5th place. Our ribs continue to do well as we took home 7th there. Overall, we were happy with a 6th place finish and it was great to see the Pork Pullin' Plowboys win a Grand Championship in thier first contest of the year.

Up next...Lansing, KS May 2nd & 3rd.

What's in a Name?

2008-03-25T16:29:00.004-05:00

Every once in a while when we're at a contest someone will ask us what's up with that line "& the Sue Dog Smokin' Crew" near the bottom of our competition team banner.

Does our team really include a legion of culinary trained canines all named Sue?

No.

Sue is my dog. When I entered my first BBQ contest, I couldn't think of a name for my team. So I named the team after my dog. I think the first name I used was Smokin' Sue's BBQ. We cooked in 6 contests that first summer. I used some combination or variance of the words Smoke and Sue in almost all of them. In addition to Smokin' Sue's, there was Sue Dog's BBQ and then Sue Dog's Smokin' Crew. I could never quite settle on a name that I thought fit just right.

Toward the end of our first year, I entered a contest in West Point, Nebraska - just a few miles from my hometown in Dodge County, Nebraska. My Dad knew a local beef producer, who also held a seat on the Dodge County Cattleman's Board, and a sponsorship for that contest in West Point sounded like a good possibility. So I entered as the Dodge County Smokers BBQ team.

Well, the sponsorship fell through, but not before another friend of Dad's made me a banner that said "Dodge County Smokers and the Sue Dog Smokin' Crew." Now I had already entered another contest happening after this one, so I asked the guy to include that Sue Dog line on the banner when I learned he was making it. That way I could use it at both contests. It was kind of an ugly banner. It was yellow and had blue and red letters. But it was free and I was happy to have it. By the way, I think it was free because the guy was using up banner materials that no one else would pay for.

Now that we had a banner (no matter how ugly), I didn't want to pay for another - and the Dodge County name was starting to grow on me anyway...plus the name kind of paid tribute to where I grew up and also the smoker that my Dad had just built around that time. So the name stuck...and so did that Sue Dog line.

When we designed our current logo, we kept Sue in there and we finally retired that ugly yellow banner last year. Sue still comes to the occasional contest, but more often you'll find a little Sue Dog look-a-like hanging in our tent at a contest. BBQers are full of superstitious little quirks...I guess that's one of ours.

North Kansas City

2008-03-16T21:13:00.006-05:00

Our second contest of the year was in North Kansas City. It was our third time cooking this one and this contest has had a few organizational problems in the past. This year they moved locations and fixed a few other issues and put together a pretty solid event. It's a shame the weather wasn't a little better.

With the new location the sites were all centrally located around Finnegen's, a bowling alley and event center in Northtown. This put us all closer to cleaner restrooms and it allowed them to hold the cook's meeting and awards indoors as opposed to outside as in years past. We also got a our full results print out instead of waiting for them to be posted online. There were some other issues with alcohol consumption that were worked out with NKC officials as well - which is good because I like to drink beer.

After braving the cold, wind, rain and snow we got everything turned in on time - but just barely...I took way too long on our pork & brisket boxes but Chris literally ran our boxes in just in time and in the end we faired pretty well - finishing first in ribs and ending up fourth overall. I was a little disappointed in our pork score as I thought it was pretty good. Chicken was OK. We tried a new recipe and it will need some tweaking, but we are on the right track. Brisket continues to weigh us down. We actually scored better than I thought we would, but I think it was just luck.

All in all it was a good weekend...we got to hang out with our ol' pals The Slabs and took in a few of the Big XII Basketball tournament games over at Pork Me Purple's site (nice brisket call, Jerrod), had a nice dinner with fam and friends on Friday, then we got a surprise visit from my buddy Officer Jon Going and we even came home with a little bit of money, which will help us keep feeding our BBQ habit.

Butt to Butt X Teams Announced

2008-03-03T23:30:00.010-06:00

The cooking teams that will compete in the 2008 Butt to Butt(c) Invitational were recently announced in the March issue of the Kansas City Bullsheet. We are excited beyond words to be part of this group of fantastic teams! Cookers like Johnny Trigg of Smokin' Triggers (pictured with his wife, Trish after his Butt to Butt win in 2007) and Chris Lilly of Big Bob Gibson's are legendary on the competition circuit and you will be hard pressed to find better competition cooks than Bad Byron of ButtRub.com and Rod Gray of Pellet Envy...hell, every team in this group is threat to take home a Grand Championship every time they fire up their pit!

The Butt to Butt Invitational is a truely unique event...Every July for the past ten years, cooking teams from nine different events across the country and the Pork Team of the Year have all been invited to Shannon, Illinois (pop. 900) for the opportunity to cook and turn in one category and one category only: pork butt. Every year the winner scores a cash prize and a handsome plaque, but the most coveted prize is the boar's tooth that contest organizer Mike Lake personally harvests.

Here are the 2008 Qualifiers and the event at which they each qualified:

(which one of these teams doesn't belong?)

Wild Bunch Butt Burners....BBQ & Blues Challenge; Hammond, LA

Pellet Envy........................Capitol City Cookoff; Jeff City, MO

Dodge County Smokers......Great American BBQ Invitational; Kansas City, KS

Weekend Smokers..............Iowa St. Championship; Marshalltown, IA

Smokin' Triggers.................Butt to Butt IX Winner; Shannon, IL

Chi-Town Smokers.............Illinois St. Championship; Shannon, IL

J-Mack Cookers.................Amazin' Blazin' Cookoff; Lebanon, TN

Big Bob Gibson's.................American Royal; Kansas City

The Heat Is On....................Jack Daniel's World Championship; Lynchburg, TN

ButtRub.com......................KCBS Pork Team of the Year

These guys are on a whole 'nother level! Chris and I are real proud of our pork and I always feel like we have a chance to win when we turn it in, but we are going to have to really nail it to have a respectable showing in this field. We can't wait to give it a shot!

I should also note that the regular KCBS contest that follows the Butt to Butt competition is one of the most highly regarded contests on the circuit. I have heard nothing but good things about Mike Lake and the top-notch event that he runs in Shannon. We are really looking forward to competing in the Illinois State BBQ Championship and Butt to Butt X on July 10th, 11th & 12th.

Starting the 2008 Season: Great Bend, KS

2008-02-28T22:30:00.001-06:00

I was pretty excited when I saw a few posts on the BBQ Forum late last year checking the interest level for a winter contest happening out in Great Bend, KS.

The weekend finally came February 15th & 16th. Chris and I packed up and drove the 4 hours to G.B. where we found the hospitality to be top notch and contest organizer Kent Romaine one of a kind!

This was unique event in that we had the option to set up camp indoors (in 70 degree comfort) while keeping our cooker outside. Quite a few teams choose to stay near their cookers, but a good number set up with us inside too. We were fortunate enough to set up next to our good friends Kyle and Steph from The Slabs.com.

Having our cooker outside and the rest of our stuff inside did prove to be somewhat of a challenge. We are so used to working close to our cooker and had to adapt to having it over a hundred feet away. It's really not that far - but you are used to it being three feet away - well, it might as well be a mile! I had brought our wireless thermometers to monitor the pit temperature, but the distance from the pit coupled with the fact that we were inside the build with the receiver rendered it useless. Thank goodness for our BBQ Guru Pit Minder forced draft control. But we couldn't use that with out incident either...

I had sent my Guru unit in to have problem looked at and got it back the the day before we left. I thought the root of the problem I was having was a burned lead wire on my probe. So I ordered a new one and the problem persisted. After sending it in and not finding a problem, it was shipped back and we set it up to cook - but again we ran into a brick wall. Chris then decided to cut out the burned up spot of the lead, splice it back together and we were in business. So new probe lead was the problem and upon learning this, Fred Jr at Guru headquarters offered to ship me a new one.

Back to the contest...once we got the cooker set up we put a tent up around it to deflect the wind and chilly temps that dipped below 20 degrees over night. We made a few trips out in the cold to check on things and I made the rounds checking out some of the other cooks.

The contingent of cookers at this contest was quite impressive. I have to think that the fact that no other cook-off was happening helped bring in some very successful teams. Chris and I were just hoping to get a couple of calls when the awards rolled around. We have some work to do on our brisket, but we did get calls in ribs and pork. Chicken was middle of the road.

We won't be able to make it back to Great Bend for the contest that Kent puts on in July, but I would highly recommend it based on our experience at the Kansas Winter Q. Oh - and it should be noted that Bart Clark of Twin Oak Smokin' Crew took Grand Champ honors at the contest. His winning score of 691 and change in one of the first contests of 2008, fighting the cold and wind on the plains of Kansas in February, was higher than any winning score put up in all of 2007. Quite an accomplishment.

Who We Are...

2008-02-19T00:24:00.000-06:00

written by Neal

The Dodge County Smokers BBQ team was established in the summer of 2005. We are Neal Dunker and Chris Nickelson. By chance we became neighbors in Mission, KS when we moved into houses that had backyards facing each other.

Some time later I entered a BBQ contest just a few blocks away at the Mission Community Center. It was a small, unsanctioned event, but I was in way over my head. Chris stopped by to check it out and visit and ended up staying and lending a big hand. We ended up finishing 4th overall and even scored a 4th place ribbon in brisket. I was hooked on competition BBQ and Chris was ready to jump in too. We formed a team and cooked in five more contests in 2005, even winning a few ribbons along the way.

We had a few team name changes along the way, but settled on Dodge County Smokers - named for the county in Nebraska where I grew up and where my dad, Richard Dunker, designed and built our cooker after attending that first contest in Mission. He figured he could do a better job building a cooker than the others he saw at that contest, and he was right.

I am starting this blog to document our 2008 BBQ season. I am really looking forward to it as we'll be cooking some different events for us and we have qualified for some exciting invitation-only contests. I invite you to follow along. It should be quite a ride.