One Minute Monday

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

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

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.

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

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

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!

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!