Question for you MBN Teams

Tommy,

Good luck. I have the same problem here in the middle o nowhere GA. You'll want to cook a minimum of 6 whole shoulders; we cook 8. MBN gets meat-expensive, FAST.

Best of luck with it, and have a good time!!!

Sansing Meats in Maben MS has whole hogs. They raise the pigs themselves, and are usually very good. They can also get you shoulders, or you can have your local meat shop order cryovac'd shoulders in for you. You can also try US Foods or Sysco if you have access to an account-even a friendly restaurant may order them for you and let you pay the invoice.

I got nothing for you in that part of the state. If you were up in the Northern part I would reccomend a place or two that I used.

The MBN contests feature great people and teams, the only drawback is the judging process requires cooking lots of meat for each category, which can make the event rather expensive for the teams, especially small teams that don't have many members to disperse the expenses.

Best of Luck!

Being a bit curious, I see the recommendation for shoulders, how many slabs are you guys cooking for judging as well?

We would buy our BB ribs by the 30# case, avg 15 slabs / case. Many contests we would cull through a case-and-a-half just to have enough of what we thought were the best to offer the judges.

Example: 3 - 4 slabs to pick through for the preliminary blind box, 1 rack for each judge in on-site preliminary (while always displaying 3 racks on the cooker for each on-site judge. Then we will have four more slabs to offer the finals judges, each judge is served their own rack as part of the finals presentation.

When we just cooked ribs at MIM we would buy 3 cases to cull through and cook the culls for friends & family leading up to the big day.

We are thinking about Ridgeland, but haven't made up our minds yet. Cleveland, MS is a great contest with the best trophies in BBQ- we don't really care about trophies anymore but theirs are awesome. We will do Indianola (the BB King Festival) if we can schedule it in.
Feel free to hit me with an email yazoosdeltaqATyahoo.com. We never mind helping teams get started in MBN. We really enjoy KCBS, but there is nothing in the world of competitive BBQ that will get your adrenaline going like making finals at an MBN.

crd26a said:

Being a bit curious, I see the recommendation for shoulders, how many slabs are you guys cooking for judging as well?

Click to expand...

crd26a, we go with a case, but only a case of BB's. We've had fair luck
with the 15+- racks that we get. There's only been one time that I can
think of where we really wished we'd had another rack or two... Still,
15+- racks of ribs, and 8 good sized whole shoulders adds up, FAST.