Disclaimer: If you don't know about scoring don't bother to read the following - this was FBA NOT KCBS so we don't really need suggestions at this time - this is posted for general information and NOT as a gripe (well maybe a little!) - we were the newest team and just about the only team that wasn't a caterer, full or part-time equipment manufacturer, vendor, or restaurant operator.
Well, it was a weekend!
Good weather, I scored a generator for the RV on Thursday so we had air conditioning in the trailer, great people at the cook off but from what staff we saying attendance was way down - probably as a result of the hurricanes and people being busy. Some had just gotten electricity restored to their homes on Friday. The staff was great -- the event was fully supported by the city, the American Legion, the Sheriff's office and Police departments, the Fire department, Kiwanis (they hosted the kid's cook off!) and so on. Great facility - nice lawn with water and electric for each site - and your own fire ant hill, too!!
And then there was the cook off. Tim and I had cooked some great food and didn't place in any categories!
We are not sure what the problem was since we got 8's to 10's on taste and tenderness but were getting slammed on appearance - and since there is no critique available we have NO idea what was wrong - especially since in one category we got a 10 in appearance from one judge and a 7.5 from another! The pulled pork really has me snookered - maybe I didn't "shred" the pork enough or something. Go figure.
Anyway, we didn't totally stink up the place - we were 10 out of 17 overall and got as high as 7th in the individual meats.
Scoring is similar to KCBS - scores go from 5 to 10 in .5 increments. And we were scored on appearance, tenderness, and taste.
Our overall score was 699.7358 and this put us 41.69 behind the Grand Chamions (741.4279) - now, interestingly enough, the Reserve Champions were at 715.2118 or a little over 26 points behind first and at that point the scores tighened up -- at 10th place we were only about 15.5 points behind the Reserve.
Anyway our scores were as follows:
(The columns are the different judges)
Chicken 9th
Appearance 9.0 8.5 8.0 8.5 9.0 10.0
Tenderness 8.0 8.5 8.0 9.0 9.0 10.0
Taste 8.5 8.5 8.5 8.5 9.0 9.5
Ribs 8th
Appearance 8.0 7.5 7.5 8.5 9.0 9.0
Tenderness 8.5 10 8.0 9.0 9.0 8.5
Taste 8.5 9.5 8.0 8.5 9.0 9.0
Pork 10th
Appearance 8.5 8.5 7.5 9.0 7.0 8.5
Tenderness 10 9.5 8.5 9.5 8.5 9.0
Taste 9.5 9.5 8.5 9.0 8.0 8.5
Brisket 7th
Appearance 10 7.5 8.5 9.0 9.5 9.5
Tenderness 9.0 8.0 8.0 8.5 8.5 8.5
Taste 9.0 8.5 8.0 9.0 8.5 9.5
Tim and I are looking at getting the judges training at the end of the month and see if we can get a handle on what we were doing or not doing.
Also, we are looking at doing the KCBS cook off in Plant City in November.
