Skinless Whole Shoulder?

95% of the shoulders I've seen in MBN comps do in fact have the skin taken off the shoulder, less what we call the "collar", which is the skin covering the shank bone of the whole shoulder. The collar helps hold the shank bone in place. Without it, there's a good change over the course of the cook the shank bone will fall out of the shoulder due to the meat shrinking down the shank bone as well as the tenderness of the meat surrounding the bone. For presentation purposes you want that shank bone intact and show the judge it pulls out clean. What varies from team to team is the size of a collar left on the shoulder. Some cut it down to just a few inches in width, others leave a large 6 inch or so collar on. Most meat presented to judges comes from the butt anyway, which is on the exact opposite end of the shoulder so that side gives you plenty of bark as it's normally cooked with both the skin and the fat cap off.

That's my two cents. Whole shoulders are awesome, and a ton of fun in my opinion. Hope that helps. You by chance doing Smokin Aces in two weeks at Harrah's Tunica?

oh man, I would LOVE to do the Big Pig Jig. That is #1 on the list of comps we don't do but want to. I just can't swing it with my team. It's all to do with vacation days. After allocating vacation days to Memphis in May, and then doing the local area comps that all require a day off, we can't swing the days necessary to head down to Georgia. But man, that one would be awesome.

I see you've got a Bubba Grill on the way. Nice pit if I'm thinking of the same Bubba Grills that I know out of Georgia. That's a great team and a great bunch of guys. I think they've got a large presence every year at the Jig.