The FIERY FURNACE Breathes Again!!!! --PORK PRON

chambersuac said:

Sounds like you and Your son did a great job. Looking forward to pics, if ya got em.

Click to expand...

I did take some more photos on Saturday, but unfortunately, once things got really crazy, the photography stopped. After 9 pm, when the chicken finally all came off, my mind and body started shutting down and it was all I could do to clean up and get home.

I had planned on taking a lot of photos of various things around the festival, but I kept putting it off, thinking I'd have all day on Saturday, then things got crazy.

Here's some photos that I did get.....

The Fiery Furnace, firing up at a little after 5 am, tucked in behind the kitchen at the back of the school.....




The set up:






Pork injected, rubbed and on......







So, I've had 4 of these stainless steel racks, each about 2'x4' in my attic for some time waiting for a good use. When this big chicken cook came up, I asked a buddy to help me out and he did a splendid job. He welded four 1" steel tubes into the existing corner holes of the shelves to give each of them a 6" lift. The Fiery Furnace racks are 12" apart, so adding three of these shelves nearly doubled the capacity for smaller items like ribs or chicken quarters. Here's one after he brought them to me last week:



Here they are in action. This was right after the initial loading of the chicken on the smoker. You can't really see all the pieces, but there are probably about 200-250 white and dark quarters on there...






And THAT is the extent of the photos I got on Saturday.



The parish listed Big Wampus BBQ as one of their "Gold Level Sponsors". They had asked me what something like this would cost if we were providing the service "for real" and based on the estimate I gave them, they qualified that as a "Gold Level" sponsorship.

All of the volunteers working the festival wore these shirts. I was unaware that we'd be given such props, but was pretty excited that we were. Here's some photos of the shirt....

The front logo on the left chest:



Here's the back, listing various sponsors:



OH YEAH!




THEN, my son and I were walking around on Friday night and in the Music Tent, where the band was rockin out, we noticed something else....





As I said, my son made me very proud. He not only was willing to help out, but insisted on it. He's been hanging out with me by the smoker since I got into BBQ and he's been watching and learning, which is why I felt completely comfortable with letting him handle the pulled pork station.

How it worked was I had my large cooler there, full of foil wrapped butts, below a table that had a bus tub and a shaker full of rub. When they were running low on pulled pork, he'd pull a couple more butts, removing all fat and add a little rub to the pork, mix it up well and dump it into the roaster on the line.

NOT ONLY THAT, but they were actually short handed at the serving line, so he ended up also serving burgers, grilled chicken and pulled pork as runners needed it. ALL DAY AND NIGHT. I don't know a lot of 13 year olds who would have hung like he did. He literally worked for more than 9 hours straight. They tell me that they had to sort of FORCE him to take breaks and get something to eat. I had a lot of people tell me that day (as I was around the back of the building and couldn't check on him much" that he was a real hard worker. People were truly impressed. One guy came around at one point and told me that he'd told Guerin that he was really impressed by how hard and long he was working and that his efforts were really appreciated and Guerin replied, "Well, that's what Wilkersons do." :clap: :thumb:

Couldn't be more proud of him and my wife, who was handling frozen/raw chicken for about 4-5 hours straight in the kitchen.




All in all, it was a fantastic event.

I'm sorry that I didn't take more photos of the event.
HOWEVER, it was pretty much the same layout (and a lot of the same people working) as last year. Here are several photos from last year's festival that I did take:

We were in the same place as last year. Last year, I had the CTO there, but other than that, everything was set up the same. You can see the tables and the cooler full of butts below it:



























MY BOY (from last year....he's bigger now :becky









And the pork.....they tell me it was better this year. Everything was the same EXCEPT for the cooker! Perhaps THAT was the difference?!?! :thumb: