olewarthog
Full Fledged Farker
- Joined
- Jan 7, 2010
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Superior Smokers and Right on Que will be cooking a few GBAs this year. We are looking forward to getting to know some of the GBA teams.
Kevin
Which ones are you looking at??? We are thinking about trying some gba's
Thanks for the information. I like the fact that there is no garnish. I also like the pork loin aspect. The Hog Jam looks to be about 8 hours away. It would be interesting to do something different from KCBS style competitions and to also see how much, if any, the flavor profiles vary between Georgia and Ohio.
^^^ Yep. Like in MBN, keep in mind that with any luck you'll make finals. It's up to you as to what you present for finals, and luckily unlike MBN finals in GBA are blind. Meaning, in MBN you'll present new/fresh racks of ribs, or whole pork shoulders, etc. Blind, if you want to "rob" your existing BBQ, that's up to you. I personally wouldn't, but that's me.
To me, that's part of the fun of it. Also it takes the tie-breaker B.S. out of the mix, for at least the top 3 teams in each category. There's more to winning than just winning your table; it's about the best BBQ out there on this day.
So do you stagger your cook times to accommodate the 2 turn in times (hedging your bet that you'll make finals)?
If winning the contests is your goal, you must stagger your meats. Fresh hot product wins finals.
Be prepared to cook a lot of meat and have almost all of it on at the same time at one point.
4-6 butts
3-8 racks of ribs
2 pork loins
You cook a lot of food and use a lot more of everything else to cook these contests. I also would not want to cook one solo. I do think that GBA is a good bit more work than KCBS.
They are generally very well run contests and everyone is very friendly.
Flavor profile? As a judge who was right at becoming a Master Judge, then they moved the mark, so I'm now at the old mark but not a MJ... there is no one "flavor profile" that wins. Certainly over the last 10 or so years BBQ in this region has gotten sweeter, but savory wins as often as sweet. I'd say ribs tend to be slightly sweeter than say pulled pork, but we've seen the sweetening of loins do ok too. More than anything, the balance seems to perform best, and those that hit the tenderness mark perfectly (can be very tough to do in loin) tend to make finals most.