> Cooks - what information on comment cards benefits you the most.
For me, I'd appreciate a comment on even the 7's, as constructive criticism is always appreciated. Simple comments are fine, like "too salty", "too sweet", "mushy", "tough", "burned", "thrown together", "too spicy", "bland/dull", "spices conflict". Many will write "under cooked" or "over cooked", when in truth it's either tough or mushy; I'd prefer the specific comment. For this reason I'm of the opinion that much of the comment card could be check-box listed, especially in tenderness and taste categories.
> What I was after was.... in most cases sauces are balanced with the meat,
> the rub(s), the smoke, so everything can work together to complement each
> other. Tasted alone, a sauce might be too spicy, too sweet or too peppery.
> But tasted along with the barbecue it might be a good fit.
For this reason above we rarely if ever any more put a sauce in the sauce competition. Our sauce works great with our rub and is very thin so as not to overpower the meat. Also, I think many of the sauces that win probably have smoke flavorings in them; our sauce doesn't because we've found that we have plenty of smoke flavor in the meat itself, we dont need additional/extra smoke flavors that possibly conflict or become overpowering. We'd put it (the sauce) in a few and was always in the top 1/3, but frankly it's not going to win a sauce (alone) competition, so we just dont waste our time and money going there...