Tony, nice to meet you. Had to leave when you were getting ready for rib turn in, so didn't want to bother you.
How did you do?
Tony in action
It was great to meet you. It does get sort of hectic until the last turn in. Sorry I couldn't spend more time with you.
I wish you had stuck around and tried my ribs, I sorta knew they were gonna place. I was a bit worried after the first round of judging though. Our son Chris judged that preliminary round and he said "man there are a lot of good ribs entered"
I ended up with a 9th in chicken and 2nd in ribs. I wasn't disappointed that my brisket didn't finish higher, It really didn't turn out all that good. I made two of them using a new method and I am way back on the power curve. I will go back to my old method and try to fine tune it.
I think I am at the point where I can fine tune my chicken and get them to where I can move up, that said, everyday is a different day...... You may have noticed from that picture that my chicken had a bunch of toothpicks in it. I used them to prevent the skin from shrinking up to much. It also aided in keeping the wing pinned down. I am learning a few new tricks each event. Eric showed me the toothpicks on the skin and I decided to do the wing thing on my own...at least one semi-original thought occurred yesterday. Eric may have told me to pin the wing down too....If you did thanks!
I had a lot of help from Eric (DeezQ) and Brian (EyeQ) and a bunch of other folks in getting to this point. You would also be surprised at the little important pieces of information you can pick up by asking questions from fellow competitors. You just need to learn to desiminate the fact from the fiction. My team of Dywayne, Sheila, Amie and myself have certainly learned a lot in just three contests. I do tend to over analyze at times. All these guys tend to keep me in check.
BTW, Robert Waters of Smokin Waters BBQ won GC. There were a total of 28 teams entered. That was a great number of teams considering that it started raining Friday around noon and didn't stop until 2AM Saturday. I can tell you, it rained a major storm from about 8PM until 1AM too. I was visiting one guys pit and he had water up over my ankles.
At this event, I also met BBQ101 and KellerSteeler for the first time.