[rtboswell]

Finished our first comp this past weekend and while it was fun we were a bit disappointed in our cook and results. We competed in the backyard division at Pigs and Peaches in Kennesaw, Georgia, along with twenty nine other amateur teams. We just missed get a call for pork by .6 of a point and ended up in fourth for that category, While we cleaned up the pork box a bit more after the photo below I would have spent some more time with the box if my teammates weren't so antsy about getting it out of there!

Now for the bad part: we got hammered on the most important category taste for our chicken and ribs. Going into the comp I was super concerned about appearance because I thought we had taste nailed. Turns out I was worried bout the wrong thing. We got all 9's for our ribs (in our rush we forgot to a pic), mostly 9's on pork, and oddly on the chicken we got four 9's, a seven and a six. The judge who gave us a six was apparently cranky and scored everyone super low on the day. That judge gave us a five on taste which tanked us; the rest of the taste scores for chicken were all over the board with a 9 and 8 sprinkled in with a few 7's, a 6, and the 5.

Here's where I need some help from those in the Georgia area on my flavor profile. Any ideas of where I could go would be awesome. I marinated the chicken in Zesty Italian dressing for about ten hours (per Killer Hogs comp timeline and my practice runs), drained it off, rinsed off the chicken and rubbed it down with Plowboys Yardbird below the skin on both sides, added the skin back and hit the top. The skins were all scraped of fat and see through.

We placed them in a mini-loaf pan and placed that in a half steam pan of butter that came up half-way on the pieces. We cooked it in butter, removed it and cooked it for awhile in the loaf pans placed into a new, clean half steam pan. Then we sauced them with a warmed up 50/50 mixture of Blues Hog Original/Blues Hog TN Red. Back in the cooker to set the sauce, pulled, picked out the six best, dunked them in the sauce again, added a little Smoking Guns finishing rub, boxed them and spritzed with apple juice to melt the rub and give a shine. We thought they tasted good, but apparently we don't know what the hell we are talking about. In fairness to us the table that our chicken hit was one of the lower scoring tables on the day and all of their chicken entries except one were in the bottom half. Still, I am looking to sort out this flavor profile issue.

Same with ribs. I rubbed them with Killer Hogs rub about thirty minutes before they went onto the cooker. I mopped them with an apple cider/veg oil combo that Killer Hogs recommends and hit them with more rub at one hour into the cook. At two hours I foiled them meat side down on top of a pile of brown sugar, butter, and honey (a decent amount, but maybe I need more?). Returned to the cooker for about an hour, pulled them off for a brief rest so we could work with them again, and then sauced with the same BH 50/50 mixture and put back on the cooker for about thirty minutes. They looked beautiful, but coming off the cooker there was no pop; in fact the flavors seemed to be leached off the ribs almost completely. They were bland. We added more sauce and that helped, but there was no heat at all. Just a semi-sweet, still too bland taste. We hit them with a little cayenne and that seemed to help but they weren't salvageable.

We cook ribs at 275 for about 3.5 hours on a Backwoods Fatboy. Two hours of smoke, one hour in foil with the mixture I mentioned above and then sauced and on cooker for about another half hour. For some reason when I've used foil, even with a mixture of all of the above, it seems to leach SO much flavor out of the ribs. Any ideas for what I'm doing wrong? Any flavor profile suggestions for those of you who have competed in Georgia?