It was my first my first comp also, I cooked with my uncle, Tim's Tailgate BBQ Team. We got 4th chicken. Lot of work for two guys.
Nice! Congrats on the chicken. I was sitting on the floor right in front of the stage (right side if you were looking at it) during the awards.
It sure was a lot of work, wasn't it? With an extra hand and some of the prep tips from this thread, I hope to be able to walk around more during the next comp.
For your first cook you guys did very good. You should try cooking LSBS or IBCA there are tons of them around all year long. I know Woody well and talk with him couple of times a week and comp cook with him at least 15 times a year. You can learn a lot from him. Only advice I would give you is to do all of your meat prep at home. It will make Friday so much easier.
Hope to meet down the road look for me Kevin Riley Circle R Cookers
Woody is a really, really awesome guy. When I told him we got 29th in brisket, he hugged me and made it feel like we won the whole damn contest. I really hope to get to cook alongside him again down the road.
We are looking for LSBS and IBCA events that work with our schedule.
Great performance, great wrapup! You've gotten a lot of good advice above, so rather than be repetitive can I just say how much I love the name Pitfaced?!! :thumb:
Thanks a ton! You are more than welcome to compliment the name. It might have been the best thing going for us last weekend :tongue:. Every once in a while, I get a stroke of creativity. :biggrin1:
WRONG,WRONG,WRONG !!!!!
This is a great opportunity to reach a large number of judges to try and correct a fatal flaw in judges thinking.
You NEVER score down for personal likes or dislikes. A judges job is to score each and every box AS PRESENTED. It doesn't matter if you think chicken balls don't look like chicken, only to score it as presented.
Ask yourself questions like did this cook do a excellent job making the chicken balls? Are they cooked well, is there symmetry in the presentation?
Do you want to taste it as it is because it looks like it might be good?
When you do taste it and it has an excellent combination of spices, the sauce seems to add to the flavor and it is juicy and has great tenderness.
At that point you realize that this cook did an excellent job with his chicken category and you cannot go back to the presentation score to correct it because you automatically dissed it with your personal dislike of chicken balls.
I for one, and probably more than us don't really care for chicken balls, but I make myself ignore that fact and reach a score based only on how the cook presented his category.
Please judges, learn to leave your personal preferences at home before coming to the contest.
Ed
Didn't mean to sound like an attack, but this issue is important for the cooks. They deserve a even playing field regardless of our personal likes or dislikes.
This was the impression that Woody and the other people that I talked with at the comp gave me. I get that some (many?) people don't want their chicken looking like that, but if I can make it look uniform with good color and otherwise appealing looking, I should go for it. For 1st timers, 8/8/9/9/8/8 wasn't bad on appearance, I thought. We want to be better, and ditching the balls may ultimately be the answer, but it was far from our achilles heel in this comp. But what do I know.
As a cook and a CBJ, I looked at the box and the questions that came to mind is, WTF is this, hamsters, mystery meat, etc? I'm not sure I want to take a bite of whatever it is so my appearance score should reflect this. Give it a generous 4 and move on! It may be the best thing since chopped liver but from the picture, it may be chicken because someone said that is the current category. I'll with hold judgment on taste and tenderness until I try to figure out how to bite it and do so without using a glass of water to take the pill.
Fortunately, this comp appeared to have judges that are able to discern the difference between hamster and chicken. Good luck on that whole "figuring out how to eat food" thing, though. I could see that being an issue for a CBJ.