T
thundercloud
Guest
Hi All,
I am a newbie from Central Missouri. I am not an expert at BBQ. I am 57 YO and still learning. It looks like I have come to a good place.
One thing I have done is help cook BBQ mutton at our Lions Club Fall Festival. The festival is an annual event that has happened every year since 1950. At one time we cooked as many as 100 sheep for the festival which we call ' The little Worlds Fair'. The locals just jokingly call it the Worlds Fair.
Most of the old mutton eaters have died off. There was a few years we had trouble with the man who cooked the sauce and sales fell further. Now we cook between 60 and 65 sheep.
I was the club's secretary for ten years.I no longer help cook. I became disabled 4 years ago. I tried helping after that but it did not work out for me. Otherwise I was one of 4 cooks from 1986 until 2006. I am no longer a member of the club.
I'm not really sure that we should be calling it BBQ mutton. What we would do was start about 4:30 AM . We loaded 30 to 35 sheep in two huge vats and 300 lbs of beef in a smaller vat. We cooked over a wood fire. We put in onions, black pepper, red pepper, white vinegar, and apples if we had them. We would cook until 3 or 4 in the afternoon. Then we fired up our two big grills. We pulled the mutton out and put it in metal grided baskets. We took each basket and put all of them on the grills for an hour.
We did it mostly to get the grease out of the mutton and hopefully get a little smoke flavor in.
When this process was done we loaded it all up and hauled it to the Lions Club Hall. That is when the pickers and cutters started their work. Myself, I and another member would go back to the vats and begin the clean up for the next days work. When we finished there I would run home, take a shower, then head down to help the pickers and cutters. Depending on how much help you had we finished around 10 or 11 o'clock that evening.
At 4:30 the next morning the process started all over again.
The finished product was held in cold storage for a day until the festival started. When the festival started one volunteer would cook the BBQ sauce. The meat was heated up in warming trays, salted, then the BBQ sauce was added and allowed to cook into the meat. We had an older man cook the sauce for many years. He eventually got too old to do it. A younger fellow took over. To be fair I do not think the older fellow passed on all of his secrets as the sauce was never the same. To make matters worse the younger guy thought you could water the sauce down.
They eventually fired him after losing a lot of customers. The sauce is much better now but it still ain't the same. To make matters worse the County Food inspectors stepped in a few years ago and made us switch methods of cooking to what they approved. None of them know anything about cooking mutton except what they read in a book. Those folks are some of the most by the book people I have ever met.
Anyhow that is pretty much my story. I did forget to mention that all of this takes place in the Missouri River Flood Plain. The flood has never got in our vats but it had come close. Our park and hall does flood which causes our members much more work than a normal organization has to do even years later. We cannot leave our equipment in the park. Each year it has to be moved down to the park for the fair and then moved back to higher ground after the fair ends. We mutton cooks got in on all that too. We were what I call the core group of workers. Our club had 65 members. Out of the 65 there are a group of about 8 that you can depend on all the time. There were several years our core dropped to three people.
I'm glad to be here and I hope to learn from you folks. You folks are the experts.
I am a newbie from Central Missouri. I am not an expert at BBQ. I am 57 YO and still learning. It looks like I have come to a good place.
One thing I have done is help cook BBQ mutton at our Lions Club Fall Festival. The festival is an annual event that has happened every year since 1950. At one time we cooked as many as 100 sheep for the festival which we call ' The little Worlds Fair'. The locals just jokingly call it the Worlds Fair.
Most of the old mutton eaters have died off. There was a few years we had trouble with the man who cooked the sauce and sales fell further. Now we cook between 60 and 65 sheep.
I was the club's secretary for ten years.I no longer help cook. I became disabled 4 years ago. I tried helping after that but it did not work out for me. Otherwise I was one of 4 cooks from 1986 until 2006. I am no longer a member of the club.
I'm not really sure that we should be calling it BBQ mutton. What we would do was start about 4:30 AM . We loaded 30 to 35 sheep in two huge vats and 300 lbs of beef in a smaller vat. We cooked over a wood fire. We put in onions, black pepper, red pepper, white vinegar, and apples if we had them. We would cook until 3 or 4 in the afternoon. Then we fired up our two big grills. We pulled the mutton out and put it in metal grided baskets. We took each basket and put all of them on the grills for an hour.
We did it mostly to get the grease out of the mutton and hopefully get a little smoke flavor in.
When this process was done we loaded it all up and hauled it to the Lions Club Hall. That is when the pickers and cutters started their work. Myself, I and another member would go back to the vats and begin the clean up for the next days work. When we finished there I would run home, take a shower, then head down to help the pickers and cutters. Depending on how much help you had we finished around 10 or 11 o'clock that evening.
At 4:30 the next morning the process started all over again.
The finished product was held in cold storage for a day until the festival started. When the festival started one volunteer would cook the BBQ sauce. The meat was heated up in warming trays, salted, then the BBQ sauce was added and allowed to cook into the meat. We had an older man cook the sauce for many years. He eventually got too old to do it. A younger fellow took over. To be fair I do not think the older fellow passed on all of his secrets as the sauce was never the same. To make matters worse the younger guy thought you could water the sauce down.
They eventually fired him after losing a lot of customers. The sauce is much better now but it still ain't the same. To make matters worse the County Food inspectors stepped in a few years ago and made us switch methods of cooking to what they approved. None of them know anything about cooking mutton except what they read in a book. Those folks are some of the most by the book people I have ever met.
Anyhow that is pretty much my story. I did forget to mention that all of this takes place in the Missouri River Flood Plain. The flood has never got in our vats but it had come close. Our park and hall does flood which causes our members much more work than a normal organization has to do even years later. We cannot leave our equipment in the park. Each year it has to be moved down to the park for the fair and then moved back to higher ground after the fair ends. We mutton cooks got in on all that too. We were what I call the core group of workers. Our club had 65 members. Out of the 65 there are a group of about 8 that you can depend on all the time. There were several years our core dropped to three people.
I'm glad to be here and I hope to learn from you folks. You folks are the experts.
