I'm fairly new to BBQ judging; I've judged three comps so far this year. On chicken, in my opinion, I think some cooks might take uniformity and manipulation of the natural shape of the meat a bit too far. One box at the last competition I judged, a box contained six chicken thighs which, to me, because of their precise identical shape and size, and obviously some molding, they looked like processed chicken of some sort you might get from the Swhann Man as opposed to natrual thighs i would expect to get at the supermarket, a family BBQ, or a resturant. I judge the meat's apprearence based on how much I want to take a bite just by looking at it, and if it doesn't look like a natural chicken shape, its not as appealing to me. Some effort at uniformity, triming, and such is obviously necessary, but I think it can be taken too far and make the meat look unnatrual.
And I realize this is just my opinion, but I want a box of chicken thighs to look like what they're supposed to be, chicken thighs, not like a box of giant processed chicken nuggets. I still gave the chicken an 8 in appearance because the meat was nicely arranged in the box, a lot of effort was made to put together a nice looking box, and the meat appeared to have great color and glaze, but I was turned off because of the overly manipulated appearance of the meat. I'd be interested in thoughts and comments about that. Maybe I should reconsider my thinking, and I'm open to ideas on the topic.
I know a lot, lot of work goes into making the chicken look uniform, but can uniformity be taken too far? Just throwing that out there for thoughts.
Mabye a bit off topic, since the original post is about ribs.
