I managed to get the Explorer packed the night before the Snowshoe. The only thing left to do on the morning of the competition was to get dressed and pack the cooler...and stop for coffee, of course. Luckily, everything was arranged in the refrigerator so I could take everything off two shelves and feel confident that I didn’t leave anything behind. We woke up around 5:00am, packed up the food, and left the house around 6:00am.
We were one of the first teams to get there, arriving at the Abington VFW a little before 7:30am. I wanted to get set up and the meat inspected as early as possible, because there was quite a bit of flavorizing that needed to happen before we started cooking. Gary Taft, the organizer of the event along with his wife Michelle, was already there chatting with some of the competitors. Michelle arrived right after we got there. We asked them where we should set up and, once the site was decided, we promptly unloaded.
Gary inspected our meat to make sure it was being kept at the proper temperature and that it was unseasoned—except for the fatty sausage, which was allowed to be pre-seasoned. Once that was done, we pulled out our timeline and took things step by step. I won’t bore you with all the details of every little thing we did. Not because anything we do is secret, but it would make for an extremely long, boring blog entry. In short, we mixed the additives into the fatty and the ground beef, marinated the pork and fish and everything was running smoothly. The fatty was going to be cooked in one of our WSMs, so I started the charcoal just prior to going to the cook’s meeting.
Everything was going according to plan. The fatties were placed on the smoker pretty much on schedule (around 10:30am). Suzanne prepped the turn-in containers ahead of time so we wouldn’t be rushing around during crunch time. I started the charcoal for the Weber kettle at around 11:00am. I even had time to take a few walks—partly to chat with fellow competitors and partly to burn off some nervous energy. It was great to see lots of familiar faces like Mike from Lakeside and Eric from Yabba Dabba Que, and we also got a chance to meet several new folks. My friend Gary, all around good guy and creator of Pigtrip, also stopped by to chat with us a few times.
But before we knew it, grilling time was upon us. As with the previous post, here is a rundown by category…
Fish
I put the fish on the grill around 11:40am because I knew it would cook pretty quickly. I got some nice grill marks on it, which was a bit surprising because I’m usually not very good at that. I was also a bit nervous because I only had eight pieces of fish and had to turn in at least six. All eight ended up looking really good, but the presentation looked better if only six pieces were turned in, so that’s what we did. Plus I wanted to try a piece to make sure it was edible before we turned it in. I thought it tasted just ok. I also thought it could have used one more minute on the grill, but Suzanne thought it was great. She was right. It was our best entry of the day, earning 4th place. I was shocked to hear the call.
Pork Tenderloin
This cooks fast too, although not quite a fast as the fish. I put the pork on right after I took the fish off the grill (after cleaning the grate, of course). Again, everything was going fine with the pork. One of them got a little darker than I had hoped, but we had plenty of pork to spare so it wasn’t a big deal. It was moist and I thought it tasted pretty good. While it didn’t do as well as I expected, it finished in the top half of the pack, earning 9th place. There were a lot of great teams at this competition and most had a lot more experience than me. I really couldn’t complain.
Fatty
In terms of cooking, this was by far the easiest category. I put the fatties on the WSM and let them cook for a couple hours. They got done a little faster on contest day than in my practice runs, but it wasn’t a big deal. I wrapped them in foil, put them in the empty cooler, and they were the perfect temperature when it came time for fatty turn in. After everything was cooked at 1:30, this was the entry I was happiest with and I was pretty confident it would get us a call. I was right, but surprisingly our fish was better that day. We got a medal for 5th place in fatty. I was thrilled to get two calls. This was a day when only four teams earned two or more calls.
Burger
As I mentioned in my “Preparation” post, I was really happy with the burger idea going into the contest. Suzanne and I both really liked what we came up with. We were a bit rushed with the burger category on the day of the contest, mostly because we had the fries to deal with for garnish as well. The other small issue was that I didn’t manage our fire quite as well as I could have. I used Wicked Good briquettes, and I only lit one chimney at 11:00. By 1:10pm when I put the burgers on, the fire was not as hot as I would have liked it to be. At that point it was too late to solve the problem and we just had to keep the lid on the kettle and hope that there was enough heat to get the burgers to my target temperature. The burgers were perfect for me, hovering between rare and medium-rare, but I feared they were a bit undercooked for those judges who like their burgers more on the medium to medium-well side. Alas, it was the worst category of the day, finishing 14th. I’m still convinced that the concept was good, but the execution was definitely lacking. Chalk it up to a valuable learning experience.
Overall
Despite a very disappointing burger score, we ended up 6th overall. I was ecstatic. Getting one call was great. Getting two calls was unbelievable. Finishing 6th overall among such a strong pack of competitors made me smile for a week. I swear that if Suzanne woke up in the middle of the night and looked over at me that I would have still had a grin from ear to ear even in my sleep.
Will I cook at the Snowshoe again? Absolutely. Gary and Michelle Taft are excellent organizers/hosts who welcome barbeque newbies like me with open arms. I’d encourage anyone who is thinking about competing in their first grilling competition to give the Snowshoe a try. Thanks for everything, Michelle and Gary!
We finished packing our gear and headed home. We were both pretty tired after such a long day. We made it home, unpacked, and got cleaned up. It was supper time and after weeks of eating fish, pork tenderloins, fatties, and burgers we wanted something different. Time for a pizza!
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
Friday, April 17, 2009
First Grilling Competition: Preparation in Retrospect
A strong intention in the mind is often overcome by a stronger fatigue of the body.
It was my intent, competing in my first ever grilling contest, to blog the entire journey. The preparation, practicing, joys, sorrows—all were going to be detailed in my blog. Leading up to the event, I recorded every recipe I tried, including not only the ingredients but also outside temperature/weather, cooker temperature, type and amount of charcoal used, length of time each meat spent on the grill, and on and on and on. It simply left no time for blogging, other than the occasional Facebook status update. I was nervous as hell that I would embarrass myself at the contest, and I was determined to make sure that didn’t happen. The last thing on my mind at the end of the day was blogging. As my father often says “we make ourselves too busy.” That makes a whole lot more sense to me than some of his other sayings, like “go take a flying leap into a rolling donut.”
So here we are. A full month has passed since the Shoeshoe Grilling Competition in Abington, MA and I’m just getting around to blogging about it. Better late than never, and I want to write things down before I forget everything. This entry will focus on the weeks leading up to the completion. Another entry will be devoted to the actual day of the competition. For those interested in grilling, competitions, food in general, or perhaps all of those things, happy reading.
I’m going to recap the preparation phase by category. The categories for the competition were: fish, pork tenderloin, sausage fatty, and burger.
Fish
I had grilled fish only a handful of times prior to preparing for this competition. My wife and I simply don’t eat a lot of fish, and when we do it is usually baked (her) or fried (me). Grilled fish isn’t something I grew up eating, so I never crave it or think about cooking it that way.
So the first step was to decide what type of fish I wanted to cook. In my mind, there were only two options: salmon or swordfish. Some competitors like to cook tuna, but my opinion is that many judges don’t like it—or at least they don’t like it the way tuna should be eaten. I decided on swordfish 1) because I like it better than salmon and 2) I feel it is the easiest fish to grill. At a first competition, easy sounded just fine to me!
In terms of flavors to add to the fish, I decided on a basic Asian marinade with very mild flavors. My first test turned out surprisingly well. The only complaint was that the fish need just a little bit more flavor than what the marinade provided, given the abbreviated marinating time that would be allowed at the competition.
For the second test, I used a commercial glaze at the end to give the swordfish a little added kick. Success. The fish was good to go after two trial cooks. Thank goodness, because swordfish isn’t cheap.
Pork Tenderloin
As with the fish, pork isn’t something I grill a lot. We eat a lot of smoked ribs and pork butt, but I’m not a big fan of pork chops, tenderloin, etc. That said, I must admit that I had never in my life cooked pork tenderloin. Never. I did a bit of reading on cooking techniques for pork tenderloin, and found some good advice from the folks at Cooks Illustrated. Whenever I need to learn about the science behind cooking something new, I turn to Cooks Illustrated. It’s an excellent resource.
After investigating the art and science of cooking pork tenderloin, I again decided that mild Asian flavors would pair well with it. My first cook used a similar marinade, although not exactly the same, as the fish marinade. It tasted great, and was moist and flavorful. To make sure it wasn’t a fluke, I did a second cook which produced the same result. I decided to use a little bit of commercial glaze on the pork as well, and it made the taste buds happy. Two categories down, two to go.
Sausage Fatty
Once again, fatties were something totally foreign to me. I’d read a lot about them, but had never cooked one before. Under the advice of many posts I had read about fatties, my first couple of fatty cooks were basically taking the fatty out of the casing, rubbing them, and smoking them with fruit wood. My wife tried my first two fatty attempts, declared them disgusting, and refused to try any further fatty concoctions. Honestly, I don’t blame her. I’m not a huge fan either. But I had to keep practicing until I came up with a recipe and technique I was happy with.
Unlike the fish and pork, I had to cook fatties several times before I was satisfied. There are several different flavor profiles you can use with a fatty. I kept things pretty simple, and used some cheese, onions, and peppers as the main additives. Texture is also a concern. As a judge, I’ve had slices of fatties that were so dense you could use them as hockey pucks. I wanted to avoid that, so I experimented several times to get the flavor and texture just right. All I’ll say is that I tried a couple of different bread crumbs, and it tasted like crap. I found another way to lighten up the texture. After getting that right, I worked on another problem…
A challenge with fatties is they tend to lose their nice, round, fatty shape when you put them on the cooking grate. This results in an oblong, half moon shape. This is especially true if you are mixing soft/liquid ingredients in with the sausage, as I was doing. It took me three tries and quite a bit of creativity to fix this problem. After several weeks of testing and a whole lot of frustration, the fatty was ready for prime time.
Burger
Now, burgers are something I’ve done a million times before. I rival that big franchise with the golden arches. Or is that the golden arcs…McDowell’s? In any case, I know my burgers. Or do I?
When I cook burgers at home for me and my wife, I keep them really basic. Most burgers consist of salt, pepper, a slice of cheese, a bun, and a medium-rare burger. Would this be enough for the judges? After thinking about it for way too long, I decided the burgers needed to be something more. A decision I would later regret. More on that in the next post.
I knew all along that I wanted to do sliders, because I thought cutting up a full-sized burger would dry out the meat in the time it took to get to the judges’ mats. I also decided that I didn’t want to mix anything in with the ground beef other than basic seasonings. That was the easy part, as was the decision to use cheddar cheese on top of the burgers. The harder part was figuring out if anything else should go on the burger or the bun. I really struggled with this. It finally got to the point where I just had to make a decision and go with it. I decided on a basic flavored mayonnaise. Nothing else. I tested this a few times, and both my wife and I absolutely loved it.
Another aspect of the burger category is that it was “open garnish” which basically meant that competitors could put anything in the turn-in box. This opened up a bunch of different options, rather than just the standard parsley or green leaf lettuce. What goes well with burgers? French fries! One problem with this was that my butane burner was incapable of generating enough heat to get the oil to a good frying temperature. I decided to see if using a chimney of lump charcoal dumped in a little Smokey Joe grill would get the oil up to the proper temperature. Boy did it ever. The fries were coming out great, and they looked great in the box.
When all the burger practicing was done, we were really happy with it. I was feeling more and more confident that, if we had a chance in hell to get a call in a category, this was it!
Putting It All Together
I’m a firm believer in timelines and practicing using competition timing at least once before the actual competition. I would have liked to have done this a couple of weeks before the competition, but the only time I had available was the weekend before. It wouldn’t allow me much time to adjust things if they went wrong, but it would have to do.
The night before my practice competition, I made the marinades and trimmed all the meats just as I would the night before the real competition. I got a good night’s sleep, and woke up bright and early just as I would have to do at the competition. I won’t go into too much detail, because there isn’t a lot to say. The practice went fine. I forgot a couple of steps in my timeline, but I simply added those and everything was good to go. It was a successful practice run and I finally felt ready for the competition.
So there you go. The practicing was done, and it was competition time. To be continued in the next post…
It was my intent, competing in my first ever grilling contest, to blog the entire journey. The preparation, practicing, joys, sorrows—all were going to be detailed in my blog. Leading up to the event, I recorded every recipe I tried, including not only the ingredients but also outside temperature/weather, cooker temperature, type and amount of charcoal used, length of time each meat spent on the grill, and on and on and on. It simply left no time for blogging, other than the occasional Facebook status update. I was nervous as hell that I would embarrass myself at the contest, and I was determined to make sure that didn’t happen. The last thing on my mind at the end of the day was blogging. As my father often says “we make ourselves too busy.” That makes a whole lot more sense to me than some of his other sayings, like “go take a flying leap into a rolling donut.”
So here we are. A full month has passed since the Shoeshoe Grilling Competition in Abington, MA and I’m just getting around to blogging about it. Better late than never, and I want to write things down before I forget everything. This entry will focus on the weeks leading up to the completion. Another entry will be devoted to the actual day of the competition. For those interested in grilling, competitions, food in general, or perhaps all of those things, happy reading.
I’m going to recap the preparation phase by category. The categories for the competition were: fish, pork tenderloin, sausage fatty, and burger.
Fish
I had grilled fish only a handful of times prior to preparing for this competition. My wife and I simply don’t eat a lot of fish, and when we do it is usually baked (her) or fried (me). Grilled fish isn’t something I grew up eating, so I never crave it or think about cooking it that way.
So the first step was to decide what type of fish I wanted to cook. In my mind, there were only two options: salmon or swordfish. Some competitors like to cook tuna, but my opinion is that many judges don’t like it—or at least they don’t like it the way tuna should be eaten. I decided on swordfish 1) because I like it better than salmon and 2) I feel it is the easiest fish to grill. At a first competition, easy sounded just fine to me!
In terms of flavors to add to the fish, I decided on a basic Asian marinade with very mild flavors. My first test turned out surprisingly well. The only complaint was that the fish need just a little bit more flavor than what the marinade provided, given the abbreviated marinating time that would be allowed at the competition.
For the second test, I used a commercial glaze at the end to give the swordfish a little added kick. Success. The fish was good to go after two trial cooks. Thank goodness, because swordfish isn’t cheap.
Pork Tenderloin
As with the fish, pork isn’t something I grill a lot. We eat a lot of smoked ribs and pork butt, but I’m not a big fan of pork chops, tenderloin, etc. That said, I must admit that I had never in my life cooked pork tenderloin. Never. I did a bit of reading on cooking techniques for pork tenderloin, and found some good advice from the folks at Cooks Illustrated. Whenever I need to learn about the science behind cooking something new, I turn to Cooks Illustrated. It’s an excellent resource.
After investigating the art and science of cooking pork tenderloin, I again decided that mild Asian flavors would pair well with it. My first cook used a similar marinade, although not exactly the same, as the fish marinade. It tasted great, and was moist and flavorful. To make sure it wasn’t a fluke, I did a second cook which produced the same result. I decided to use a little bit of commercial glaze on the pork as well, and it made the taste buds happy. Two categories down, two to go.
Sausage Fatty
Once again, fatties were something totally foreign to me. I’d read a lot about them, but had never cooked one before. Under the advice of many posts I had read about fatties, my first couple of fatty cooks were basically taking the fatty out of the casing, rubbing them, and smoking them with fruit wood. My wife tried my first two fatty attempts, declared them disgusting, and refused to try any further fatty concoctions. Honestly, I don’t blame her. I’m not a huge fan either. But I had to keep practicing until I came up with a recipe and technique I was happy with.
Unlike the fish and pork, I had to cook fatties several times before I was satisfied. There are several different flavor profiles you can use with a fatty. I kept things pretty simple, and used some cheese, onions, and peppers as the main additives. Texture is also a concern. As a judge, I’ve had slices of fatties that were so dense you could use them as hockey pucks. I wanted to avoid that, so I experimented several times to get the flavor and texture just right. All I’ll say is that I tried a couple of different bread crumbs, and it tasted like crap. I found another way to lighten up the texture. After getting that right, I worked on another problem…
A challenge with fatties is they tend to lose their nice, round, fatty shape when you put them on the cooking grate. This results in an oblong, half moon shape. This is especially true if you are mixing soft/liquid ingredients in with the sausage, as I was doing. It took me three tries and quite a bit of creativity to fix this problem. After several weeks of testing and a whole lot of frustration, the fatty was ready for prime time.
Burger
Now, burgers are something I’ve done a million times before. I rival that big franchise with the golden arches. Or is that the golden arcs…McDowell’s? In any case, I know my burgers. Or do I?
When I cook burgers at home for me and my wife, I keep them really basic. Most burgers consist of salt, pepper, a slice of cheese, a bun, and a medium-rare burger. Would this be enough for the judges? After thinking about it for way too long, I decided the burgers needed to be something more. A decision I would later regret. More on that in the next post.
I knew all along that I wanted to do sliders, because I thought cutting up a full-sized burger would dry out the meat in the time it took to get to the judges’ mats. I also decided that I didn’t want to mix anything in with the ground beef other than basic seasonings. That was the easy part, as was the decision to use cheddar cheese on top of the burgers. The harder part was figuring out if anything else should go on the burger or the bun. I really struggled with this. It finally got to the point where I just had to make a decision and go with it. I decided on a basic flavored mayonnaise. Nothing else. I tested this a few times, and both my wife and I absolutely loved it.
Another aspect of the burger category is that it was “open garnish” which basically meant that competitors could put anything in the turn-in box. This opened up a bunch of different options, rather than just the standard parsley or green leaf lettuce. What goes well with burgers? French fries! One problem with this was that my butane burner was incapable of generating enough heat to get the oil to a good frying temperature. I decided to see if using a chimney of lump charcoal dumped in a little Smokey Joe grill would get the oil up to the proper temperature. Boy did it ever. The fries were coming out great, and they looked great in the box.
When all the burger practicing was done, we were really happy with it. I was feeling more and more confident that, if we had a chance in hell to get a call in a category, this was it!
Putting It All Together
I’m a firm believer in timelines and practicing using competition timing at least once before the actual competition. I would have liked to have done this a couple of weeks before the competition, but the only time I had available was the weekend before. It wouldn’t allow me much time to adjust things if they went wrong, but it would have to do.
The night before my practice competition, I made the marinades and trimmed all the meats just as I would the night before the real competition. I got a good night’s sleep, and woke up bright and early just as I would have to do at the competition. I won’t go into too much detail, because there isn’t a lot to say. The practice went fine. I forgot a couple of steps in my timeline, but I simply added those and everything was good to go. It was a successful practice run and I finally felt ready for the competition.
So there you go. The practicing was done, and it was competition time. To be continued in the next post…
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
KCBS Fires New England Area Reps
The KCBS Board of Directors made the determination to remove Ken and Kathy Dakai as KCBS Reps and Ken as a CBJ instructor. The reason was listed on the KCBS Quick Notes from the Board 4/8/09 and was stated as: "conduct unbecoming the best interest of KCBS." This info can be found on the KCBS web site. Hopefully the upcoming minutes from that meeting will shed more light on the situation. Because, for the moment, it's a decision that is leaving many in the dark.
This post was used by permission, courtesy of Lakeside Smokers.
This post was used by permission, courtesy of Lakeside Smokers.
More posts!
Wow. I really haven't posted anything since December? That's horrible.
From now on, I'll try to posted at least once a week. Well, maybe once every two weeks. Err...as often as I can?
From now on, I'll try to posted at least once a week. Well, maybe once every two weeks. Err...as often as I can?
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