Our fourth competition is now over!  It was the Taste of Grand Rapids, in Michigan, on July 14 and 15, 2006.  In this entry, I’m going to have lots of photos, and some deconstruction of my impressions of how we did and how the competition was run.

Let’s start with the competition organization.  This was in some ways a horrible competition.  Some proof of this is the reaction of other competitors on the BBQ Forum and the BBQ-Brethren Forum.  Basically, I felt that the organizers treated the cooks as an afterthought, without a lot of thought into what the teams needed.

For instance, there was electricity brought in for the vendors, but not the competitors.  There were only a very few facilities for the teams, yet plenty if you wanted to go find them a quarter mile away.  The ice was as far from the cooks as it could be, and the organizers didn’t deliver it to the cooks until well into the afternoon on Friday, though many teams were there by 9:00 am.  The reps didn’t walk around to introduce themselves, nor did they come by Saturday morning for time checks with the teams.

Ok, that’s the negative… Now the positive…

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It’s been a hectic week for the last few days, and I’m trying to catch up. so I thought I’d get a quick post up for kind of an admin sort of clean up.

First of all, I sincerely apologize to everyone waiting for sauce; last week just hit me really hard, getting ready for a comp right after vacation (last time I’ll ever do that, I hope!), and some problems that turned out not to be too much to worry about with my dog.  I really missed having my wife at the competition in Grand Rapids, but I love her all the more for staying home to spend time with my almost-15 year old black lab.  Anyway, no excuses, but deep apologies, and I’ll be finishing up stuff tonight, and the sauce will be sent out in the next couple of days.

I’ll write more about this later, but our Grand Rapids results were our best yet.  The short version is:

Chicken - 40
Ribs - 20
Pork - 15
Brisket - 5!!!!

We came in 14th out of 57 teams!  And we can now honestly say that we have ‘award winning’ barbecue!  We couldn’t stop smiling after our first walk up!  it’s like being a tourist… You don’t want to look like a tourist, but you want to see everything.  When we got called up, we didn’t want to look like it was our first time up, but we couldn’t stop smiling!!!

Ed Tobian joined us for the weekend, from the eastern side of Michigan, and provided incredible help all weekend.  Along with that, we really worked ou the new smoker, along with Martin, the designer and builder of the Smokehouse (who also helped out immensely).  We found a few things to tweak about the smoker, but we got some great food off of the beast!

Pictures and more detail will be coming shortly!