Last weekend, Mark and I pulled the smoker up to Detroit, MI, for Dr. BBQ’s Competition BBQ Class.  The class was very much oriented toward Kansas City Barbecue Society (KCBS) competitions, and Ray (Dr. BBQ) certainly has the background to talk about comps!

The class ran from 3:00 PM on Saturday until about 2:00 PM on Sunday, with set up starting at noon on Saturday.  The weather couldn’t have been better.  Highs in the low 70s, low in the high 40s overnight, clear and gorgeous.  The class was held at an engineering/manufacturing firm, and John Ford, the owner, has a GREAT pellet smoker inside, with a fantastic kitchen, so we did the classes inside mostly, taking the food outside to cook.

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This coming Saturday and Sunday, April 21-22, Mark and I will be attending a competition barbecue class held by Dr. BBQ, Ray Lampe.

If any of you have seen the Versus (formerly OLN) Network’s Barbecue Championship Series, you got to see Ray go head to head to head with other barbecue pros.  He’s won awards over several years, and has a couple of books out, Dr. BBQ’s Big Time Barbecue Cookbook and Dr. BBQ’s Barbecue All Year Long Cookbook as well as his upcoming Dr. BBQ’s Big-Time Barbecue Road Trip.  On top of that, he’s active in several online barbecue forums and has his own webpage at www.drbbq.com. 

The class will be geared toward Kansas City Barbecue Society competition.  Meats in the categories of chicken, ribs, pork and brisket will be cooked overnight, leading to a barbecue breakfast on Sunday. 

Mark and I are hoping to jumpstart our competition cooking, and I’m personally looking forward to meeting Ray as I’ve spoken with him briefly and corresponded a bit on barbecue forums with him.  I’ll have a report with photos after the class, then, hopefully, more ribbons this year from competition!

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The weather has been warming up, until the middle of this week, at least.  When it’s warm, I want to grill things, and I decided, with my wife’s prompting, to do shish kabob one day.  This is a great meal to grill as you can do everything on skewers, minimizing the need for dishes to be dirtied. 

One thing I’ve found with shish kabob is that I don’t care to do everything on one skewer.  The reason for this is that things get done at different rates, so you have to be very careful to size everything just right so it all gets done at the same time.  Or you can do like I do and just do each item on its own skewer!

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A few weeks ago, I got an email from Dave at Nando’s Peri Peri.  It was a somewhat typical email from a company asking for a link.  Well, so far, my only links listed on the blog have been to non-commercial sites.  It was a nicely worded email, though, and not a form letter.  I replied that I didn’t want to start adding to my links with commercial links, but that, after looking at the website, the sauce sounded pretty good.

Dave turned around and very quickly sent out 3 bottles of Nando’s Peri Peri to me to try.  Nothing asked at all of me, just to try them.  Well, I first owe Dave an apology for not getting to them quickly enough, but I finally made time to try out the sauces.  I was a bit cautious, as I read something on their website about preferring gas grilling to charcoal, but I kept an open mind and went on!

I smoked some chicken thighs on Saturday to try out the sauces, which were Hot, Medium and Garlic.  I ended up grilling chicken yesterday, simply because the sauces were so good, I want to try them more!  I actually marinaded the chicken yesterday in the Garlic for a couple of hours before grilling. 

(Nando’s Peri-Peri Sauce graphic, from the website, used with permission)

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