A quick update

After NH Charlie and I competed in Boston Hills NY and placed 4th overall in the Barbecue and Reserve Grand Champs in the grilling contest. We got a score of 676 in the grilling which really boosted our standings for NEBS Team of the Year.

Lake Placid one of our favorite contests of the year followed Boston Hills. We placed 2nd in Peoples choice ribs and were Grand Champs in the KCBS bbq competition. When they called our name for Grand Champs the whole crowd was stunned because we had 3 lower calls in the categories and there was a team with a 1st place and two 2nd places that everyone including us thought would win the event. Luckily for us that team did not do well in the 4th category and our consistant placing in each category propelled us to the top.

After Lake placid I took the parents to Wildwood NJ for some fun in Atlantic City and a competition practically on the beach. The site of this years event was right next to the sea wall and the view was awesome. I posted some pictures in an earlier update. While there are no woods in Wildwood there is plenty of Wild to go around. The bars let out around 3am and it's quite a site to see.

Stupid me forgot to pack pellets for this trip and out of 62 teams I was the only pellet cooker in attendance. I decided to cook all the big meats in my Backwoods and save what little pellets that were in the hopper for chicken. That decision paid off and we were named Reserve Grand Champions. Congrats to Fat Angel BBQ for their first Grand Championship!

The following week we sat out the event in Troy NY because we all had other things on our schedule.

The most recent event we attended was the Harpoon Championships of New England Barbecue bar none our favorite contest every year. Charlie and a team of helpers vend the event and Doug and I concentrate on the Competition end of things. We placed 1st in Brisket and Pork which put us on top for team of the year for both of those categories. We were trailing coming in to the event and hoped we would do well enough to win at least one of the categories. It was also good enough to make us Grand Champs for the second year in a row !

We were also Grand Champs of the Grilling contest which we have struggled in the past couple of years. Harpoon is a Marathon and most of us on the team are not even built for a sprint, a brisk walk maybe. Doug really worked his tail off on Sunday and I did my best to help even though I think I may have gotten a bad Ice Cube sometime during the night.

Sunday of Harpoon is also the day that the NEBS Team Of the year is announced. I'm very proud to say we were named NEBS Team of the Year for the 4th Year in a row. The awards this year were a knife block with Lamson Sharp knives that had the NEBS logo inscribed in them.

Next up we are teaching a class and then on to Maine for another competition.

That's all for now.

Scenes from Wildwood NJ

Not a bad weekend in NH

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Huge is the theme of the day

I thought the airplane was big , the airport in St Paul/Minneapolis is stoooopid big ! After landing I had to walk 2 football fields ride a train for 3 stops on to 3 moving sidewalks one of which was broken and then finally at least one more football field length walk to the last gate in the A terminal. I need a nap !
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Jumbo Jet

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All aboard

I just boarded my flight to KC MO. This is the biggest plane I've been on in a long time. This thing is huge ! I guess its a 757.
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Headed to Raytown MO in the morning.

I'm headed to Raytown Missouri to compete in the Raytown State BBQ championship. This will be my first time competing on my own in the midwest where I don't have the pressure of competing in a Major competition like the Royal or GAB. That's not to say the competition will be any easier but I'm sure it will be a different experience. The Royal and GAB are invitational contests that have people from all over the country competing. In Raytown I'll probably be the only strange face in the neighborhood. It should be a little more laid back and I'm really looking forward to it.

Pictures from The Art of BBQ Mays Landing NJ

SMB placed 1st in Chicken, 6th in Ribs, 6th in Pork, 4th in Brisket and ended up 3rd overall. Pretty good results for our first time competing together. Congratulations to Lo N Slo bbq for Grand and 3 Eyz BBQ for Reserve Grand.

Hopefully these two guys came in DAL because the guy with the sour look on his face was a complete asshole.

Danville-GAB-Etc...

Our results in Danville were not all we hoped they would be. We ended up 15th overall and only got one call for 4th place pork. I would like to thank Bill McMann the contest organizer for making it possible for us to compete. We used Bills personal FEC100 and he arranged to get us the rest of the equimpment we needed. It rained, it was muddy and our site was far away from the teams we normally socialize with. We still had a good time and I'm sure someday we will do it again. Congrats to my good friend Tuffy Stone on his Grand Championship and the Dizzy Pig Team on their RGC.


The week following Danville I competed in the Great American Barbecue contest in Bonner Springs Kansas. I cooked on borrowed equipment and relied on my friends from The Slabs to help me through the weekend. Thank you Steph, Kyle, Val, Brent, Jerry and Pam for all the help. I could not have done it without you. Thank you Rod Gray and Todd Johns for lending me the bbq pits to cook on. Thank you Andy for getting the Pit to me. The judges at the GAB hated all my food with one exception, Pork which took 1st place.


The next contest I'm doing I'll be competing with some of the young talent in the New England area. I'm really looking forward to cooking with these guys and trading stories (and stealing secrets...shhhhh) it should be fun.

Time to do some traveling.

The weekend of May 15th I'll be flying in with Richard Westhaver AKA Dirty Dick to compete in Danville Virginia under the team name Dirty Smoke. This will be the second time Dick and I have competed together, last year we went to Chesapeake VA and got a first place call in Ribs, a 7th place call in Brisket and ended up 11th overall. Not too bad on borrowed equipment but we hope to do better this time around.

The organizer of the event was kind enough to gather up all the necessary equipment and meat for us to be able to compete. It's always a challenge cooking on borrowed equipment and you never know what your going to forget to bring with you, last year Dick forgot the chicken rub. I don't think Dick wants to forget anything this year because he keeps sending me lists and asking me to add to them. Hey Dick don't forget the Vodka !

Wish us Luck !

Salisbury Maryland Pork in the Park

I'm going to keep this post short. The weather was perfect, the company was great, and we did very well. There were two highlights to the awesome weekend. The first was a catered breakfast given to me as a birthday present by my girlfriend Steph and of course the second was hearing my team name called for Grand Champion and going up to accept the trophy with my parents.

Breakfast is being served.

Grand Champion Trophy

Salisbury MD awards

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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: The Board discussed the conduct of Contest Reps and made a determination to remove the Contest Reps involved for 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.

The art of recovery and the importance of Teamwork

This past weekend I competed in the Grillin' On the Bay event with Dave and Nancy Peterson. I'm about to explain to you the disaster and recovery of our chefs choice Entry.

The chefs choice category for this event was pretty wide open which meant we knew we would be competing against things like lobster and filet mignion. We had to decide if we wanted to attempt to make the best lobster or filet dish or try to come up with something different. If you knew anything about the 3 of us you would realize that we tend to buck the trends and go our own way. Our first thought was beef ribs which is something I cook with I Smell Smoke on occasion and we do very well with, but hey been there done that right ? Then we thought about beef shanks and again I felt that was too similar to the short rib recipe. Finally we decided to do a classic Veal Osso Bucco in the dutch oven, remember everything for this event had to be cooked over wood or charcoal.

If you've had Osso Bucco in a restaurant then you know the portions tend to be pretty large and it would be very difficult for us to fit 6 pieces in the 9x9 styrofoam container that we are required to use for competition. A quick phone call to my friend Doug who is in the food service business and we had some 3 oz portions of Veal shanks on order. This plan was starting to come together.Osso Bucco is a pretty involved dish to make, not difficult but somewhat time consuming. Tie the meat, Season the meat, brown the meat, chop the veggies, saute the veggies, deglaze the pan with wine, add stock as needed during the braising process, etc. And to top that off you have to add in the effort it takes to keep the dutch oven hot enough to keep the liquid simmering but not so hot that you burn what's inside. This is done by adding a few lit pieces of charcoal over a 3 hour time period. We had to do this and work on 3 other categories that we were cooking.

I won't even mention how Windy the weather was that day because it really wasn't a factor. We were able to go through all the steps and had a great Veal Osso Bucco ready to go a little over 1 hour before the turn in time for the chefs choice category. We tasted the veal and the sauce and it was outstanding, melt in your mouth meat with a rich flavorful sauce. The fact that we were early was not a big deal. We removed the dutch oven from the fire and set it aside to cool and planned to reheat the dish shortly before serving.

The category before Chefs Choice was pork and we had the fire pretty hot to quickly grill some Pork chops. After we grilled the chops we spread out the charcoal in the grill so it would cool somewhat. There were 45 minutes between categories so we figured the coals would die down enough for us to put the dutch oven in the fire to reheat the veal and sauce. Twenty minutes before it was time to turn in the Veal we put the dutch oven on the grill to reaheat. Literally 3 minutes later when I went to check to see how it was doing I opened the lid to find a burnt mess ! A lot of the liquid in the sauce must have evaporated while it was resting for that hour off of the fire, the cast iron does hold heat well. First I tasted the sauce.....yuck the burn totally permeated it. Then I tasted the meat.....double yuck, I couldn't get that burnt taste out of my mouth. The dish was ruined, there was no point in even turning it in...........or was there ?

I'm sure my team mates could see the look of frustration on my face. All that work for nothing. Nancy suggested maybe we could come up with a sauce that would work with the veal, we did have some tomato sauce and other ingredients. I was doubtful, at this point I think I was ready to just throw in the towel. Then Dave suggested we seek out Brendan from Transfomer BBQ and see if he had any of the bbq sauce we loaned him earlier in the day. I perked up a little at that suggestion. Bbq sauce can hide a lot of mistakes but that burnt taste was still in my mouth so I was still very skeptical. Then it came to me...maybe we could wash some of that burned taste off the meat, maybe it hadn't penetrated the meat and it was just from the sauce that was still covering it. I asked Dave to start heating some chicken stock while I went over to Brendan's to see if he had any bbq sauce left.

I think Brendan sensed that I was stressing a bit and I explained to him I destroyed my chefs choice entry. He handed me the sauce and I moped back to my site convinced I was wasting my time but resigned to produce something we could turn in.

When I got back we took each shank and swirled it in the heated chicken stock to rinse them trying to get as much of the osso bucco sauce off as we could. We were running out of time. I asked for a brush for the sauce but both of our brushes were in dishwater waiting to be cleaned, we were going to spoon the osso bucco sauce over the meat not brush it on. So I just poured some of the sauce out and applied it to a piece of meat with my gloved hand. Here was the moment of truth...do or die time.... put up or shut up time....I had to taste the meat, I wasn't looking forward to it. I broke off a small piece I really didn't want any more of that burnt taste in my mouth. I placed it in my mouth..... began to slowly chew....hmmm....ummmm...err hey this isn't bad. I took a bigger piece.... not bad at all. We had something I wasn't totally embarrassed to turn it. I figured at least we won't get last place......I hope !

We filled the turn in box with the wonderful truffle risotto that Dave cooked and carefully added 7 veal shanks that we were able to save. I don't have any pictures but someone from SeriousEats.com snapped one just before we closed the box for turn in. We joked that we hope the picture doesn't show up on his website and we place DAL with it. I dusted the meat with an orange gremalata I had made for the osso bucco, I figured what the heck I took the time to make it so I might as well put it on there then I gave the box to Nancy to turn in to the judges. Phew that was intense.

When Nancy returned to the site and we were cleaning up we started joking about what if it does well we won't be able to keep a straight face. While I wasn't very happy with the entry I was pretty happy how we dealt with the whole situation. We didn't give up and we all worked together to get something turned in and at least not get disqualified. I had a real feeling of pride and satisfaction at that point, it's hard to explain but it was really an uplifting experience. I think these are the moments that real competitors live for. It was a real challenge, we faced it head on and we persevered.

When the Chefs Choice category was announced I figured we didn't stand a chance of hearing our name called. I'm not saying what we turned in was horrible but it was a far cry from what I envisioned us turning in. They were also announcing the last place team in each category and I even feared if we did hear our name it would be for that. To my amazement and Nancy's hysterical laughter we were called for 4th place in Chef's choice. Unbelievable ! There were some pretty skilled competitors there that we beat.


So what's the moral to this whole thing ? To me it's this... First, when you start a team make sure you surround yourself with good people that will lift you up when things go bad, people you can count on during a crisis(I've been pretty lucky in this regard). Second...Never give up. Always do your best to turn something in. It may not be your best but it will be the best you could come up with in that situation.



Next stop Salisbury Maryland....

Grillin' On The Bay 4/4/09

I'm headed to Sheapshead Bay NY this weekend to compete in the Grillin' On the Bay competition. Dave and Nancy Peterson of Petey's Crispy Critters will be joining me and we'll be competing as Team Agave. The categories are Chicken Breast, Pork, Fish and Chefs Choice. We had a little team meeting on Tuesday night, sampled a little Agave and came up with a pretty good plan of action in my opinion. Wish us luck.

Everything is off the cooker and looking great. First up is pulled pork. Here's a picture of the butt Before I pulled it. There is a little sauce painted on it.

Here is a picture of the pulled pork. I add seasonings and sauce to the pulled product to give it that special something that the judges seem to like.

I didn't take any pictures of the whole brisket but here's a picture of one sliced. The new marinade was a tad on the salty side but I think I'm headed in the right direction. The briskets came out moist and tender.

Here's a picture of a sandwich made from the scraps that are left on the cutting board after slicing. Mmmm mmmm Good !

I'm working on my photo skills trying to improve my composition. I'm pretty new to the world of photography and I know I have a lot of room for improvement. I must say though the ribs were very tasty and I would be proud to turn them in at any competition.


The salad in the background is broccoli slaw. I first had this at the Harpoon competition at the Meddling Kids site. Very tasty and a nice change from regular coleslaw.

All in all a very successful cook. I was able to compare some rubs and sauces side by side which is not something you really want to do at a competition. You should always go in with a plan and try to stick to it.