Scott Terril
TVWBB Member
I'm really curious to see how some of you more experienced competitors feel about this. We cooked in the Smoking in the Golden Valley competition last weekend. This was our second sanctioned competition and although we finished about the same as in our first one, we felt we improved significantly in each category.
Friday night we walked around and talked to quite a few teams. Slap's, Gettin' Basted, Wood Hook, etc. Wes from Wood Hook and Randy from Eli's Pit Crew were particularly great guys. The consensus of opinion from the teams we spoke to was that the vast majority of the competitors were using Wagyu briskets and many were using Compart ribs. We noticed this in the Jammin' in JC competition as well.
When we combined this information with our results from our first two competitions, we came up with a discouraging conclusion. Even as our skill level increases through more competition and more practice, we are going to struggle to place highly in ribs and particularly brisket unless we significantly increase the amount we spend on meat. Granted it is a small sample size, but our best scores in both competitions by significant margins were chicken and pork. The two cheapest meats.
My partner has two college aged sons and I have one in college and one soon to be in college. While we both make comfortable livings, neither of our families can really afford for us to spend $650+ per competition on meat. ($400 on two SRF briskets, $200 on a Compart BBQ pack, plus chicken and ancillary products)
My point/question is that if KCBS REALLY wanted to make things truly competitive, why don't they supply teams all the same meat? I would willingly pay an extra $100-$150 over the entry fee if the competition supplied the meat. Wouldn't this more accurately reflect the skills of the cooks?
Now I want to make one thing perfectly clear. Even if we had been cooking with $1000 worth of meat, we wouldn't have placed in the top 10 of either of our competitions. We are still learning, building our skill sets, and refining our recipes. That being said, I do believe we would have finished significantly higher if everyone had been cooking from the same baseline of meat. (I do believe that is the first time in my 52 years of life I have ever used the phrase "baseline of meat".)
I am curious to hear everyone's opinion.
Thanks!
Scott
Friday night we walked around and talked to quite a few teams. Slap's, Gettin' Basted, Wood Hook, etc. Wes from Wood Hook and Randy from Eli's Pit Crew were particularly great guys. The consensus of opinion from the teams we spoke to was that the vast majority of the competitors were using Wagyu briskets and many were using Compart ribs. We noticed this in the Jammin' in JC competition as well.
When we combined this information with our results from our first two competitions, we came up with a discouraging conclusion. Even as our skill level increases through more competition and more practice, we are going to struggle to place highly in ribs and particularly brisket unless we significantly increase the amount we spend on meat. Granted it is a small sample size, but our best scores in both competitions by significant margins were chicken and pork. The two cheapest meats.
My partner has two college aged sons and I have one in college and one soon to be in college. While we both make comfortable livings, neither of our families can really afford for us to spend $650+ per competition on meat. ($400 on two SRF briskets, $200 on a Compart BBQ pack, plus chicken and ancillary products)
My point/question is that if KCBS REALLY wanted to make things truly competitive, why don't they supply teams all the same meat? I would willingly pay an extra $100-$150 over the entry fee if the competition supplied the meat. Wouldn't this more accurately reflect the skills of the cooks?
Now I want to make one thing perfectly clear. Even if we had been cooking with $1000 worth of meat, we wouldn't have placed in the top 10 of either of our competitions. We are still learning, building our skill sets, and refining our recipes. That being said, I do believe we would have finished significantly higher if everyone had been cooking from the same baseline of meat. (I do believe that is the first time in my 52 years of life I have ever used the phrase "baseline of meat".)
I am curious to hear everyone's opinion.
Thanks!
Scott