Judging sauce - your thoughts


 

CullenJ

TVWBB Super Fan
I judged a KCBS contest this past Saturday and we had a sauce category before the main entries came in. At my table, we judged only two sauces. One of them was either regular Blues Hog/Tennessee Red mix clone or was just a mixture of those two sauces. When judging was over and we talked amongst ourselves about the scoring, one person at the table bluntly said: "That first entry was just Blues Hog and I scored them horribly for it."

I was taken aback. I mean, it's pretty easy to call out Blues Hog because of its distinctive flavor, but I took issue with his point of view. For all we knew, the cook DID just make a clone. We didn't see him pour the sauces from a bottle. We really don't know what we were given and it's my opinion that you judge the sauce based on what's in front of you, not what you think went on back at the cook site. That means you judge it based on its own merits.

I am curious to hear what other judges think about this.
 
I get a little upset when I'm judging and I hear other judges say something along this line. I'm not there as a guessing game to see if I can identify whether this sauce is Blues Hog, or Bone Sucking, or some other brand. I'm there to judge whatever is put in front of me on it's own merit. Want to see me get really upset? Put me at a table and let me hear a judge say that they scored an entry down because they happen to like spares much more than loin backs. That really gets my burn going (and yes, that really did happen once).

If I were to just pour a sauce out of a purchased bottle of 'whatever sauce' and won the competition, I probably would feel pretty hollow about that victory. I didn't win it, 'whatever sauce' did. To me, to really feel like I won it fair and square, I need to make it my own. It's like a few years ago we had a fun cook and one of the ancillary categories was chili. It was found out later that a few teams used straight canned chili. Kinda of took the fun & competition out of it.

I'll get off my soapbox now.

Russ
 
The rules for the sauce contests many times say it must be made from scratch and not a doctored up commercial sauce. If the rules don't specify it is hard to complain. Not really a sauce contest if not made from scratch, in my opinion.
 
I wonder how many times a team's sauce has been unfairly judged as being Blues Hog when in fact the sauce was all their own but included some tamarind ?
Russ... comments regarding garnish, other than for legality, also get me going. Thankfully that is seldom seen in the real world of judging, although it is more prevalent in forums...
 
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I wonder how many times a team's sauce has been unfairly judged as being Blues Hog when in fact the sauce was all their own but included some tamarind ?
Russ... comments regarding garnish, other than for legality, also get me going. Thankfully that is seldom seen in the real world of judging, although it is more prevalent in forums...

Yes. That's my thinking on it. Dude was all, "I am 99 percent sure that is Blues Hog." I just shook my head. I'm glad some people can be so sure about their convictions, I suppose.

@J Hoke: If there were rules about sauce at this particular contest, the reps didn't let us in on them. I've been judging for quite a few years and this is the first time I've run across someone so blantantly unwilling to give a team the benefit of the doubt.

@Russ: I can't count the number of times I hear, "I marked them down because I don't like (name of spice)." I can't stand that. It's one thing to say that the spice overpowered everything else, and we all know that cooks sometimes stubb their toes, but that's a far cry from not liking something. In fact, I just heard this a couple of weeks ago when someone said, "I don't like cumin, so I gave them a (whatever score)." Blows my mind. If you don't like a certain kind of something, or can't set aside your prejudice long enough to give someone a fair score, you don't need to be judging.
 
Then if as a Judge you hear a bias & the entry wasn't scored fairly , you should bring it to the attention of contest rep. IMHO
 
I understand what you're saying, but you understand how tricky something like that would be, right? First of all, doing so in the middle of a contest would be hard. Second, what's to stop the person from saying that they thought the sample was poor? There is no real objective way to prove they weren't scoring fairly. They'd just say that I misunderstood them or something. Finally, there is thankfully a system built in to KCBS to account for this -- they simply toss out the lowest score.
 
I recently cooked a competition that had a sauce comp within. I had brought two different sauces to the comp, my regular sauce that I usually use and a sauce that was a mixture of three commercial sauces, which when I mixed them at home was pretty darned tasty. I decided to use that sauce on my comp ribs and took 7th. I had brought plenty so at the Cook's Meeting I signed up for the sauce contest and placed second. I didn't win anything but I was pleased that I was able to take three different sauces, albeit commercial, and come up with a real good tasting sauce. NO, I didn't make it from scratch and YES, I wouldn't have felt as good winning with it as I would have if I had made it from scratch. BUT there were no rules stating you couldn't use commercial sauces, so, it is what it is. But, you're right, that judge should have kept his opinion to him or herself.
 

 

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