Glen Ellyn Backyard BBQ: Gettn' Ready for Grillin' For Our Girls Competition

Monday, April 11, 2011

Gettn' Ready for Grillin' For Our Girls Competition

A few months ago, a good friend of mine had asked I join his team to compete in the 2011 Grillin' for Our Girls Competition to be held on Sunday, June 5th, 2011 at "The Barn" at Arabian Knights Farm in Willowbrook, IL. We are all BBQ lovers; however, none of us have any KCBS experience and have never Q'd together...let alone in competition. But being a worthy cause and because we all share a genuine passion for BBQ, I accepted.

This past weekend we held a practice assigning everyone a category and holding everyone accountable to a turn-in time. My buddy Bill and his brother Chris are responsible for pork ribs, their other brother Bob is responsible for brisket, D is responsible for chicken and yours truly has taken on shoulder.

I arrived at Bob's house at 6:30 am to start a 7lb shoulder. I have never cooked on a Chargriller Outlaw before, but it went very well. Not a bad pit for the price. I happen to be in the market for a new pit and may consider it.

A picture of our camp and one hungry pooch....

Shoulder was on precisley at 7:00 am, brisket at 10:00 am and a rack of spare ribs just for fun...

Ribs for turn-in and chicken went on later in the day....

During the process we kept notes and have learned a ton, including items we forgot to bring, positioning of meat in our cookers in order to adhere to turn-in, how to better trim our meat for the sake of presentation and even what not to use in a turn-in box (flat leaf parsley doesn't hold up well). We all acted as each other's critics.

We all nailed our turn in times, and our taste was second to none, but we definitely need to work on presentation a bit.

A picture of final ribs...