Memphis in May

2009: Rookie Outing

2010: Barbecue Joe Returns

The Event

The World Championship Barbecue Cooking Contest is held annually as part of the Memphis in May International Festival. After a "scouting trip" in 2008, we decided to compete in 2009. We were greatly encouraged to do so by the continuing positive feedback we received at events such as our AT&T Pebble Beach Open House and our William Shatner tutorial.

The event is huge, with around 250 teams from all over the country and a sprinkling of international teams as well. During the three days of the competition, around 100,000 people come through Tom Lee Park, and almost $100,000 in prize money is at stake. The focus is on pork, with three separate contests: one for "whole hog," one for "whole shoulder," and one for "ribs." These teams are big, with tractor trailer-sized smoking rigs and large investments in booths. Fortunately, there is a fourth category, called Patio Porkers; these are smaller, "semi-pro" teams who compete amongst each other on ribs. We entered in Patio Porkers.

It is impossible to compete without a team. We were fortunate to have the "Marc Marasco Alumni Association" to help us out.

Aimee and Mike Aver went to college with Marc. They now live outside of Nashville, and trucked their "Miss Piggy" across the state for the event.

On the right is Jim Sciarra, who worked with Marc at Kadiri and then later with me at Ravenflow. Jim flew in from San Francisco to complete the team.

Trageger Industries was kind enough to provide sponsorship for our team.

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The Team

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Tuesday

Many of the "big rigs" load into Tom Lee Park, on the banks of the Mississippi, as early as the Sunday preceding the event. We flew in from California on Tuesday, and made our first stop at the event rental company, picking up the side walls for our tent and a 150 quart cooler in which to store meat and beverages.

We made it to the park by mid-afternoon. As predicted, "the track was muddy," and sand was being liberally spread around to absorb as much water as possible. Shortly after arrival the rental company people showed up, and I lightly supervised the installation of our 10' x 10' rental tent and wooden flooring. The decision to rent this equipment was one of the better ones we made, as it rained on and off for most of the event. The second-best decision was to rent our own Porta-Potty.

We then went shopping for those items we chose to purchase locally, and called Mike to synch up for this arrival the next day.

Wednesday is the last "prep" day before the event opens to the public on Thursday, and the last opportunity to "load in" your equipment. Mike arrived from Nashville late morning, and we rendezvoused at the hotel, transferring all my stuff to the truck. We made a "meat run" at the local Costco and then arrived at the park at pretty much the last possible moment. Off-loading was easy, and we spent most of the rest of the day getting the booth set up. We had to pass a fire inspection and get our electrical hookup done.

We were now official: Booth P211, firmly ensconced in the middle of Patio Porkers row.

As we had entered the "People's Choice" event, we put two pork butts in the smoker to be ready for a Thursday noon submission.

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Wednesday

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Thursday

Mike and I were pretty busy on Thursday. Public traffic was light at first, but then picked up. We submitted our pulled pork for the "People's Choice" event (Part 1). PC is the only event not judged by officially certified judges, and, as a result of the public's participation, the Memphis Department of Health gets involved. This led to a minor kerfuffle and and adjustment of our strategy for the Friday submission (Part 2). Suffice it to say that it was the proverbial "learning experience."

We also entered one of the "Ancillary Contests," a category called "Anything But". The idea here is to have meats other than pork -- beef, poultry, seafood, and "exotic." We entered our lamb shoulder in the exotic category, with submission due on Friday.

Jim arrived from San Francisco on Thursday evening, and, as team photographer, swung into action.

This is what the smoker looked like Friday morning. In the back are the two pork butts that will become pulled pork for the PC contest, with a submittal time of noon. In the foreground, our two lamb shoulders, to be entered into "exotic" at around 2:00 p.m.

Needless to say, the logistics of staging multiple entries, each of which must be smoked for many hours at different temperatures, can be challenging for the pit master. It is one of the reasons that the support team is so important.

Aimee arrived Friday afternoon.

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Friday

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Saturday

Saturday is "money day." The whole hog people have to cook for 24 hours, so they have been there all night in order to submit at mid-day. I prepared our ribs the day before and marinated them overnight. Jim and I arrived early and had them on the fire at around seven. This is what they looked like a few hours later.

Here we are cutting up one of our racks of ribs for submission. Note that all your efforts come down to one Styrofoam box measuring 9.25" x 9.25" x 3"; you can also submit a cup of sauce if you so desire. The box can be seen at the bottom.

The contest results can be found here.

Aimee's tee shirt design came in 17th out of 28 entries, scoring 604.5 points; the winning entry scored 744.7 points.

Our pulled pork finished dead last in People's Choice! We suspect that the "post processing" by the Memphis Health Department had something to do with this.

In the exotics category, our lamb finished 53rd out of 62 entries, scoring 421.2 points; the winning entry scored 480 points.

In the Patio Porker ribs event, we finished 31st out of 44, scoring 446.2 points; the winning entry scored 480 points.

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Results

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Lessons Learned

We learned a few valuable lessons from this initial foray into the world of barbecue competitions. First and foremost, do not bring lamb to Memphis!

Second, understand that at this level the competition is very stiff, and that differences are measured in small increments. At the right is the Patio Porker results, plotted as score vs. ranking. Even though we finished 31st, our score was 93% of that of the first place finisher.

Note that extensive precautions are taken to ensure that the judging is completely "blind."

Here is how we made out on the detailed judges’ scorecard. In the first three categories, you are scored in whole integers on a scale of 5 to 10. In the last category, overall impression, you are scored in tenths on a scale of 5 to 10. In each case, they drop the score of the lowest judge, which I have indicated below by an asterisk (*).

	Judge 1	Judge 2	Judge 3	Judge 4
Appearance	9	8	7*	10
Taste	9	8*	9	10
Tenderness	9	8*	9	10
Overall Impression	9.6	8*	8.8	10

1. Judge number 4 is clearly a person of impeccable taste, or comes from Far Rockaway. Or both.

2. Judge number 1 is also getting the hang of this judging thing. What is interesting is that after giving us 9’s in all three categories, his/her overall impression is a 9.6. Now that shows some discernment. It leads me to believe that he was on the fence between a 9 and a 10 in every category, and went “down” each time, making some of it up on overall impression.

3. Judge number 2 is obviously the infamous French judge, amazingly consistent across the board while knowing next to nothing about barbecue.

Judge number 3 is equally obviously the notorious Russian judge, who always sneaks in one absurdly low score to sabotage the Americans. But his overall impression comes painfully close to a 9.

Here is what we said last year:

We will be back!

I joked last year that the typical Memphis in May barbecue team consisted of one cook and thirteen drunks. Now I know why you need all those drunks! There is a tremendous amount of "grunt work" just to keep the wheels turning and getting the meat done on schedule, especially if you enter multiple contests. Our valiant team of four was up to the task, but just barely. We were all very tired by Saturday evening. So next year we will have a bigger team.

Mike and I did a good job organizing the logistics. There were very few items "missing" when we got on site. Mike was also a whiz at improvising solutions on the spot.

Dealing with the public is always a challenge. A somewhat larger team would have helped here.

We'll be a little less paranoid about submitting on time next year. We got to the submission lines too early in our fear of being late. This meant our samples cooled perhaps a bit too much.

We cooked some barbecue -- both pulled pork and baby back ribs -- during "practice" that was better than our contest submittals. Some of our attempts at "tuning" went awry. We need to get better at adapting to the local conditions and changing things on the fly.

If we can spread the work around a little bit more, we can all have a lot more fun.

In 2010 we continued with Jim Sciarra as co-pilot, and added Stan and Arlene Weinrich, who took over for the Avers, who could not attend. Stan is a fraternity brother from the Cooper Union days (1962-1966). Stan and Arlene resided in Memphis for many years, although they now live on the coast of North Carolina. The Weinrichs' friends the Fleetwoods also helped out.

We would like to thank Traeger dealer Pat Russell, of the BBQ Shop in Scottsboro Alabama, for providing us with our competition grill. I guess all Miss Piggys look alike!

We focused exclusively on the rib competition, determined to improve on last year's performance.

We finished 16th out of 39 teams, moving up 15 places; we are still awaiting the judges' detailed report to see how. We did change our recipe from "sweet and sticky" to "dry and spicy," improving our score from 446.2 (92.96%) to 459.7 (95.77%). Needless to say, the competition at this World Championship level continues to be fierce!

For lots of really great photos of the event, see Jim's collection here. As usual, Jim did a bang-up job, handling the bartending, photographic, and all other miscellaneous duties with typical aplomb.

We plan to return again in 2011, shooting for a top-10 finish.

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2010 Update

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