© 2010 Pigheaded BBQ

April 17-18, 2009

Pork in the Park BBQ

Salisbury, MD

Recap:

Well, our 2009 BBQ competition season is underway, and it started out with a bang. We had beautiful weather for the most part, with the exception of a very brief but strong wind burst that wreaked havoc with our row of competitors. Have you ever seen how high a canopy can fly? We did, we saw a fellow competitor's canopy fly at least 25' in the air. This extremely nice couple must be snake bit, because they also lost canopies at Dover 2 years ago. Hang in there Chris & Valerie. We also had a few other adventures, but ask us about them when you see us. In attendance for this event was Ron, Mike, Brian and Mike's little sister, Stephanie, who had permission to stay out all night again. Mike didn't want to babysit alone, so he enlisted our help. We had some friends stop by, saw friends on the circuit we hadn't seen since last year and met some very nice people as well. Ok, I guess you're wondering how we did. We didn't start out well. Once again chicken let us down, way down. 82nd out of 92nd place down. Well, we can't do much but go up our next time. In the ribs category, we finished in the top 1/3rd with a 34th place finish. They were good, but just a tad overdone. Our usually strongest category, pork was also a disappointment this time. We thought it was ok, but never thought it was a 76th out of 92 ok. We did finish with a bang though. We placed 7th out of 92 in brisket. This category, we did think we nailed it however and it appears that we were right. We'll take a top 10 finish in any category, especially in a field this big and with the caliber of teams we competed against. I guess the winter season was longer than we thought and we forgot how to cook. Never fear, we'll be practicing harder than ever and our scores will improve. Thanks for taking the time to visit our website and hope to see you at one of our competitions in the future.

August 8, 2009

Victory BrewBQ in the Vineyard

Gap, Pa

Recap:

We had a good time at this first time event. It was a one day competition, so we only cooked chicken and ribs. It was hosted by Victory Brewing Co and held at the Twin Brook Winery. A nice venue that featured wine tasting, free beer, family and good friends who came out to support us. In attendance were Ron & Brian. There was supposed to be a BBQ division and Grilling division. Ron was going to do the bbq and Brian the grilling. Well, not enough teams signed up for the grilling division, so we teamed up and cooked together. Well, we won both chicken and ribs! We were very surprised and happy. If you know us, we haven't exactly set the world on fire when it comes to chicken, so with a new recipe and technique we felt pretty good about the end result, but were still surprised with the win. Our ribs were a new recipe also. I think we'll stick with them both for awhile. I think this competition has the potential to grow next year with more advanced advertising and more sponsor money. We'll be back to defend our title.

August 28-29, 2009

New Holland SummerFest
New Holland, Pa

Recap:

Even the rain couldn’t spoil the 2009 New Holland Summerfest. This is my favorite BBQ competition. Melvin Stoltzfus and crew do a great job organizing this event. There were 76 teams competing. We had the same site as last year and were happy for that. Ron, Mike, and Stephanie got there around 10:30 Friday morning with Brian arriving shortly after and all began setting up our site. The early arrival proved a good decision, what with the tight ingress into some parts of the grounds and the weather deciding to let its presence be known. The weather turned out to be a big factor for the 2 days we were there, raining all of Friday afternoon and most of Friday night, quickly turning our site into a muddy mess. We thought of reenacting the famous Woodstock mudslide, but nobody wanted to shed their clothes. (Thank God for that).

Saturday was a full day with 6 categories to be turned in, starting at 11:30AM. First up was sausage which we mixed and stuffed Friday afternoon, followed by chicken, ribs, pulled pork, brisket and chef’s choice which in our case was pecan pie. This made for a fairly hectic morning, but everything was turned in on time. We were pretty happy with most of our entries and awaited the judge’s decisions.

Our smoked mozzarella cheese and roasted red pepper sausage placed 33 rd. Our Chicken placed 40 th, our ribs placed 19 th, our pork a dismal 63 rd, our brisket got us a walk with a 7 th place finish and our pecan pie placed 19 th. Overall we finished 29 th. Not a great performance, but not terrible considering the level of competition here.

As always, we saw some old friends from the circuit, and made some new ones. Friends and family also showed up to show their support and root us on. I think the hardest part of the competition was cleaning the muddy mess that our trailer turned out to be. Thankfully, my wife Norma and son Ron helped me with that chore. The trailer is cleaned, packed and ready for the Southern York County BBQ Competition in Shrewsbury on Sept 11-12. Stop by and have some good food and camaraderie.

October 16-17, 2009

Diamond State BBQ Championship

Dover, DE

Recap:

Dover Downs, we came we saw we got SMOKED!!! I’ve been trying to put this competition out of my mind, and with my sieve for a mind I truly hoped I could forget it. Well, I can’t. This one will be in my mind the entire winter. The weather was typically Dover. In other words “Dover Blows”. In fact, I had tee shirts made up last year stating just that. They sold like hotcakes. The rain, chill and winds lasted most of the competition.

Despite the weather, the cook went very smoothly. The smokers hummed along all night through the wind and rain, without so much as a hiccup. Our meats turned out like we planned with the possible exception for chicken. We thought they were a little too spicy. We had high hopes for at least the ribs and brisket. We went to the awards ceremony hoping for a top 5 call in at least one category. Alas that was not to be. We weren’t even close in any of the categories, in fact we were in the bottom half of the 81 teams for all four categories. The dismal results are as follows:
Overall: 61 out of 81, Chicken: 54th, Ribs: 48th, Pork: 72nd, Brisket: 43rd
We can’t blame the weather, we can’t blame the judges, we can’t blame anything because we don’t know why we finished so low. We can only chalk it up to the old saying: “On any given day…”. On April 16-17, 2010 in Salisbury, MD we will try to redeem ourselves. Yes it’s going to be a long cold winter for Pigheaded BBQ.

Thanks guys for a very good season. We had our ups and downs, but all in all, this was our best season yet and despite Dover, we are improving. Keep your heads up and keep on smokin’!!

July 10-12, 2009

New Jersey State Barbecue Championship

Wildwood, NJ

Recap:

Oh those Wildwood days, Oh those Wildwood nights….

Well, we came, we saw, and, pardon the pun, we got smoked!! Wildwood was a new venue for us this year. We had a great time, made a lot of new friends and helped out some first time competitors. We should have had someone help us.

This was our first 3 day event. I thought we would have been more tired than usual, but that wasn't the case for me. Maybe it was the laid back Friday. Instead of arriving, setting up and immediately prepping the meat, we arrived, set up and had the rest of the day to relax. Friday night at the cooks meeting, we received our mystery meat for the Iron Chef category. Duck, I've never tasted duck before, let alone cook one. Ronnie, was given the task to come up with something and was he ever prepared. He pretty much emptied out his food pantry from home and was pretty much prepared for anything, After consulting his Blackberry, he decided to roast the duck first, then he pulled the meat and made egg rolls out of it. They were, in our estimation, very good. Next up was sauce and Mike took over then. He whipped up a concoction that made us proud. I was up next for dessert and made “Redneck Cannolis”. These were a hit with everyone, but the judges.

This was by far the worst performance by Pigheaded BBQ. I'm not sure that I have an explanation, or even know why we did so bad. The ribs were very spicy and a little tough. I can explain the tough, but I can't explain the spicy. Same rub, same sauce as our 4th place finish in New Holland last August. The chicken was chicken, the pork was good and we thought we hit a home run with the brisket, but the judges disagreed.

The damage:

September 11-12, 2009

Southern York County BBQ Cookoff

Shrewsbury, Pa

Recap:

We arrived at Shrewsbury in a driving rainstorm around 10:30AM, not knowing if we would sink or swim. We met with Ben , one of the organizers and found our spot. After parking the trailer we decided to duck into the Farmers Market to stratagize and stay dry for a spell. We had a look around, a bite to eat and decided to go brave the weather and set up. We had positioned the trailer to use as a wind block and set up our canopies, tables and other necessary paraphernalia. We saw that a small lake was developing in our site, so we borrowed a shovel from our local neighborhood Pirates, (Tom & Chrissy of the Va BBQ Pirates) and filled a few buckets of gravel to fill in the low spots. Ron Jr. then became our resident irrigation specialist and dug some channels to divert the water away from the site. Thank goodness we were situated on crush and run instead of grass, or this would have been a quagmire.

The rest of the day was spent doing our normal competition chores. The meat was inspected by Melvin of New Holland fame, the meat prep was started and the site fine tuned. We did some visiting of neighboring teams. We were between Smokeopolis and Susquehanna Blue Smoke. Both were great neighbors. We chatted with Sal of Smokin' Gnome, Jim & Mark of Pequea Pullers, Tom & Michele of Lo'N'Slo and met the Pulling Pork team who were the only other team from Delaware. Since it was still raining, we decided to walk across the parking lot back to the Farmers Market for dinner. What a friendly bunch of people. They greeted all the BBQ teams enthusiastically and had lots of questions about the whole competition scene. The food was great and we had fun looking around at all the shops. We headed back for the cooks meeting and more chores.

Did I mention that it rained there? It rained 'til around 1:00AM, then more or less settled into a light mist. We put our butts and brisket on and semi -retired for the evening. Up for good at 5:00AM to get ready to put the ribs on and start the long day ahead. The cook went well during the night and once the ribs were on, we prepped the sausage and got ready to put the chicken on. Our Amish friends from the Middletown Farmers Market came up to support us. They were there to see how a first time competition looked because we are trying to convince them to host one in Middletown. My wife and Dorothy, a family friend drove up also to cheer us on. We were pleased with the chicken taste, though not necessarily the appearance, thought the ribs and pork were good and the brisket tasty, but a little tough and the sausage good. After turning in our entries, we started cleaning up and waiting for the award ceremony.

We all walked over to the awards tent and heard some good music from a local band as the final scores were tallied by the Kansas City Barbecue Society reps. During a steady rain, the ceremony started and we were surprised by being called up for 2nd place chicken finish. We were called up again in the next category for a 3rd place ribs finish. We didn't hear our name for the pork category, but were called up again for an 8th place finish in brisket. Tom & Michele from Lo'N'Slo were Grand Champs with 2 firsts and 2 second and Paul & Barbara of PA Midnight Smokers were Reserve Champs. Guess who was 3rd overall? PIGHEADED BBQ. We were stunned and very pleasantly surprised.

Melvin from Meadow Creek, Joe from NBBQA, and Ben and Alicia from The Markets at Shrewsbury did a very good job with this first year event and despite the weather the a good time was had by all. We will definitely plan on being backnext year.