We are back, and we are talking this week about this past weekend at the Wildwood Hills Ranch BBQ Competition for Vulnerable Youth.
This competition was started by Joe Quick with Hawknut’s BBQ and hosted at the Wildwood Hills Ranch in St Charles, Iowa. This ranch hosts leadership events for the youth in the area and gives them a place to have a good time and learn some great life skills as well. This month, they wanted to host a BBQ competition class of sorts and asked pro teams to donate their time and equipment to help teach these kids how to do competition BBQ and have it be a fun competition between the kids.
It was set up as a KCBS Backyard Competition, which means chicken and ribs. Even though it is a fun competition for the kids, it was set up this way to act as a warm-up for us pro teams for the upcoming competition season. The biggest change to this event compared to how I normally compete is that we were using chicken legs instead of my usual thighs. The reason for this is that since it takes significantly more work to do thighs, they were worried that we wouldn’t have enough time to show the kids how to trim them properly. Turns out this was a blessing in disguise because I discovered how much easier it is to do legs, and I think I am going to do legs from here on out, especially since I can still get really good results. .
I had 2 kids on my team and both of them were really looking forward to competing against their friends, and also to learn, which made it that much more fun. We prepped the ribs in my normal fashion which you an read about in my Ribs! Ribs! Ribs! post from September, the only difference being that we also injected the ribs with Butcher BBQ’s Pork Injection, which was my first time doing this, and its definitely going to be done from now on, in the competition setting. Next was chicken leg prep. This being the first time, I had to look up some information online and see some techniques. The downside was that we had 1 week’s notice, and the weather last week wasn’t the best (check local listings). I went into it feeling confident either way.
We prepped the chicken by freeing the skin from the chicken so the fat would render better and injected it with Butcher BBQ’s Original Bird Booster on each side of the bone. I wanted to watch the salt content on the chicken, so I decided to only apply my Lovely Jubbly BBQ And Then Some rub and put them in the Masterbuilt 1050 with the ribs at 275 degrees. It smoked for about 1.5 hours before hitting 187 internal temp, which at that point we took them off, dunked them in Blues Hog Champions Blend BBQ Sauce, and put them back on for 7-8 minutes to set the sauce. They really turned out well, with the team absolutely devouring the leftovers.
After turn-ins, we got everything all cleaned up and waited for awards. Out of 7 teams, we came 4th overall, which is always a good feeling to get a call!
The best part about this weekend is that we got to help teach a new generation of BBQ cooks, and I got to meet in person some teams that we have connected with via Facebook, expanding our friends and giving us more to look forward to at more competitions. I absolutely cannot wait to do this event again next year and find other ways to help teach the word of BBQ too.
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As always, keep cookin’ and Lovely Jubbly!
Lovely Jubbly BBQ 