The dust has settled and my weary old body is slowly recovering from a 40 hour stint at the Beer Blues & BBQ Festival. The event itself went off without a hitch (except for 1 broken trophy) and was arguably one of the highlights of the Bay of Fires Winter Arts Festival. Earlier this year we held Tasmania’s first fully sanctioned low and slow BBQ competition in Hobart. This was followed up within months at St Helens with Tasmania’s second, yet richest, low and slow comp, offering prize money in excess of $5500. When consulting with parties that are interested in holding BBQ competitions within Tasmania, the main things that sticks with me are both the initial look on people’s faces when I propose a competition, then the look on their face’s post competition. To give you an idea; Low and Slow BBQ is extremely new down in Tas and the concept of what we do is unbelievable to most. “You do what? You cook in a field, where teams bring their own kit and stay there for 18 hours plus”? To post competition conversation of “We totally didn’t anticipate the reception, we’ve been slammed, we ran out of beer, we ran out of food, oh and we’d love to do this again next year it’s been fantastic”! Most of the time I really want to say, “Yes well, I was trying to tell you this months ago…”, but as Confucius says “a journey of a thousand miles….”. The event saw 8 Tasmanian teams, of which 5 teams returned from the Hobart comp and 3 were new Tassie teams: Creek Freaks, Sausage Smokers and the Student Smokers (St Helens District High School team); having a crack. We also had 3 mainland teams make the journey down which is great even though they took out the comp 😊 The Tassie BBQ scene bump in was nice and relaxed with the highlight being Grant from TSJ getting out of his car and throwing up in the middle of the footy field saying “I think I picked up a bug on the boat” whilst Jimi’s head shook left to right, then whispering to me “I fixed him up good and proper last night”. The newbies pushed a few time frames. The Sausage Smokers were late but made it eventually. The school team’s smoker, which they built in engineering class, needed some tweaks so it was wheeled back into the work shop where the students made some last minute mods. Thankfully we were close to the main shopping strip in St Helens so the local IGA stores were quickly stripped of their parsley and the reject shop was a favourite destination for cleaning supplies. As usual I over committed and agreed to help set up the Hark marquee, get meat for about 5 teams, Parsley for 4 of the teams, Rubs & Sauces for the student team and their teacher Justin Emerton’s team Whalebone Ribs BBQ, and to top it off I had to share my marquee and some basic kit with the Smokeface Grillahs, who I now call the Fartarse Grillahs!! These boys could fuel a smoker on gas alone!! Not long after bump in, around 3pm, we were all cleared to proceed. On this outing, I was joined by one half of “The Shanes” Shayne Lewis. Our good mate Munders aka SOSKING has a knackered back and couldn’t make it this time which is a shame as he’s always good value. The Mrs was busy with the kids and helping out at the Hark marquee so we were a two man team. To be fair though, due to my commitments, I left Shayne to his own devices prepping meat. Thankfully he’s a chef so trimming up the meat wasn’t an issue for him although he did look at me funny when I told him to separate the point from the flat. I clocked on around 8:30pm after I had fulfilled my obligations to the competition and commenced trimming up the Boston Butts and fired up the pit while Shayne finished prepping the lamb and chicken. From there you would think it was smooth sailing, put wood on the smoker and keep it at temp right? Yeah, No! Apparently, I was left in charge when security clocked off – no one told me about that? My wife likes to tell me that BBQ is like womens club for men and you know what? She’s right! After ducking and weaving a few issues, getting the family dinner, a quick stop at the local IGA, the battle between The Smoking Devils and The Sausage Smokers, I eventually settled in to the night shift. Thankfully my team mate Shayne was understanding and had been busy socialising so all was well. As I’m sure most teams know – I’m not really sure what happened between 3 and 7am, other than I tended to the pit and drank coffee. I know this as I was still awake in the morning, the pit was still at temp and it must have been me as Shayne was asleep. For me this is the most boring part of comps as I like to stay busy and other than wrapping & boating proteins there isn’t much else to do. Hand ins for the St Helens comp were every 30 mins and started at 10am with Brisket. We cracked on, got all our entries in, and except for a couple of errors, we were pretty happy with the cook. By this point the wind had picked up and gaffa tape was holding the marquee together – seems to be a regularity for me! Knowing that the marquee wasn’t going to last, we attempted to pack up before it blew away but we were too late and the 6 x 3 ended up in the wheelie bin. When we all lined up for the results the first category to be called was Brisket. 1st place for Beef went to Jeff from Turnspit Dogs and when they called his name he was nowhere to be found. As it turns out he was asleep and Gordo had to ring him. When he turned up to find he had won Brisket he thought we were all having him on. The sleepy bewildered look on his face whilst saying “really, na, you’re shitting me, really, c’mon did I really win”? was hilarious! Our best result was 1st place in Pork which is back-to-back 1st places in Pork for us. Pretty happy with that as our Pork rub and Pork sauce are proving to be the difference. Unfortunately, the mainland teams wiped all the Tassie teams, pretty sure that’s because we use “natural” methods in Tas but that’s a story for another post 😊 Irrelevant of who won the competition the biggest winner was the Tasmanian BBQ scene. The whole community came together to make this event a success and the feedback from the public was overwhelming. Teams were on call to help the student team with Abel from Cleanheat being the mainstay. Hunters Cleaning Products Tasmania sponsored the $250 entry fee for the students and supplied them with their cleaning equipment. James Elphick sorted out Boston Butts from Scottsdale Pork and in conjunction with Trevor from Robbins Island who provided MB9+ Wagyu Briskets, I'm glad to say that this great Tassie meat took 1st places in their respective categories. We are especially thankful to the event sponsors Cleanheat Charcoal, Hark Australia, East Coast Village Provedore, Rupertswood farm, Tamar Artisan Small Goods, Lean to Kitchen and of course to our team sponsors Great Water Filters Australia, Robbins Island Wagyu, Walkabout 4WD, Maka’s Leather Goods, Tasmanian Hotel & Catering Supplies and Misty Gully. Finally we would like to say thank you to Heidi Howe for giving us the opportunity to hold a competition as part of the Winter Arts Festival. |