Smokin on the River this weekend!

For all you BBQ aficionados out there, the 5th Annual "Smoking on the River" will be held this Friday and Saturday on Riverside Drive in scenic Downtown Jeffersonville! This is a KCBS sanctioned event with a total prize pool over $8,500! If you're a fan of the "BBQ Pitmasters" show on the Travel Channel, then you would enjoy checking it out.

This year I'll be cooking with Chef Reed and the guys from Against the Grain in their first KCBS event. I'm sure I saw fellow forumite Andrew A.'s team, Bourbon Barrel BBQ listed as a participant well. They were last year's Reserve Champion and they know how to put out some serious "Q".

There will also be a Beer and BBQ tent where I'm certain the guys from NABC and other local brewers will be sampling as well.
Also, they usually have some really good blues bands performing on the River Stage.

Here's a link to more information about the event.
http://smokinontheriverbbq.com/about_us.html

If you make your way down there, stop by and say "Hi" as long as it's not from 11:00 am thru 1:30pm on Saturday as that is crunch time and when the judging windows are open. You will be politely shooed away until the boxes are turned in.

You will be politely shooed away until the boxes are turned in.

Good to see you are finally "getting" that part of it...

BTW...Regrettably we (The Rolling Bones) won't be cooking the event this year, too many other irons in the fire at the moment...But we'll look forward to seeing our friends at a couple of other contests later this year.

Might come by tomorrow (Friday) what are the times? Or is there an event website?

Sadly (sarcasm) I will be enjoying my father's day weekend Saturday skydiving.

Well not quite the results from last year. We slipped one spot to third but it was still a great event. We love cooking so close to home. Great contest. We will for sure be back next year.

Well not quite the results from last year. We slipped one spot to third but it was still a great event. We love cooking so close to home. Great contest. We will for sure be back next year.

Good on ya Andrew.

BTW, I'm -pretty- sure we're gettin' out of the competition business...among other things we've grown a bit weary of supporting someone Else's weekend paycheck with our hard earned money. If you know of anyone who needs a lightly used 22" or an 18" WSM, I've got one of each for sale.

Dan, you guys were set up right next to some good friends of mine (Kegg's over Easy). They had a blast at the event, and enjoyed the time hanging out with you all a bit.

I know Eden and those guys because I grew up over in Hooiserland. They were great neighbors.! We had a great time!

I thought we put up a pretty good showing (33rd overall, with 23rd in Pork and 28th in Chicken) for a first time team using a new rig that Chef Reed Johnson had only fired up a couple of times prior to the competition.

We really had a hard time controlling a constant temperature. It never really spiked too hot on us, but it did require pretty constant attention. We made a note of some simple design changes to be made to the rig and with the addition of a MOJO unit, I think we should fair much better at Ribberfest in Madison, IN in August. But more importantly, the team from Against the Grain now understands what it's going to take to place well in the separate categories.

Chef Reed is not quite the mad scientist as Chef Ryan from Feast, but he has some pretty impressive skills and puts out some seriously tasty eats. His crew is very tight knit and work well together! It's very hard to explain to us working chefs how different the competition circuit is as opposed to cooking in a restaurant setting until you experience it first hand. Valuable lessons were learned. I'm really looking forward to cooking with these guys in future contests!

Here are a couple of pics from the event.

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Those boxes look great!

Thanks! I worked hard on those boxes! Because Reed, not really knowing that curly parsley is pretty much the norm for the base of the box in competition, had his chef toque on and got flat leaf instead. So I kind of "shingled" the individual leafs of parsley in a sort of "fish scale" pattern for our base; as I had nothing else to do at 2:00 am while most everyone else was napping.
We pretty much got eights and nines across the board for Appearance. There always seems to be some hard ass judge that gave us one lone six.

Here's a couple of lessons we learned. Our ribs really needed about another hour in the rig and we got a lot of fives and sixes for Tenderness on those and that was our worst category.

Our Brisket on the other hand was a whole other story. Reed got us a 35 #whole Creekstone Farms Prime packer cut that I broke down into the flat and two pieces of cap. The marbling was beautiful throughout the whole piece of meat, so we figured we'd really concentrate on the flat and sort of neglected the cap parts. Unfortunately at turn in time the flat had rested too long and was kind of dry and overdone, I knew it was going to be a weak box for us. I expected and we received a pretty dismal showing in that category on Tenderness.

However, when we started breaking down and pulled out the pan with the cap pieces that we shoved to the back of the shelf and just sort of forgot about, figuring we were going to just snack on those; they were friggin' perfect! They were exactly what you want to turn in. Tender, juicy with a very nice smoke ring and pull. Pretty damn tasty too. We probably would have had a call in the top 10 if we hadn't forgotten about them and turned that in instead Oh well live and learn.

Well not quite the results from last year. We slipped one spot to third but it was still a great event. We love cooking so close to home. Great contest. We will for sure be back next year.

I looked all over the place for you guys to say "Hi", but couldn't find you. Where was your spot this year?

However, when we started breaking down and pulled out the pan with the cap pieces that we shoved to the back of the shelf and just sort of forgot about, figuring we were going to just snack on those; they were friggin' perfect! They were exactly what you want to turn in. Tender, juicy with a very nice smoke ring and pull. Pretty damn tasty too. We probably would have had a call in the top 10 if we hadn't forgotten about them and turned that in instead Oh well live and learn.

That brisket point was excellent.