Sommer and I had a great time in Ottumwa last weekend. The weather was great on Friday and we managed to navigate into our spot around noon. It was another tough crowd with lots of great teams.
We had a couple challenges on the weekend....I woke up about 3:30 am to a hard rain, no big deal as the cookers were under the awning. I decided to get up to check on them to be sure, I took the first step out of the trailer and knew something was wrong as I felt my shoe fill with water. I quickly realized that we had 6+ inches of water running through our site. It was a mess with cooler, garbage, logs, you name it floating by. The water was about 2 inches from coming into the firebox on the smoker. After about ten minutes it stopped raining and the water started to go down...that could have been really bad, but in the end it was no big deal.
We had a couple challenges on the weekend....I woke up about 3:30 am to a hard rain, no big deal as the cookers were under the awning. I decided to get up to check on them to be sure, I took the first step out of the trailer and knew something was wrong as I felt my shoe fill with water. I quickly realized that we had 6+ inches of water running through our site. It was a mess with cooler, garbage, logs, you name it floating by. The water was about 2 inches from coming into the firebox on the smoker. After about ten minutes it stopped raining and the water started to go down...that could have been really bad, but in the end it was no big deal.
Challenge number two proved to be a bigger issue. Brisket has been, by far, our best category...I knew that would not be the case this weekend when I took our brisket out of the package. It had a huge fat cap and after I got it trimmed it was really skinny. In my experience a skinny brisket is a dry brisket. This one was no exception. I probably should have made a couple off adjustments to cooking or trimming, lesson learned I guess. Everything else went off as planned and we were really happy with the other three categories. The judges did not agree :) Our scores were actually pretty good with everything except the ribs in the 160's but it wasn't good enough for a top ten call.
Out of 30 Teams
12th Place - OVERALL
12th Place - CHICKEN
15th Place - RIBS
12th Place - PORK
14th Place - BRISKET
A very consistent outing just not consistently good! Overall, I was happy with everything except the Brisket and we will give it another go June 26th in Marshalltown.
Joe
That's an awesome picture...glad you didn't lose anything too valuable. I just made a brisket last week and left too much fat. Had to re-trim after it was cooked...turned out very well though.
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