There's been a flurry of posting before this, but this should serve as a summary. The dust has settled, the weekend is over, and we are all a little older, wiser, and more tired. And plenty hung over.

So, as regular readers will know, this entire blog was created as a way for us to document our discoveries in the food world, in particular the art of slow smoking. The main competition we had our eyes on was the Pitmasters Competition (previously the British Barbecue Society Competition). There are several rounds, and the one we attended this year and last year was the "warm up" Mayhem in May competition. We want to keep attending until we have mastered the art of slow smoking, after which we will enter ourselves for the full-on championship rounds, the main prize of which are places at the Jack Daniels and American Royal Barbecue competition. We are a long way from there, but we aim to get there.

But for the moment, we are learning - and the other competitors in Mayhem in May are great people to learn off - many of them cater slow smoked foods for a living, and have some impressively immense equipment that makes our battered bins look very small and squalid.

So we all left work early on Friday evening, with fully packed up cars. Me and Seffers were in the vanguard, whereas MANT, Harry and Stoods were held up in traffic. Hence, me and Seffers had to put the tents up. Look what a cracking job we did.

There was a great deal of carousing on Friday night, and I was induced by a baying audience to bring out the ukulele and music stand. Mission accomplished. There was some minor fracas when it was discovered that I'd forgotten to bring saucepans, toothpaste, shower gel, a spare chopping board, nutmeg, pudding plates, barbecue sauce ingredients, enough rub, and breakfast ingredients. In my defence, I did bring bread-making ingredients, and a ukulele. AND a music stand. MANT also forgot the tongs, so I reckon we're even. LEARNING POINT FOR NEXT YEAR: pack saucepans etc.

So, on Saturday morning everyone woke up with hangovers induced by Yeti's rum. We put up the gazebo and our famous banner:

The first event of the day was Ready Steady Q - a warm up event in the style of Ready Steady Cook where you're given a meat, can choose some extra ingredients, and must produce a dish in an hour using only a barbecue. MANT and I competed. I put too much chilli in my ratatouille (what kind of idiot puts chilli in a ratatouille anyway?) and MANT's was too peppery, so neither of us qualified for the next round. Entertainingly, there was also a film crew making a short about the competition. I think MANT gave better comments to camera than I did, but we'll see.

After that, it was time for lunch. We had a dual-headed lunch. A delicious pig cheek and shallot stew, and a smoked trout, which was caught by my mother-in-law, and lightly smoked by us as a kind of post-lunch pudding type affair. Both very tasty indeed.

And after all that, it was time to get down to business. At 2:00 we were given our meat.




We then had about 24 hours to cook the meat and hand it in. Hand-in was staggered from noon on Sunday to 2:00 PM. So, the first thing to get down to was rubbing the meat with our spice rubs. So we had chicken thighs, baby back ribs, spare ribs, a pork shoulder, and an enormous beef brisket. When in a situation like this, the important thing is not to think too much but just get rubbing. There had been some muttering in the ranks that MANT was being too dictatorial, but at this point panic set in, and MANT was unanimously voted in as Dictator for Life. He chose a path of higher-than-usual heat, and a consequently shorter cooking time.

I hate demembraning

After that there wasn't much to do but wait until our annointed cooking times. MANT planned out the timings (last year we were marked down for over-cooking) and Seffers studiously documented them in a notebook. I also attempted to make bread in the barbecue, but the less said about that the better. We did decide to inject the pork shoulder with a mixture of cider vinegar and apple juice in the middle of the night. And Stoods heroically stoked the fire until 4 in the morning. I think the maximum anyone slept was about three hours.

By four o'clock in the morning, we were all awake again, no thanks to Stoods' last minute whisky enthusiasm. It was time to put the brisket on (although we had been warned repeatedly during the night that we were skating close to the ice with our brisket cooking time).

All night we had been plotting. And our plots were laid out in neat lines on notepaper provided by Seffers. These notes would be our Rock of Certainty to cling to throughout the maelstrom of the coming cook-off. So the first thing we did was set fire to them while making breakfast.

Our plan was the high temperature / short cooking times (relatively speaking). This was a high risk gamble, and we took it in order to distinguish ourselves from the competition. The meat was rubbed and marinaded (and in the case of the pork, injected), so it was pretty much a matter of "stick it in the smoker when the timing tells you to."

Meanwhile, the secondary activity of making the entry for the pudding competition had begun. I figured that since we had a smoker, we might be able to use it like a conventional oven to bake a pie. With a tray of water between the coals and the food, the direct heat would be absorbed by the water, and so the ambient air / steam temperature would be somewhere only a bit north of 100C. A slow oven, basically. So I figured a custard tart might work, since that needs to be cooked slowly so that you can get it out before it sets too much (so it still has a smidgen of wobble).
But, we are men of science, so the first thing we wanted to find out was whether you could bake with the direct heat of the coals (i.e. with the mediating tray of water removed) in a sort of "upside down grill" arrangement.

Turns out you can't.

So anyway, I made a pastry from flour, ground almonds, sugar, 1 egg, and a dash of water to bring it together. I rolled it out into the pan, rested the pastry, then blind baked it in our makeshift "ovens", on top of the pork.

And rather amazingly, it did actually work. We used lemons wrapped in foil to weigh down the pastry, by the way.

Things were going well here, so now it was time for a nice argument with Seffers and MANT about the ingredients for custard. As any idiot knows, you need double cream, egg yolks, caster sugar and vanilla. Since this was a custard tart, it was necessary to finish with nutmeg, but I forgot the nutmeg. I did remember the vanilla though. Those are the ingredients - also, Liz Upton recommends some cornflour or custard powder to stabilise the mixture and make it a better consistency. There was no custard powder at the village shop, but Seffers did manage to get some cornflour. Anyway, those are the ingredients - but the relative quantities were a subject of much debate. MANT was pushing to reduce the quantity of eggs, but he's weird about eggs - and Seffers had a recipe that sounded like heresy to me. Broadly, we took the average of everyone's suggestions, made a custard, heated it gently on the gas hob to thicken a little, then it was poured into the prepared pastry case and baked at the top of the pork in the smoker for a hour and a half. I was expecting it to take less time than this, and I was anxiously checking it to see if it was setting. Thankfully it did set in the end. I idiotically didn't take a photo when it first came out of the smoker it looked beautiful - but we needed to cut it into six portions and make it look nice. However, the pastry tin was not springform. This is a learning point for next time. It's a gigantic pain in the ass trying to get perfectly wobbly custard tart out of a non-springform tin. My ham-fisted attempts caused MANT to laugh so much he was still wiping tears from his eyes when it came to handing the pudding in. We also bought some raspberries, some of which we had dropped in the custard before baking, the rest we turned into a basic jam and smeared in between the slices of tart.

There was a bit of time to do a tour of the field and check out our magisterial competitors. I think these pictures will show the quality of the competitors we were up against.

Our neighbours Bunch of Swine. They very generously gave us some of their ribs. They were delicious. This was the first time they competed, but man they were organised. A delicate ballet of smoking. Ours wasn't a ballet. More a drunken line dance where nobody knew whether they were gentlemen or ladies.

The Jambo. Custom built - hit tech smoking.

BBQ Shack - these guys really knew what they were doing.

I think these guys knew what they were doing. It was a stag weekend for them - but they seemed to work really hard.

Smoque - these chaps were looking to set up a series of restaurants in the Midlands. They also hosted the massive party on Friday night that left everyone with brutal hangovers - but that allowed me to play the ukulele.

Royal Pit Crew. Look how neat everything is.

Yeti - what a great guy. As well as giving us great barbecue tips, he also told me the secret of baking proper sourdough bread (which I will go into in another post).

Is any further comment necessary? Wow.

So let that gallery put our achievements in context. The time for handing in was drawing near. While Seffers and MANT and Harry tended the pits - me and Stoods took on the most important job of the entire weekend - arranging the parsley. This was a tip from the Smoque guys. You get marks for presentation, so it's important to make the bed of parsley look nice. The rules stipulate that your entry can't be marked distinctly in any way (to keep the judging anonymous). So within the bounds of the strict rules you need to make your bed of parsley look nice. It's best to make sure there aren't any stalks, and you want to keep each tiny bit of parsley the right way up so you get the nice bright green, rather than the dull green from the other side.

Behold our handiwork.

From there it was just a logical progression to add some meat to the prepared containers:
We won chicken last year, pretty much by accident. So this year we attempted to recreate the winning method, by leaving the chicken soaking in some melting ice overnight, and trying to crisp up the skin as best we could.

I think we could probably have followed Seffers' advice and crisped the skin for longer, but they were broadly acceptable

MANT said we ran out of rub for the ribs. But I thought they looked pretty good. They certainly tasted OK - but I think maybe the meat could have been a bit less yielding. It's good to get just a little bit of chew in there.

We were broadly happy with the chicken and the ribs. We weren't at all happy with the brisket and the pork:

We took a decision not to pull the pork, but to serve it in slices. Unfortunately the injections left unappetising marks through the flesh. And it tasted pretty dreary.

And the brisket was terrible. Wildly undercooked and tough. The rub was quite nice, though.

So, we handed our meat, pudding and barbecue sauce in and waited.

Here is a picture of the Stoodley family waiting.

Eventually the tension was broken - the results were announced. We didn't place for any of the meat categories. Looking at the detailed results afterwards, it turns out we came quite close to placing in chicken. They were surprisingly nice about our brisket - which is mystifying. Here are the judging notes:

3 Gastroteers
Chicken
Great skin, some parts a little dry,
Ribs
Good texture and taste, requires a little more flavour,
Pork,
Fatty soapy flavour, bland, appearance unappealing, lacked flavour, looked dreadful
Brisket,
Very tough, nice flavour, undercooked

Pretty fair, basically.

However, there was a surprising turn-up in the minor categories when we took third prize in pudding. Go custard tart!

So overall, we learned a lot about hot smoking / barbecuing, and about cooking outdoors. It was a really fun weekend, although it was pretty tiring. The British Barbecue Society Competitions get the Gastroteers "Hearty Recommendation" Award. We will definitely be back next year. We don't feel we are quite ready to compete in the big league competitions, but we'll stick to the Mayhem in May until we're a bit happier with our results.

AwardsIt's prize-giving time, but we're not hopeful...3rd PrizeFUCKING YES!Third prize pudding. RESULT!

Stoodleys

Pudding not great

Pork