Special thanks to Patricia Matthews for photography!

Ya know, one of the more frustrating things is to achieve success within the Barbecue Industry – winning awards for packaging, content, and uniqueness; selling more sauce than the average barbecue operation would ever dream of – and never cracking the top 5 in the Nugget’s Best in the West Rib Cook-off.

Even having won awards at other barbecue venues over the years never quenched the thirst for a win at this event – which gathers the top 25 rib cooking teams in the nation!

Yeah, we’ve come close a couple of times, but after 19 years it sure feels good to come into the top 5 at the premier invitational rib cook-off in the country today!

The Best in the West Nugget Rib Cook-off should not be compared with a “KCBS” or a “Memphis in May”-type event. It has a serious financial and volume component those other groups can only dream about.

And it’s that incredible amount of volume that makes it even harder to come up with a complete run of top-flight ribs to turn in for judging. They cook maybe 3 or 4 slabs – we’re working on 190-plus slabs in the same time frame – and we have to serve what we turn in for a blind judging as well.

It’s a Real Challenge

Try slamming 50 cases of ribs per day through the portals of a 35 x 35 foot operation, on a street corner, 16 hours a day for 5 straight days, and then turn in championship-caliber products that you can hang your hat on and make money.

This event is that tough when everything is going right (when does that ever happen?).

It worked out for us this year, despite my partner (and son!) missing his 5 am wake-up call! I thought at the time “Ah hell, everything was going pretty damn good till now – hope he’s not still toasted from the night before.”

Without Jason there to get the cooker fired up and all the ribs spiced and loaded by 6 am, I really thought that we were going to have trouble getting great ribs ready on time, and out of the hunt for sure.

But I had stoked the fire box chock full of wood the night before and had a decent bed of coals and a good temperature to give me a little help on my cooking time.  Jason came in just as I was finishing the loading and worked them over for a few hours in the smoker.

And he wasn’t toasted – just worn down! Ya see, he had been letting me get off my old feet for a couple of hours every day during the afternoon lull in business. I sure as hell appreciated that break, I gotta tell ya!

I really thought we might have something working for us when Jason brought the ribs forward to the holding cabinet from the smoker – surprised as all get out – an hour early – and they looked pretty fair, but, how would they set up?

We still had an hour or two before they would be turned in – would they cut OK? Would they still hold their color?

I checked on them 30 minutes later and was floored – really floored – when I popped the door open on the holding cabinet the aroma was just phenomenal – they smelled like the best bacon your momma fixed in your earliest memories of breakfast on the farm!

We had laced them with a very nice coating of Bear Claw Honey Butt Spice that morning and it was approaching the time for finishing these ribs with a glazing of Pappy’s XXX White Lightnin’ and serving them.

When you’re doing an event that has this caliber of talent on deck, attention to detail is absolutely critical, because the smallest of ‘defects’ or imperfections are amplified when being compared to the best in the country.

And these ribs were as close to perfection as I have ever turned in, and I feel that the difference between 5th place and 1st is just minuscule more often than not.

That’s why this event means so much to any who come into the top 5 – it truly takes a team effort all the way around to be able to compete.

Plus a good luck charm! This year I had my daughter Shannon (who hadn’t been to a full-blown rib cook-off since she was little bitty) hold the tickets with the numbers and put some very good mojo on them!

It sent my heart soaring to see her reading off the numbers a split-second before the announcer called it out!

How to Judge a Rib Cook Off

For the un – initiated to the double-blind judging system for rib cook offs, the ribs are collected at the booth by a runner – who lets you pull from a spool of numbers like you would see at a raffle – one side of the ticket is placed on the bottom of the pan holding the ribs and you keep the other half – the ribs are ferried to the door of a room holding the judges, out of site from the cookers so they are clueless where they are coming from, and they are then handed off to another person who assigns them a number placed on TOP of that pan and takes them to the judging table

They are judged on a point system for color/appearance, taste/texture, tenderness and when they have judged that pan and it is deemed a finisher or a winner – they pull the number from the BOTTOM of the pan and it is held in an envelope, with its appropriate finish in judging, until the announcements are made. And no one has a clue as to where they have placed until the numbers from that ticket on the bottom of the pan is called out.

Now, some would say I may seem a little overjoyed at finishing 5th…to those who have never competed against the teams who travel thousands of miles from all parts of the country to compete in this event – sign on and join up with us and you’ll get a taste of intensity you may only see once in your life.

I am truly thankful to John Ascuaga’s Nugget Casino and to the entire Ascuaga family for the invitation to their event and am truly grateful for being allowed to come and hawk my goods. God bless them for being genuine fans of great ribs and keeping the contest focused on the competitors!