BBQ and Baseball Tour 2018 Day #7 “Wings, Buns and Other Things”

Today was our first day of judging. This is a lightly attended day since it involves sauces and wings. Neither command much interest except from diehards like us.

We connected with some old friends like Lance from Tastin’ ‘Round Town (www.tastinroundtown.com). We can blame him for this craziness since it was his BBQ tour in 2015 that got us infected with the Memphis in May BBQ bug.

We also had some time to explore the booths. The contestants frequently like to have catchy names like “Boars Night Out”, “The Pig and the Pigulum”, “Nice Rack”, “Aporkalypse Now”, “Born in the Que SA” and “Love Meat Tender” to name just a few.  There are over 200 booths competing in the three main categories of Whole Hog, Shoulder, and Ribs.   There are two phases of the competition “Blind” and “On Site”.  The blind competition will occur tomorrow when product will be presented to judges in styrofoam boxes that are numbered.  Each box will be judged by 4 judges.  The second phase will occur on Saturday when judges will go to booths and meet the team and taste their product.  Each judge will go to 3 teams and each team will have 3 separate judges visit them.  On site judging provides us with a great opportunity to taste some amazing BBQ but it is the cultural experience that I enjoy most.  More about that on Saturday.

Today Patrice and I did blind judging of sauce and wings.  Just to give you an idea of how arbitrary this can be, at my table one of the judges and I decided wings #2 were the best that we tasted.  A judge sitting across from me thought #2 was the worse of the lot.

There are a lot of people out at the festival so it is easy to get separated if you are not careful.  I made sure I didn’t lose Patrice by having her wear a shirt that described her perfectly (see below)

When we were leaving the fair to return to the hotel is started to rain.  At first there were fine droplets but soon after we had to run for cover.  Luckily they had room for us at the Metro PCS booth where they had phone chargers set up for the fair attendees.  So in spite of having to wait for the rain to clear we at least had an opportunity to charge our phones.  The rain let up for a bit so we hustled home while we had a chance.

After having those wings I thought I wouldn’t need to eat again until Saturday at the earliest but when dinner came around I was ready to go.  Gary and Smooch picked out a place called Flight [39 S. Main St, Memphis, TN 38103] and the place was spectacular.  They specialized in fine dining but portions can be ordered in small sizes called Flights.  So if you can’t decide if you want the Scallops, Soft Shell Crab or Shrimp you can have all 3.  They do that with their wines, appetizers, entrees and desserts.  The food was spectacular.

Until tomorrow when the real BBQ judging begins.