May 29, 2014 | Food, Grilling, Life, This Week's Eats
If you’ve never had the chance to attend a BBQ competition you must do so as soon as possible. Run, don’t walk. I tell you this because I recently attended the Memphis in May World Championship BBQ Contest and it was a phenomenal experience. There are several large competitions throughout the year in various cities around the country, but Memphis in May is the big one. It’s affectionately referred to as the “Super Bowl of Swine.” It was truly a sight to see….and smell. Two weeks later and my purse still smells like smoked pork. Seriously. There were over 250 teams and over 90,000 visitors. Competitors travel from all over the world to compete in categories like ribs, chicken, whole hog and exotic meat. Each team has their own booth where they grill, smoke, marinate, inject, baste and brush for three days in hopes of winning a cash prize and most importantly – bragging rights. As much fun as the festival was, I was there for work. My Weber colleagues and I spent three days doing grilling demonstrations with our latest products, promoting the Weber Mobile Grill Academy and our latest cookbook “Weber’s Big Book of Burgers.” I am beyond blessed to have a job that I love and to work with people who are so passionate about what we do. While we did our thing, the competition teams worked tirelessly, often sleeping in sleeping bags in their booth so they could wake up every few hours to check the temperatures on their smokers. Now that is dedication. I could barely stand waking up every two hours when I...
Apr 27, 2014 | Food, Life
I recently had the pleasure of grilling with fellow blogger and grill enthusiast, Mike Lang. Mike is a police sergeant from Ohio who started a blog several years ago about BBQ and beer. His blog is great – I encourage you to check it out at www.anotherpintplease.com. In fact, it’s so great that it caught the eye of the Weber marketing team and he’s been blogging for our website since the beginning of 2014. You can see both of our blog posts at www.webernation.com. A few weeks ago Mike came to visit the Weber HQ’s and I gave him a behind-the-scenes tour of the Weber test kitchen. We spent the day grilling pizzas, spatchcock chicken and banana s’mores boats. Mike made a great video of our time together, which I’ll post a link to as soon as it’s available. It was so much fun but I still can’t say spatchcock with a straight face. 🙂 ...