Comments Off on Business Member Feature – The BBQ Guru
By “BBQ Bob” Trudnak, Director of Sales and Marketing for The BBQ Guru and Pitmaster of The BBQ Guru Competition Team
The BBQ Guru is a leading designer innovative BBQ equipment. The company was first in the marketplace to develop an entire line of high-tech temperature control grill accessories. These include the award-winning PartyQ, DigiQ, and CyberQ Cloud automatic temperature control devices. The BBQ Guru also recently launched the exclusive line of Monolith BBQ Guru Edition grills, creating the most advanced ceramic charcoal grill in the world with built-in temperature control with email and SMS text notifications.
The company is committed to making the world’s finest outdoor cooking products and also offers a wide selection of BBQ tools and accessories. Whether you’re looking for automatic temperature control for your outdoor cooker, or specialty made rubs and sauces, The BBQ Guru has all your outdoor cooking essentials. For the competition cooks, many people may not know that BBQ Guru carries a variety of top, current award winning sauces, rubs and injections as well as disposable gloves, cutting boards, food handling gloves, charcoal and chef’s knives. Check us out and all of our products at www.bbqguru.com
Comments Off on Featured Recipe – Bacon Wrapped, Grilled, Stuffed Turkey Breast
This month we feature an incredible looking recipe submitted by Bob Trudnak, pitmaster of BBQ Guru out of Warminster, Pennsylvania.
• 2 turkey breast portions
• 12 slices of raw bacon
• 2 cups of cornbread dressing
• BBQ Bob’s Alpha Rub
Cornbread Dressing
• 1 16 oz. box of cornbread mix
• 1.2 C. chopped celery
• 1 small yellow onion chopped
• 2 tbs. butter
• 2 eggs beaten
• 2 cups of chicken stock
• 2 tbs. dried sage
• 2 jalapenos chopped fine
• Salt and pepper
DIRECTIONS
Turkey Breast
Set smoker up indirect at 275°F
Use Applewood smoke (approx. 2 medium chunks)
Butterfly the turkey breasts carefully keeping the same thickness on both sides of the slice.
Place about 1 to 1 ½ cups of cornbread dressing into each breast and fold the breast over.
Wrap each turkey breast with approx.. 6 pieces of bacon to cover it completely then toothpick it to keep it secure. This will keep the cornbread dressing in as well.
Cook for approximately 1 hour And 20 min. or until the internal breast temp reaches 165°F
To make the cornbread:
Cook cornbread to directions on box
Sautee onions, jalapenos and celery in the butter and set aside.
Once cornbread is finished and cooled, crumble the cornbread and mix it in with all other ingredients into a casserole dish.
Bake at 350°F for 30-35 minutes
Comments Off on Tip From the Pros – Garnishing Your Competition Box
by Brian Walrath, MABA Board Member and Pitmaster for Brown Liquor BBQ
The old saying goes, there are more ways than one to skin a cat. The same holds true for garnishing your KCBS competition box. Now before I even get started, I want to remind all of our readers what the current KCBS rules state regarding garnish…ahh, ‘ole rule #12:
12) Garnish is optional. If used it is limited to chopped, sliced, shredded or whole leaves of fresh green lettuce, curly parsley, flat leaf parsley, curly green kale and/or cilantro. PROHIBITED GARNISHES ARE lettuce cores and other vegetation, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TOendive, red tipped lettuce. “PROHIBITED” garnish shall receive a penalty score of one (1) on Appearance.
Now, when our team first started doing competition barbecue, we did the standard curly parsley boxes you’ve probably seen many times. The drawback to these types of boxes are that they are a bit time consuming and finding consistent parsley can be a challenge at different times of the year. Also, we’ve heard feedback from the judge’s tent that sometimes the individual pieces of parsley stick to your barbecue and some will ding the taste if they get it in their bite. However, even with that said, a well done parsley box makes a nice presentation if you have the patience and like that overall look. Here’s a link to a great resource on making that pretty parsley box.
Another way to garnish your box became popular last year with the use of cutting discs of tightly rolled curly leaf lettuce. Pitmaster Jerry Stephenson of Redneck Scientific even created an awesome video on exactly how this technique is done. We started doing our boxes this way last year and found that it cut our time making boxes drastically and we could do all four in about 20 minutes or so. We liked that nice even, flat surface this method provides. We also liked that we could cut our discs to different heights to boost up the garnish so the meat would sit up on it and be the star of the show or cut them a bit narrower so we had more depth for chicken or stacking ribs. One word of caution if using this technique…make sure you remove all the Saran Wrap from the box or you could get disqualified for having a foreign object in your box. One tip is to use colored wrap which can be readily found in green or red during the holidays or can also be found on Amazon.
In 2016 kale became an approved garnish for KCBS boxes. Building a kale box is a bit similar to the curly parsley, but it’s much more dense and easier to work with. The bunches don’t seem to stick to meat entries, and building kale boxes is just as quick, if not quicker than building the lettuce disc boxes mentioned above. Here’s a great new video produced by BBQ Guru featuring BBQ Bob Trudnak, pitmaster of the competition team by the same name!
At the end of the day, there are dozens of ways and a handful of different greens you may use to garnish your competition boxes. This article highlights just a few that we’ve used and have had some success with. You’ve got to find what works for you and what you can do consistently to keep your appearance scores in that 8 to 9 range all the time. Garnishing your boxes is probably the easiest element of competition barbecue that you can control week in and week out. But, remember, it’s also the lowest weighted component of scoring, so don’t get too bogged down in turning in the perfect pretty box for the judges…first and foremost, cook the meat right!
The BBQ Guru is a leading designer innovative BBQ equipment. The company was first in the marketplace to develop an entire line of high-tech temperature control grill accessories. These include the award-winning PartyQ, DigiQ, and CyberQ Cloud automatic temperature control devices. The BBQ Guru also recently launched the exclusive line of Monolith BBQ Guru Edition grills, creating the most advanced ceramic charcoal grill in the world with built-in temperature control with email and SMS text notifications.
