Every year for the past three years now, my cousin has been hosting an annual rib cook off competition on the Canada Day weekend. This year Canada day falls on the Wednesday so it wasn't a long weekend for me, but nonetheless I made the drive to his house a few hours away and spent Saturday day and night at his place.
This was the first year that I've attended the cookout event and I decided to enter the competition and try my luck against the others, with my standard oven cooked ribs. I make them quite often and have tweaked the cooking method several times and now I'm pretty satisfied with how they typically turn out. I figured I'd give it a go against the competition.
Five of us entered the contest and when I saw everyone's fancy BBQ smoker rigs, I figured I didn't have a good shot at winning. These are BBQs with hoppers that feed hardwood pellets in, to add some additional smoke to the cooking process.
I was the only one cooking my ribs in the oven that day so I just hoped that my ribs would be cooked well, not dry out and taste decent.
I'd be satisfied if people just enjoyed eating them really. I joked that I wasn't playing to win but was aiming for "not last place." There was no ranking system, just first place and a bunch of losers.
The other contestants put their ribs on an hour earlier than me which had me second guessing my timing. The put them on at 12:00pm to be done for 6:00pm judging. I put mine on at 1:30pm and actually thought that that was still 30 minutes too early, so I kept the heat quite low and turned it up gradually over several hours.
As the day progressed I also watched the others spraying their ribs with various juices in bottles and wrapping them in tin foil and doing butter baths with additional spices and all sorts of fancy techniques.
Seeing all the elaborate methods that folks were doing actually started to make me think that I might have a chance at winning this thing. Sometimes less is more with cooking. I started joking with the others, "I can't wait until my 'basic bitch' ribs cooked in the oven beat all of you with your fancy rigs and techniques." I told myself not to worry about what the others were doing and to just do my own thing, follow my gut and don't fiddle with it, just stick to the process and let the oven do the work.
It also dawned on me that everyone's ribs were all being smoked and the fact that mine weren't might make them stand out against the rest. I actually don't like a lot of smoke flavor myself. I find its over rated a lot of times. Personally, I like char flavor from a BBQ but very minimal smoke.
I was aiming for a juicy sweet rib with a nice lacquered BBQ sauce finish on it and I achieved what I wanted in the end.
So what was the verdict you ask?
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'Basic bitch' oven cooked ribs for the win!
I should mention that I didn't win the people's choice award but there was no trophy for that category so who really cares, right?
I won the judges vote and got the GOAT trophy and a bottle of Baileys. Thats all I cared about in the end.
I could see that a couple of the other contestants were a little upset by my win. It was probably more so about their loss, but I could see it on their faces that they weren't happy about the decision. They were chirping me that ovens shouldn't be allowed next year...
All in all it was a fun event and a good way to spend the Canada Day weekend. I was pretty happy about the unexpected win too, as you can probably imagine. I was riding a high for a while afterwards and have already been thinking about trying to come up with a new recipe to enter next year. I have some time to think about it.
