What happened to the Chicken?

At the conclusion of the ‘21 BBQ season, we developed a chicken process which was consistently landing us in the top 10, heck we even earned our first 180 in chicken. For those of you new to the competition BBQ, a 180 is a perfect score in a category. One might imagine, how surprised we were when our first cook this year, our chicken was right back at the bottom of the barrel. How could that be? I’ll tell you.

As I look to advance the team and improves our processes, I frequently try to identify gadgets or tools that might help to make things a little easier. This off season I stumbled across the wolf trays. They are awesome and eliminate the need for me moving the chicken around in comparison to our old program, which helps to maintain their little pillow shape. You can find them here…. https://270smokers.com/products/wolf-tray-small

Also in this off season I took a class with a couple of world champions and both of them mentioned using butter or margarine during their entire cooking process. In my infinite wisdom I assumed that doing the same would improve our chicken, man was I wrong! Somehow our chicken fell back to a measly 162.2in MO, so this past weekend at the Iowa State BBQ championship, I eliminated the butter while setting the skins and boom, we’re back in the 170s! I would’ve never thought something so small would make such a huge difference, but I’m sure glad we figured it out early. Unfortunately there are a ton of great chicken cooks out there, and although we won our table we still finished 13th, so no trophies, but a score in the 170’s keeps us in the hunt for a GC at any contest, which is a win!