I can’t say I have a ton of experience attending cookoffs. Since I have moved to Texas, I have learned that Texans love nothing more than their two-step, football and food, more specifically BBQ. It all sounds pretty good to me. So last May I came across this “Steak Cookoff”. I’m always up for a trip but throw in steak, even better!
Hico is a small town about an hour and a half south of Ft. Worth, home of Billy the Kidd. The Texas Steak Cookoff occurs the third Saturday in May and wherever you are – its well worth the trip. I’m getting hungry just thinking about it. Let me paint a picture for you – the streets were lined with smokers and BBQ’s of all shapes and sizes. You could look down the street and just see smoke – oh what a beautiful thing! If I remember right, they said the amount of entries doubled between 2009 and 2010. This even has also been featured on the Food Network. I believe in 2010 there were 84 tents (teams).
We started off the day purchasing a $25 bracelet. This entitled us to appetizer sampling from any tent and a steak dinner. That’s right – steak dinner (I’ll get to this in a minute).
The appetizers were not the typical appetizer, they were damn good appetizers, bacon wrapped shrimp, stuffed mushrooms, etc. Each team could opt to enter into an appetizer contest.
Then came the steak. Each team started cooking steaks which would be submitted to judging (sounds like a hard job to be a judge here). While the teams were cooking you could get check out their get-up…
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