BBQ Reality Show

There appears to be a reality show for just about everything these days. People living in remote areas trying to survive, strangers living together in houses under a watchful eye, people competing for jobs, competing for modeling contracts, etc. I'm waiting for someone to host one for bbq contests.

It could work like this....

1. Get together a group of 50 people who have never cooked bbq before.
2. Organize them into 10 teams of 5 people each.
3. Take them to a bbq cook-off.
4. Assign each team a bbq "consultant" at the event.
5. Teams would be give tokens (aka lifelines) that allows the teams to ask three questions of the "consultant" at pivotal points during the event.
6. Consultants could spend a maximum of 10 minutes explaining or demonstrating the method to use.
7. The teams' entries could be judged right along with the other contest entries and the highest score wins. Or, there could be a separate "amateur" category like the backyard division seen at some events.

The organizer would need to provide a few basics for each of the teams such as a cooker, basic utensils, a prep table, cutting board, hand washing station and some type of shelter. To keep it as fair as possible, the cookers would need to be the same type or brand, such as all WSM's, or all offsets, all pellet cookers...you get the idea.

As I think back to the first couple of events we entered and how confused we were about how to approach some of the basic bbq tasks, I think this would make some very entertaining television for food enthusiasts. I know we "entertained" some of the contest regulars at our first event and we're probably still providing occasional amusement to on-lookers for some of our un-orthodox approaches.