BBQ Goes Head to Head in Fulton

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FULTON, Miss. (WCBI) — Some of the best cooks from the southeast have descended on Fulton this weekend to find out who makes the best barbeque.

It’s a tough job but somebody’s got to do it. These folks are judging the fifth annual Stand By Your Grill Kansas City Barbeque Society event at the Jaime L Whitten Campground in Fulton. Vaunita Martin is with the Itawamba County Development Council. She says this event brings about 25-thousand dollars a year into the local economy.

“We have over 330 folks that have come in from all over the Southeast and we have just as many judges as we those competitors that are coming in and so they’ve stayed in our hotels and they have eaten at our restaurants and shopped at our grocery stores for some of the meat that they’ve cooked this weekend,.” she says.

Gerald Jetton of Fulton has the job of coordinating all the judges to make sure they follow strict guidelines even on evaluating the meat’s appearance.

“How does it look to you? Does it got a nice color to it ? Has it got some grill marks on it. Does it look appetizing? Does it look like its been smoked real good? Just exactly how does it look to you and they have a scoring process of 2 through 9 where 9 is excellent and 2 is probably unedible,” Jetton notes.

“You have to do a lot of prep work prior to just to get your meat ready before you get it here,” says Kristy Keeton/Southern Smokers of Amory, “A lot of trimming and things like that like getting your sauces and injections and spices ready to go. And then once you get here there’s a lot to do, obviously the cooking of the meat and then when you’re deciding which pieces to put in the boxes you’re looking for what the judges are looking for, the appearance, the texture and the taste,” she says.

When you go out to the restaurant or eat barbeque at home it’s always good when the meat comes right off the bone. But for this contest that’s not good according to Bart Bevill of the 662 Barbeque Crew of Mooreville.

“Here like the ribs they don’t want to pull out of the bone which if we’re cooking at home we want the rib to come out of the bone. And so it’s just totally different and that’s it’s so hard to learn to do this,” Beevill notes.

And while most of the teams are from out of town, Fulton’s own Sloppy Hog Barbeque crew are out to defend the home turf. And Shane Satterwhite is the head Sloppy Hog.

“This is our home so we love this place and we love competing down here at the Whitten Center and it’s beautiful. We’ve each got a campsite here and we love the shade and it’s cool down here so this is probably our favorite competition anyways but we’re pretty partial because it is in Fulton,” he says.

And while there is lots of work, the 662 Barbeque Crew went to a lot of trouble to set up their satellite dish.

“Once you get everything prepared you got to have something to do so you might as well watch WCBI,” Bevill says with pride.

They didn’t want to miss this story.