We gathered at the judging command center and introduced ourselves. My qualifications consisted of having cooked for a living in the dim & distant past while most of my fellow judges worked in the meat processing business at some point. We had a lot of Oscar Meyer retirees in addition to a few folks who are still in the business at smaller plants.
Something like 1,015 products had been entered and 30 or so of us paired off for judging.
Man did I feel sorry for the people who got stuck with jerky, see above. Actually the grandson of the gentleman I was paired with ended up with the stuff. He said that he got the call only the day before so that explained it. I've judged jerky before and there is some really tasty stuff to be had. But, holy fuck, your jaw will be sore for three days afterwards. And some places submit product that you'd think had been lying around in an attic or something. It's like biting into a piece of dried oak. You can use it for flak jackets.
Our table seemed to be the collection point for hacksaws. The guys next to us had bone-in hams so they were cutting away all morning. I guess they ran out of room on their own table.
There were 4 or 5 categories of ham and I think this is the boneless commercial variety. I have gotten old and stupid and I have forgotten how to use my camera so all of my close-ups are out of focus because I can't get the stupid thing out of wide angle lens mode. Nor can I re-enable the flash. D'oh! On the bright side, you get to miss out on a photo of my chew cup overflowing.
Merlyn and I judged boneless traditional hams. This was my first time doing hams and it was a good learning experience. I knew going in that a traditional ham meant that it was made of whole muscles instead of pressed and formed bits and pieces. However, I learned that you can use a variety of muscles including the inside cushion, eye, and knuckle.
I was rather surprised at how many of the products had gelatin pockets, which got the ham docked a lot of points. And those little holes dotting the meat? The curing solution got injected with too much pressure. If you don't eat traditional hams a lot, then you probably don't think much about the texture of the meat. But as I was gnawing on nearly 20 different ones, I really noticed the differences. One was very mealy and mushy. Merlyn thought that they'd overdone it with the phosphates. I believe phosphates are used to help meat retain moisture and, in this case, it retained way too much of it. Other criteria included uniform color and bind. Since a ham is made up of 3+ muscles, you want them all to hang together well.
Overall the hams conformed to the Bell Curve. Most were just right in the middle with a handful of really bad ones and 2 or 3 really good ones. This was in contrast to my experiences in years past of judging jerky and sausages where there seemed to be a lot more bad ones and a lot less in the middle. I can't tell you how many samples of jerky I've tasted that were, once you got past biting into wood, nothing more than liquid smoke or teriyaki seasoning. The winner got low marks from us on external appearance because it hadn't been trimmed very well but the meat had great texture and flavor as well.
Someday I hope to judge bacon. There must have been 40 entrants in the two categories of bacon. I wish my close-ups had been in focus because there were some slabs that just had me drooling.
The other category that Merlyn and I judged was dried/smoked beef.
I think out of the 21 entrants here maybe 2 were smoked. And, like the hams, the majority were in the middle. A couple outstanding ones and a few clunkers, including one that hadn't fully cured so you had these spots on the meat. Just as with the hams again, the winner here was scored very low for appearance. Dried beef should have a nice mahogany red surface whereas the winner's was too dark and salt had leeched out and dried on it as well. But it had a great texture and flavor.
Afterwards I joined up with my sick bastard of a friend Ed who had judged wieners in a natural casing. Here he is holding his wiener.
Why is he a sick bastard? Well for one, he never let me forget that he had wieners in his mouth all day. Secondly he used to work in the meat processing industry (before heading into the public sector where he was personally chewed a new asshole by Tommy Thompson) and he relishes every opportunity to tell stories like how they remove the skin from foetuses that they pull from cows brought to the slaughterhouse. (It involves injecting air into the foetus until it puffs up like a balloon.)
We went over to the product show together. The product show is where you can get maps which show which cuts of meat come from what part of the animal, bowl choppers the size of a football field, and more spice blends and pre-mixed marinades that you can shake a stick at. We grabbed about 40lbs each of pre-mixed marinades and bags of seasoning. Excalibur Seasoning also had fish and chicken breading so I made sure to grab a couple bags of those. I also saw this commercial juicer which was pretty slick.
You put your oranges in the bin on the top, hit the switch, and BAM! – fresh OJ out of the tap. All of my photos of the juicing mechanism are for shite but what happens is that the orange falls in, gets cut in half, and then is slapped onto one of the rotating juicer hoolies. The de-juiced orange then falls into a basket underneath. A case of oranges makes about 22 8oz glasses and the sales guy said you can expect to make about $48 per case of oranges. Not bad.
Overall the 2011 WAMP Convention was a success. My jaws survived although I probably consumed about a month's worth of salt in one day. If I don't get to judge bacon next year, I'd love to do smoked poultry. And perhaps I'll to the banquet too. Perhaps I could glean some trade secrets from meat processors around the state.
Lastly I'll note that I spoke with the guys from UW Provisions and they said that they're expanding their site to be something like 3 times the current size. Plenty of room for meat goodness. I should get out there again and get me some rabbit or pheasant as I haven't had any game in a long time.
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