Single-Use Equipment in Competitions
When doing KCBS BBQ Competitions, you are outside and often cramped for time. Because of this, finding time to wash and sterilize your cooking equipment can be difficult. The BBQ Mavens have started moving to single-use products wherever possible. Cutting boards, injectors, towels, and pans are all essential when prepping or cooking your meats. Finding versions of these products that we can throw out after using them has been a life changer.
Cutting Boards
Rather than spending $100 on a wood cutting board, we spent $20 on a box of 30 single-use cutting boards. We use one for meat prep, cleaning it off quickly with a rubber spatula, and throw it away! Then, when its time to cut the meats, we pull a new one out and are ready to rock and roll! This makes clean up a breeze and saves tons of time!
Our personal preference here is the Smoky Mountain Smokers version, however, there are tons, and all basically the same!
Injectors
With injectors, there are tons of fancy options out there. Different sized needles, different sized tubes, and styles of injectors can cause people to spend tons of money buying the latest and greatest of something that very well might break when you’re cleaning it. Because of this, we use a $2 injector for each meat and let them chill till we are done with prep and can clean them up. There are disposable injectors too, but we just went with the cheap version allowing us more flexibility!
A cheap version of an injector that would work great can be found on Amazon.
Towels
Keeping your workspace clean is essential when cooking so your meats do not get ruined. As a result, we use dry cloth towels, wet cloth towels, paper towels, and sanitary towels for this. The cloth towels are great for the stickier messes, where the paper towels are quick to wipe something up and toss. We also are sure to use a Clorox wipe whenever we switch meats or have a mess that we need to keep away from whatever we are doing next. This, mixed with disposable cutting boards, is how we find the most success!
Aluminum Pans
There can never be enough pans when doing Competition BBQ. Pans are used for meat prep, cooking, resting, serving, and storing. We rarely would ever re-use a pan, as we wouldn’t want cooked meat sitting in the raw meat pan, and wouldn’t want to use the pan we cook in to take leftovers home.
All of this leads to buying our aluminum pans in bulk at Costco. These pans, both the large and small sizes, are used all the time and I am not sure what we would do if we were needing to clean out metal pans between uses.
You too can optimize your competition processes, by checking out your local BBQ Store to pick this type of gear up before your next competition! Are there other pieces of equipment that you have shifted to single-use? Let us know in the comment section below!
Recycle
With the thought of single-use products, we would be remissed if we didn’t also discuss recycling. Some of these items, specifically the aluminum pans, can take up a ton of space in garbage bags and are recyclable. Be sure to do your part to help save the environments by recycling any of the products that are able to be recycled.
