KCBS News Feed2011 Wisconsin State Fair
August 11, 2011 Creampuffs, chocolate covered bacon on a stick, funnel cakes and deep fried butter… we’ve gotta be at the Wisconsin State Fair!This year we were moved to a new location on a busier street between the Grizzly Bear show and the Wilderness resort stage that featured comedians, jugglers and Mallory Lewis with Lambchop so we always had a crowd! We also had a great view of the Slingshot ride that shoots people up probably 200 feet in the air! Every couple of minutes you would hear screams echoing through the area.
Because we are set up from 8-10 a.m. every day, we break-up our demonstrations and include a rib preparation competition in our early demo then sample out the finished product five hours later at our late demo. It is always fun to ask the crowd if they like their ribs “falling off the bone”, then educate them on the standards of competitive BBQ.
When we return to various cities, we usually have folks that have seen our demonstrations in prior years who always come by to say hello. It seems every day we have people stop by, including our buddy Josh from Gallo Winery/Redwood Creek Wine and his wife Lauren, to see what the Great American BBQ Tour was all about.
While you can get just about anything “on a stick” at the Wisconsin State Fair including PB&J, mashed potatoes, and even beer! They will deep-fry just about anything and the hit item this year was deep fried butter. Yes, I even tasted it or at least tried to… The butter was wrapped in a wonton and when I bit into it, it literally exploded in my face and shot butter up on the underside of my cap and all over my smoker… Just a little something else to remember the Wisconsin State Fair by.
Passersby sometimes think that I look like Guy Fieri, but at this event I had numerous people think that I was Larry the Cable Guy. Guess it is another “Guy” and I never asked if it was pre-Nutrisystem or post.
As busy as the fair is, Christine and I could not do it alone and we were blessed to have KCBS members and their friends and family come out to help. Marjorie, Christine, Maggie, Tim, Don, Tonya, Rick, Michael, Angela, Ron, and Chakari did an awesome job and we cleaned the trailer out of everything that was not tied down. Christine and I also want to send a big thank you to KCBS judges Dick and Deb who were going to make the trip up from Illinois to help, but after the record first day at the fair, we knew that moderation would be needed otherwise we would be sitting around playing Go Fish on Sunday. As such, they agreed to sit this one out but they will be at the top of the list if we come back to Milwaukee next year!
Next stop… cooler weather in Dillon, Colorado!
