Hold Your Own Steak Cook-off in Your Backyard

Steak Cook-offs are the hottest thing in the world of Food Sport- yes there is such as thing as food sport! These are steak cook-offs happening every weekend all across the US, Europe and Australia sanctioned by the Steak Cookoff Association.  Guys and gals compete for  purses ranging from $1000 to $10000 and big time bragging rights, and a coveted invite (by points) to the SCA World Championship held in Texas every October.

You can experience the fun  and energy behind of a steak cook-off right in your own backyard.

It’s a great format for a dinner party too.   All you need is 2-3 grills, ribeye steaks (ideally from same rib loin) and a handful of guests to help grill the steaks  and enjoy sampling steaks from each grill. Its a steak dinner with lots of colored toothpicks!  One color corresponds to each grill.

We recently held a steak off on the grilling deck  We used 4 grills, 3 steaks per grill.  We had 12 guests of which only one of us knew which steaks came from which grill.

Here’s the set up we used- 2 Pellet Grills & 2 Charcoal Grills:

1. Weber Kettle Charcoal Grill
2. Portable Kitchen (PK) Charcoal Grill
3. RecTec Bullseye Pellet Grill
4. Yoder YS 640 Pellet Grill

Additionally:

• All the grills were equipped with GrillGrates.
• All the grills used the same fuel, B&B briquettes and B&B pellets.
• All the steaks were seasoned the same way

We decided not to make this a personal competition- ie your steak, your way on your grill; but rather a grill on grill where the grill was the primary variable.   Either way steak cook-offs are fun, fast and friendly, and a great way to entertain your friends and neighbors.

The winner from our cook-off?  The YODER YS640 was the clear winner with the PK 2^nd, Weber Kettle 3^rd and the Rec Tec 4^th.

Why do we think the Yoder was the clear winner? The open-fire option delivers a live fire cooking experience, more so than even charcoal. This results in a unique combination of hot & fast AND real wood smoke. Among our guests the decision that the Yoder steak was the winner was almost unanimous. Very impressive. It was a pretty close between race between 2nd, 3rd and 4th place so we’ll just have to do it again!

Friday Night is Steak Night- why not make it a friendly cook-off too?

GrillGrate. Eat Well.

– Brad

P.S. One thing we will change in the future, is to slice the steaks and plate for our guests,
eliminating the variable of self-selection and pieces that are too small.