Team Moo Mouton

Team Moo Mouton is a small husband and wife team out of New Orleans, LA. I (Lee Mouton) have always enjoyed outdoor cooking but my passion for it really came out when I developed my own BBQ sauce (Uncle Lee-Bird's Cajun Zing) about a year ago. Everyone loved my sauce, especially my wife Niki. Niki then jumped on board and experimented with creating her own rub. We're hoping to eventually bottle and sell our sauces and rubs. We figured...what better way to get the word out about the sauce, than by entering BBQ competitions. We bought a $37 Brinkman smoker and cooked some chicken on it a few times and it came out really great...or so our friends said 'we heard about a BBQ competition only an hour from our house (Smokin' Blues & BBQ Challenge in Hammond, LA)...so the day before the event we decided to enter it. We thought this would be a great way to see if other people really thought as much about our sauce and smokin' as we did.We entered the backyard division and had to turn in chicken and ribs. We had cooked chicken a few times, but had NEVER cooked ribs on a smoker before!There were 61 teams in the compeition and many of them had huge rigs and matching t-shirts and what not. We just kept reminding ourselves....it's not the size of your rig, but the taste of your meat!It came time to announce the winners. As they were calling out the place finishers for chicken....10th, 9th, 8th, 7th...the lower they got, the more we realized we weren't going to take a place. Then they got to 1st place chicken....Team Moo Mouton! We were shocked and ecstatic. Our chicken beat out 60 teams and this was our first competition! Next it was ribs..10th, 9th...8th place ribs...Team Moo Mouton. Again we were shocked. I think if the other teams knew that what we turned in was our first ever ribs cooked on a smoker they would be shocked too! Then it was time to announce the Grand Champion...yep, you guessed it...Team Moo Mouton!!!! We are now, of course, hooked on BBQ competitions!We are now selling our sauces and rubs!!