Philadelphia BBQ: Mermaid BBQ

Mermaid BBQ is the bastard child concieved after years of cooking, grilling, heckling and generally causing a ruckus whenever we get together. It is a company, a team and group of friends.

The Company:

As grillmaster, Scott began making his own barbecue sauce many years ago for himself and friends. Word has spread pretty far and wide and has Scott making insanely large batches of sauce in different varieties in a tiny apartment kitchen outside of philadelphia. He has begun experimenting with different spice and rub mixtures as well. Shipments have gone across the country and across the world. At this time, you can order sauce and rubs directly from Scott. Email him at mermaidbbq@gmail.com

I am a microbatch garlic and onion BBQ sauce, made by hand in pennsylvania since 1998.. brown sugar/tomato based and 100% vegan in content, mermaid sauce is highly addictive; produced for sale to people interested in the BEST product for grilling/cooking of any type. Mermaid BBQ sauce has been used with great success on ribs, poultry, bland chinese food, pasta, burgers, pork tenderloin, rice dishes and almost anything else you can imagine.

The Team:

Scott and I have been grilling and cooking together for as long as we've been friends. Going on 10 years now I guess. Aside from similar, sarcastic personalities, we both really just love to cook for people, a lot of people. Annual car shows, camping trips and weeklong beach vacations have us regularly working together to feed masses of our friends. We almost always have Sarah working with us and have had had help from Eric, B-team Scott, George, Kyla and many others over the years. The past few years we've really stepped up our game and have even entered a few competitions this past year. Lately we've been focusing on the smoking side of cooking meats and I'm excited to take it even further this year.

Last years Rib cookoff in Northern Liberties earned Scott and the team a first place finish and mention on a few food blogs including Phoodie and Phoodaphilia. Sadly I wasn't able to work this event but came by after to chow down.

Scott and B-Team Scott workin the monster ranch kettle

Scott, Kyla and Myself Nomming.

After the cookoff, we spent a long week in Ocean City, Maryland.

Here's some of the smoking that went down.

We were smoking twelve racks of ribs at a time with a steady temp range of 200-225degrees. Overall smoke time was between 7-9 hours.

This is the same model Char Griller smoker I'll be getting and it will be modified with some improvements to the design. I can't wait.

Closed out the year with our car clubs annual Toys For Tots Event down at FDR. Every year, DCI hosts a huge GTG and toy drive to collect toys for the marines. Scott and I (and others) usually handle the food duties and this year we decided to make it a competition with entrants judged by the marines who come to pick up the toys. Scott, Sarah and I took second place behind Coolwater.

We smoked ribs on the weber with apple and hickory and bacon wrapped shrimps mopped with Sauce on the little camp grill.

Our setup
1 Weber Ranch Kettle for crowd feeding duty
1 Weber One touch
1 camp grill for sides