Does anyone know how crawfish cookoffs are judged

Political, presentation, taste

The point of a cook off is to first have a great time, second raise money for the cause, and third to have a good time. Anything else is lagniappe, imo.

You'll get better responses on the OT.

It's funny to me that you're asking this now. I just saw a friend last week who competed in a cookoff last Spring for charity in Mandeville and asked if he was competing again.

His team put a considerable amount of time, effort and money into putting out some great crawfish. They did multiple test boils using different recipes. The had evaluation forms for their guests to fill out. They tweaked the higher scoring recipes for the next boil based on the feedback. They finally arrived at a recipe that was pretty darn delicious. I don't know how they ended up scoring among the 20 or 30 teams, but they didn't place.

Anyway, when I asked him if he was doing it again, he said they weren't. Basically, he felt like there were some teams that had been out there for multiple years and drew plenty of guests to the competition. I think there were some "guest judges" (I know some Saints players were there) for this particular fundraiser, but the voting is swayed by the people who buy a ticket to attend and get to vote. As you'd expect, you get a lot of people voting for their friends.

One the one hand, it's raising money for charity, so who cares who wins. On the other hand, you'd like to feel like you got a fair shake on the judging.

I was in the same cook-off last year at the lakefront. We didn't place, but had a great time.

If they have to do all of that to find a good recipe, then they don't have a good recipe already. The stuff people try at these competitions is comical.