Recently, Backyard Pit Rubs did something we’d never done before.
We cooked for the public.
We’ve spent months travelling around to markets, shows and events selling our rubs, talking about food and sharing ideas with our customers.
But this was different.
This time, we weren’t just selling the flavours.
We were cooking with them.
Our first public cook took place at Bramblebee Farm, and I’ll admit, I didn’t really know how it was going to go.
Would people buy the food?
Would they enjoy it?
Would we sell enough?
Had we prepared too much?
Or, even worse…
Had we not prepared enough?
Well, we got the answer to that one.
We sold out.
And although selling out was an incredible feeling, something else happened that day that meant even more to me.
I got a little taste of an old dream.
The BBQ shack dream
If you’ve read our first blog, you’ll know that many years ago I dreamed of one day having my own beachfront BBQ shack or restaurant in Australia.
Life went in a different direction.
Then a conversation with my son years later brought that dream back to the surface and eventually helped create Backyard Pit Rubs.
But at Bramblebee Farm, something felt different.
I wasn’t imagining cooking for people anymore.
I was actually doing it.
There I was, cooking food using flavours we’d created ourselves and serving it directly to people.
Then watching them eat it.
Watching them come back.
And eventually watching the food disappear until we’d got nothing left to sell.
It might not have been a beachfront BBQ shack in Australia…
But it certainly gave me a taste for the dream again.
So, what was on the menu?
For our first public cook, we didn’t want to overcomplicate things.
We wanted proper BBQ food, cooked well and packed with flavour.
On the menu we had:
The 10” Backyard Signature Sausage – a proper 10-inch sausage using our Signature flavour.
Chicken Down Under Wings – chicken wings seasoned with one of the rubs that has been with us right from the beginning.
6oz Bramblebee Burgers – big, proper burgers from Bramblebee Farm.
And finally…
6oz Venison Burgers.
Four simple choices.
Good ingredients, big portions and the sort of food we genuinely enjoy cooking ourselves.
And then we fired up the BBQ and waited to see what people thought.
By the end of the day…
There wasn’t anything left.
For our first ever attempt at cooking for the public, we couldn’t really have asked for much more.
I was completely in my element
So how did I actually feel standing there cooking for everyone?
I absolutely loved it.
I felt completely in my element.
There were one or two moments when we had a little bit of a wait – particularly when the Chicken Down Under wings started flying out – but strangely, even that felt good.
Suddenly I was back in chef mode.
Keeping an eye on what was cooking.
Thinking ahead.
Making sure the next batch was ready.
Trying to keep everything moving while orders were coming in.
It took me straight back to my days working as a chef.
But there was one massive difference.
This was ours.
I wasn’t standing in somebody else’s kitchen.
I wasn’t working every hour under the sun, spending my entire life standing over the heat because it was my job.
I was cooking because I wanted to.
I was serving food we’d chosen.
Using products we’d created.
Under the name of a business that my family and I had built together.
And that made the whole experience feel completely different.
For those few hours, I think I got a glimpse of what I’d imagined all those years ago when I dreamed about having that BBQ shack.
Maybe the location was slightly different.
There wasn’t an Australian beach behind me.
But the feeling?
That was pretty close.
Then the wings started doing the selling for us
The standout of the day was definitely our Chicken Down Under wings.
They absolutely flew out.
But what happened afterwards was probably even better.
People would buy the wings, eat them and then come back to tell us how good they were.
And then we’d watch them walk across to our Backyard Pit Rubs pop-up stall…
and buy the Chicken Down Under rub.
That was a pretty special moment.
Until then, we’d spent months standing at events explaining our flavours to people.
We can describe Chicken Down Under.
We can tell someone what we use it for.
We can give them recipe ideas.
But nothing compares to actually putting a plate of food in front of someone and letting the flavour speak for itself.
They’d tasted what we’d created.
They’d enjoyed it enough that they wanted to take a jar home and recreate it themselves.
For me, that was one of the biggest successes of the whole day.
It wasn’t simply:
“Those wings are really good.”
It became:
“Those wings are really good. Where can I get that seasoning?”
And there was our little pop-up shop sitting right there.
Perfect.
From a jar to a plate
That day made me realise there might be another side to Backyard Pit Rubs that we haven’t really explored yet.
Until now, we’ve mainly given people the ingredients and ideas to create something themselves.
At Bramblebee Farm, for the first time, we got to show them exactly what we could do with those ingredients too.
And I loved it.
The fact we sold out was fantastic.
The fact people loved the food was even better.
But seeing someone enjoy something I’d cooked, walk across to our stall and buy the rub we’d used on it?
That’s going to be difficult to beat.