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Taking place as part of The  Flavours of Yorkshire, A Food Lovers Festival, the best thing about this contest? All your meat is included in your entry and supplied by our partner, Cranswick.

Apart from that, it is a cooking competition specifically focussed on outdoor cooking, barbecue and grilling over fire and smoke. If you rate your barbecue and outdoor cooking skills, or just want to take part for fun. This will be an amazing weekend.

The Whole Hog is a contest that celebrates pork. Each round will be focussed on a different cut for each team to decide the best way to cook it and the best dish they can produce.

Over the weekend of the 4th and 5th July at Galtres Pickering Showground, just outside Pickering in North Yorkshire. The contest will take place as part of The Flavours of Yorkshire, A Food Lovers Festival.

Anyone can enter the contests regardless of skill or experience. If you are a barbecue or outdoor cooking enthusiast, rate your outdoor cooking skills, or just fancy a weekend amongst like minded people, you are welcome at the contest. Teams can consist of one to five people, so get a couple of  family or friends and come along, or come alone, the choice is yours.

The contest will take place over two days and each day there will be three rounds making six rounds in total.  All teams will submit their entries for a round (we call it turning-in) at roughly the same time. The entries will then be scored by a panel of judges against four criteria (Visual Appeal, Flavour, Mouth Feel and Creativity) to get an overall score.  The highest score wins the round, and the highest score combined across all six rounds becomes The Grand Champion.

It is a contest where each round has loose restrictions on what each entry should be. These maybe around the number of components, a theme that must be adhered to or use of a specific ingredient. It may also prescribe how the entry can be presented. But ultimately freestyle competition's are about allowing teams to show their creativity.

We always aim to make taking part in barbecue competitions affordable. To that end we have kept entry the fee as low as possible to cover the costs of the event and set it at £120