(paper tears)
- The Shed is high-volume.
We have a small crew that's been with us a long time,
so we have an average of 5-6,000 people a week
that run through the front doors of The Shed.
We'll serve 2,000 pounds of meat a day
in our peak season and that does not include
what we're shipping out every day.
- [Brad] 40, 50 briskets, 60, 70 pork butts,
2 or 300 racks of ribs, 150 gallons of sauce,
every four days.
And every day, it seems like we're
cooking more and more.
(energetic music plays)
- So here at The Shed,
we have two facets, right?
We have The Shed BBQ and Blues Joint,
and then we have the Saucery,
which is our co-packing facility.
- That's where we make all our fresh seasonings,
our fresh sauce.
Today, Scott, the saucer, he whipped up
a batch of our Southern Sweet,
which is what we use at The Shed
every day all day.
That's our jam, so tomato-based, sweet.
Of course, you know, it's gotta be sweet,
we're in Mississippi.
What you're hearing behind us is our bottling lines.
So all the sauce that we put on the plates at The Shed
we make here and then any retail bottles
that you see somewhere, we also produce that.
We're filling them, they're getting lids put on,
labels put on, date code, heat shrink,
and out in the mail to somebody.
We don't know who you are yet,
but we could appreciate the order.
- [Brooke] So apart from bottling at the Saucery,
we also facilitate the rubs, super fresh,
all fresh-ground products.
- We're gonna make a world-famous Shed rib rub.
Seven ingredients, but I can't tell ya
how much it is.
- [Brooke] And Scott has worked at the Saucery
since day one.
- [Scott L] There's gonna be a total of 75 pounds of
brown sugar that goes in that.
- We're in South Mississippi, and we like sweet.
- We're right next to Louisiana,
which is like the sugar capital of the United States.
Barbecue, in regionality, is about getting something
that's from your local area.
If you're buying sugar, it probably came from Louisiana.
Keep it sweet and sticky, just like the
humidity around here.
- I gotta make sure it mixes all the way in.
I would hate for them to grab a handful and just
get all spice or something, you know?
Gonna box this up and we'll send it
next door to The Shed and they'll probably
use it fairly quickly.
- [Brad] Best ribs in the business.
Seaboard Farms, Prairie Fresh.
So we'll start out, fresh cases.
We get our rib rub that we just
picked up from the Saucery.
We'll rub em' up, put em' on some pans,
get em' in the smoker.
We season em' a little bit differently.
Trying to get all the sides.
We're rolling right into a tub.
Sometimes if we're crazy busy,
we'll roll em' in a barrel.
Depends on how many racks that we gotta do.
- With our ribs, we don't shoot for a
competition-style rib.
A competition-style rib would be one that you can
take a bite out of and see your bite mark.
What all of our fans and all of our
regulars have come used to,
and what we've found the majority of the public likes,
is a fall-off-the-bone rib.
All right, these are all done being seasoned.
They'll go in the walk-in overnight
and be cooked tomorrow.
So these have been marinating overnight,
and all the brown sugar has basically
penetrated the entire rack.
- [Brad] For ease of use, we put all the ribs on trays
because when you're doing so many,
it's a little hard to get in there.
That's why these racks in here
continue to be a little bit cleaner
than everything else we're cooking directly on.
- [Scott Z] And I think, honestly, we retain
a lot of the moisture on the ribs
by doing it this way.
You're not wide-open drying out the entire rib
'cause when we go into our wrap stage,
we've still got moisture in that meat because
they're sitting on top of each other.
- So at The Shed, we're here day in and day out,
but we also compete on the barbecue circuit
and that's a whole other animal.
We're competing, we have a large competition team.
I'm blessed to say that we have won the
World Grand Championship twice.
Our guests here love it falling off the bone
and that's what we serve.
On the barbecue circuit, it's a little different.
If your meat's falling off the bone,
you're not gonna score very well.
- All right, so let's get in on some ribs.
So these are halfway through.
These are about 150 degrees, right when all that
fat starts to render and you get that
beautiful, orangey-red color to 'em.
So what we're looking for on the ribs
is to see that nice color on 'em.
You can see the fat starting to render out.
You can totally eat this rib, not a problem,
but our next step, we call it the cut-and-wrap,
and it's twofold so not only does it
allow us to have a beautiful rack of ribs,
but once we score the backside,
they come apart in four and six bones each,
so it also helps with the efficiency of the line.
So it's a three hour process with the
cut-and-wrap happening pretty much
right in the middle of it.
- [Scott Z] So this is our rib rub that every rib
has been seasoned in raw.
And then our original sauce.
And all we're doing is adding another layer of flavor.
Flavor and adding moisture with the sauce on the cut.
Gives it a really good finish, too.
Even coming straight out of the foil.
It's just a Southern sweet brown sugar base.
We're in the South, so everything's
got a lot of sugar in it.
And then when we're putting them on the rack,
if you noticed they're actually upside down
so the top of that rib is what's
sitting on the downside.
So all those juices, all that sauce,
is sitting on the top of that.
Otherwise you're just gonna end up
with too much bark.
It's too much brown sugar, too much sweet,
too much smoke.
- These were featured on the season two
of Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives, and still to this day,
people come in and say, "What'd Guy eat?"
He had the baby backs, amen.
Let's go.
They're gonna go back into the smoker
for another hour.
As soon as they get tender,
they are going straight to the line.
So it's been about two hours since
we did the cut-and-wrap on the ribs.
It's time to open up the old hickory
and see where they're at.
I always like to pull one from the
middle of the pan.
All the ends will get done first,
so if you want like a true test on if
these are done or not,
you always wanna pull from the middle.
And as you can see,
all those juices are sitting right inside the foil.
And the ribs have been sitting face-down in it.
So we end up with a picture-perfect,
extremely juice, fall-off-the-bone, rib.
These'll be going straight up to the line
to put on plates.
So this is the beginning of our pork butts,
the beginning of the pulled pork,
and it's a very simple recipe.
We literally just do minced garlic, and a lot of it,
and a pecan smoke.
Honestly, the simpler, the better.
When we tell people that we only do garlic on our pork,
they look at us and think that we're lying to 'em.
They think we're not wanting to give them the secret,
but it's legitimately just minced garlic.
I mean, it's won us national awards.
Regis and Kelly's Hometown Grill-Off,
we won that with a pork sandwich with a slaw topper.
We always run our pork on the left
and our brisket on the right.
We'll stack our bigger butts, they'll go on the top racks,
our smaller ones will go on the bottom.
And that's a ten degree difference in the rack.
So your top rack's always consistently
running a little bit hotter than your bottom.
So with us putting these on top of each other,
as this cooker rotates, we're gonna have our own
drippings dropping on each other.
So it'll be self-basting the entire time we cook.
So when we open it in the morning,
it's literally gonna look like we've been
glazing it the entire time.
So these have come from the Saucery.
They'll trim the deckle off,
that hard piece of fat that is not gonna render out.
So the fact that we don't have to trim brisket
here in-house, and it's coming from the Saucery,
is about the best thing we could ask for here.
All right, so a Texas-style rub would be
a salt and pepper-style rub.
We got turbinado sugar, garlic salt,
salt, black pepper.
That's about it.
- So right now, it's all about covering the meat,
making sure it gets in each crevice.
Once I rub it, I'll start stacking them.
So they'll just sit on top of each other
to really help get in the grain of the meat.
- [Scott Z] So when we go in,
we're gonna put that cap towards the fire box.
That keeps the flat, which is a thinner cut,
it's gonna help keep it moist.
- The Shed in a nutshell was originally
built out of 'one man's trash is another man's treasure.'
We built it on a shoestring budget
without the shoestring.
So I was 19, Brad was 24, and we used
Brad's dumpster-diving treasures to kind of
build out the first original Shed.
23 years later, we're on 30 acres
and all of it is just really handing it back to
growing grassroots,
but also having an amazing crew.
- [Brad] This crew is exactly what I feel like
every restaurant and every barbecue joint deserves
is people that believe in the product,
they believe in what we're doing.
- [Brooke] Everybody's in it to win it.
(upbeat music plays)
- [Scott Z] We're getting all the pans laid out to
get the pork and briskets pulled off for the day.
So we're looking for that-
looking towards the cap, I don't wanna see it
kinda bounce like that.
See how it's kinda rolling back and forth like a wave?
You don't want them to be too stiff,
but you also don't want them to be-
you don't want your finger to just slide
straight through the flat.
So we're pulling the butcher paper about an arm's length
and then we will double-wrap every single brisket.
What it's gonna do is it's gonna maintain
all the juices, finish off the bark,
and it won't continue cooking.
It slows down how fast it's continuing to
cook while we hold.
So when we're folding,
I do side-to-side and we're trying to
maintain as much of the juice as we can.
It's gonna naturally seep out.
And then I'll turn it sideways, upside down,
and actually roll it.
And, honestly, that's just one way that
I have found to keep it tight.
And then you end up back on the top.
- [Brad] And we've tried so many different ways.
I mean, we've wrapped 'em in cellophane before,
we've wrapped 'em in foil.
Started doing the butcher paper and
that butcher paper just solidifies all the juices
and makes that bark just stick
right to the outside of every slice.
But we're just trying to keep 'em
to right around 150 degrees.
They'll go to the line.
All these will be sold today.
Service is at 11, so there is that resting period,
that marinating in its own juices,
creating that bark.
- [Scott Z] And we're trained all the way to our line.
Our line knows what to feel for.
If it doesn't look good, we're not serving it.
- We got the briskets done, they're wrapped,
ready for service, now we're gonna check the pork.
All right, so the idea is we're gonna
make a mountain of pork, okay?
- [Brooke] Oh, okay.
- All right, so we got, I think, 36 butts here.
On a perfect day, we'll pull 'em off,
we'll let 'em cool down to around 140 degrees,
that's when we'll go in and start
pulling all the pork, mixing in the top bark
really really well.
It's all hands on deck, always, when we're pulling the pork.
- And we have a double-pull system
where we'll pull the pork down, hand that over,
let somebody else give it some love and
filter through it a little bit
so we don't waste anything.
- So even though it just looks like we're
kinda tearing it apart, there's some technique
that goes to it.
We're gonna leave the bigger chunks
in bigger chunks just to retain the moisture.
All I'm doing right now is going through,
pulling out cartilage and bone.
- [Brad] That's what we're looking for.
That's exactly how we'd layer it on a pork sandwich.
Coleslaw topper, we are in the South.
- [Scott Z] Now we're getting the pans full.
These will actually go out to the serving line.
And we're getting all the flavor into the pan.
- [Brad] Right now, we're dealing with our lunch rush.
And typically, the lunch rush lasts from like
10:30 to 2:30.
All right, I got a brisket sliced,
got the pork sandwich, then you got a
baby back plate, T.T.
- Barbecue in Mississippi is sweet,
it's to the point, you get exactly what you're expecting.
And, you know, we're on the coast of Mississippi,
and every state has different regions of their state.
We encapsulate Southern barbecue in southern Mississippi.
We do it with dark brown sugar, fresh spices,
pecan wood, and just a lot of grit.
- [Brooke] That's right.
- You know, we don't have grits on the menu,
but it's a lot of grit to make this happen.
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