- [Arnis] All right, it's eight o'clock.
And our
grocery delivery is here.
And now we're gonna get all this unloaded
and take it into our cold storage,
right here inside of our prep room.
So this delivery has everything,
from our proteins to our produce.
We source everything through one purveyor.
- We got 35 pieces of brisket coming in today.
Some bacon, some pork ribs, some pork shoulders.
We just brought in 8,796.92
pounds of brisket.
That's a lot.
That'll get us through about three days.
(percussive music)
- [Nathan] Once that last load drops,
it's time to make the magic happen.
These briskets, we want 'em all to go on
in a very consistently trimmed way.
Because we also want them to
be the same for our cutters,
when they get out to the block for service.
We don't want them to have to be giving these briskets,
you know, big haircuts out there.
We want 'em to be able to slice and sell
as close to 100% of what
comes off the pit as possible.
When you get a brisket that's done,
that's looks absolutely, you know,
beautiful and smooth and perfect,
you just have to take a little pause there
and appreciate what you've done.
- [Arnis] So these are
briskets that were trimmed.
Give it a quick dunk in pickle juice,
just to make sure our salt and pepper sticks.
And that is it.
Salt and pepper,
pre-mixed.
One to one by weight.
A lot of people who are not familiar with Texas barbecue,
or who don't barbecue at home,
they see the jet black bark on a brisket,
and they just assume that it's layers
and layers of black pepper.
And it's not.
I mean, there's a chemical reaction that goes on
when that bark is being formed in the smoker.
We're using a generous amount of pepper,
but nothing crazy.
And those are ready to go on.
- [Emma] So when I go to load in the morning,
I know the hotter spots are gonna be on the outside
and the cooler spots will be on the inside of the doors.
So I try to load with the bigger briskets out
in the hotter spots.
That way the smaller briskets don't just get blasted
with all that extra heat.
And whenever we go to load,
you just kind of wanna let it sit in its natural form.
'Cause if you try to smush it together too much
or spread it out,
that can mess with the integrity of the meat.
- In regards to Texas barbecue
and what is regarded traditionally
as the great Central Texas barbecue,
we are far removed from that.
We are not in an area that is
traditionally known for barbecue.
So for us to come and set up shop here,
was a risk really.
But it's been extremely rewarding in the fact
that we helped pioneer this craft barbecue scene
in West Texas,
where it hadn't really been yet.
(upbeat music)
- So right now we're about midway through the cook.
Midway being six, seven hours.
We started a render,
we're starting to develop some color on the briskets,
and we're gonna wrap.
We've sprayed apple cider vinegar.
And then this is rendered brisket tallow,
from the same trimmings that came off this brisket,
that we ground and then rendered in a smoker.
And all we're doing is trying to introduce
and maintain as much moisture as we can
as we finish cooking this brisket.
The magic of cooking a brisket
is getting the connective tissue to break down
and those larger muscle fibers to tenderize,
without overcooking or burning everything else
on your attempt to cook the very center of that.
That's what makes cooking a brisket so difficult.
So once we're wrapped in paper,
we can crank the temperature up.
And all of our moisture,
everything that we render out of this,
is going to stay in that pouch.
The reason that we use paper instead of foil,
is paper breathes.
Even though we're gonna retain that moisture,
we're not going to steam the brisket
as much as we would if we were using foil.
- [Joseph] All right, so now that we're done wrapping,
that's the last one,
we're gonna let these go for another,
about five to six hours.
- [Arnis] Where we're standing, it's 118 degrees.
With these ambient temps,
we've got to pull these a little early.
So we're gonna try to time it where we get these off
and let that velocity take 'em to the doneness,
instead of us letting 'em go to doneness
and then overcooking 'em after we get 'em out.
Here's our hatch green chilees.
We're gonna go roast them up,
out in the pit room,
for our green chile cheese sausage
and our green chile cheese grits.
So this is just a pretty conventional chile roaster.
I built this here,
just kind of a fun little project.
It's really just a big bingo hopper.
So I'm from Eastern New Mexico,
growing up every fall,
people be selling fresh green chile
and have a roaster on site.
That is all so nostalgic to me.
I wanted to make sure that I was able to bring
green chile into the fold,
as kind of a focal point of what we do.
We're just gonna look,
we're gonna watch the color.
We're gonna start to see blistering
and we're gonna start to see a lot of char.
The higher the heat,
the faster we're gonna blister the skin.
But we're not gonna cook 'em as fast.
So,
it's like barbecue,
there's kind of a fine balancing act to get 'em
where you need em.
And we're starting to get some good color on some of 'em.
But the way the tumbler works,
it just keeps things turning
and keeps 'em all cooking pretty evenly.
As these chile skins are cooking and blistering,
they're actually starting to slough off a little bit,
which is what you see here.
Some of the seed pods or
the ends of the chile maybe getting caught in the
steel.
And then it's dumping some of that seed out,
but it's not gonna affect the final product at all.
We're gonna put 'em in a trash bag to sweat them out.
And kind of let 'em rest a little bit,
the same as we would a piece of meat.
I've done everything I can to substitute where
we would use jalapeno
or where jalapeno would be traditionally used.
We use green chile and I'm proud of that.
And that's it.
We're just gonna let those hang out.
- [Joseph] So right now,
I'm going in and doing a brisket check.
These have been on now for about 12 hours.
But right now, I'm kind of going in
and feeling which ones feel like they may be done.
Like this guy.
Soon as I picked him up,
I could tell cause that bend right there.
And then as I actually feel it,
I can feel everything else that's actually tender.
And the way we like to feel.
So on this smoker,
we have a few air gaps on these doors.
So if I feel like one of 'em is moving faster
than the others,
I'm gonna move it towards the door
where there's getting a little bit
of fresh air inside the cook chamber.
And so then I'll move the one that was out here inside,
because that one feels a little bit stiffer than this one.
So as soon as I picked it up again,
it bent like that.
And that's kind of a tell-tale sign right there.
But,
right over here on this edge is still not quite done.
So I'm actually gonna move this one over here,
where this outer edge
is where it's cooler and this inner edge,
it still needs some work.
Just towards the heat side inside.
- [Arnis] When that brisket goes out to the service line,
it's been in this paper pouch
for the second half of the cook,
plus the entire hold.
And you see,
all of these renderings on the cutting block.
- [Arnis] So these are our green chiles that we roasted.
They've been in this bag for about an hour.
Just kind of sweating.
That's gonna help just even out their cook,
as well as,
make the skin a little bit more easy to peel.
That whole entire box has shrunk down to this.
We put these in and they were like,
they were pliable and cooked.
But there wasn't any moisture.
But now like, we've sweated out
moisture in that bag.
Like there's serious chile broth in here.
It's delicious.
It really is really good.
That'll just go back into our diced chile.
After cooking and sweating these,
the skin, it just comes right off.
You smell it.
It's a bit sweet.
It's not gonna be like an overwhelming sweetness.
But definitely sweeter than a jalapeno would be.
It's got a sweet and fruity fragrance to it.
No doubt.
We don't need a super uniform dice,
just a rough chop.
The majority of these are gonna go
through the meat grinder anyway.
Which is gonna kind of determine their final size.
So we'll finish peeling and chopping this.
And then we're gonna go make some green chile cheese
sausage in the cold room.
Yeah, so we're gonna take our lean brisket trim,
our lean pork trim,
and a super basic spice blend
of salt, pepper, paprika, garlic
and a little bit of pink salt.
Now we're gonna add this pre-grind back into the hopper.
We're gonna cut the green chile in
and a little bit of the cheese.
And then we're gonna run that back
through the same grind plate.
And after that, it will be stuff ready.
If he doesn't layer the cheese here on the second grind,
he's gonna have a really hard time trying to
hand mix cheese into this grind at this point.
Yeah, so now we've got the grind with the layered cheese.
And that's going straight into the hydraulic stuffer.
We're proud of our sausage,
very much so.
We don't have a history of Texas barbecue in Lubbock.
Or West Texas in general.
So, to be able to do everything the way that we do it,
and make sausage in house,
is very special and something that we're really proud of.
We get much less exposure here
in this region,
than the other joints do
in the larger metroplexes throughout the state.
And that's fine.
That's not what it's about.
It's about serving our customer
and trying to do the best we can every day.
But at the same time,
we think our product is as good as anybody's,
anywhere.
Once we make our sausage,
we're gonna put that on a smoker
and we're gonna cold smoke it.
Now this isn't traditional cold smoke,
like you would think of Salmon.
To us, it means we're gonna cook at a much
lower temperature than we would ever try to cook something.
And what we're trying to do is,
get as much smoke and as much color on this sausage
without rendering the hard fat that we ground into it.
- These links will get cold smoked for about two,
two and a half hours.
We're gonna take it into an ice bath,
with water and ice.
Basically what we're doing is shocking the sausage link
to bring it back down to a safe temp.
Once it's shocked,
we will then put it onto trays
and put it back into the walk-in,
where it'll chill until we are gonna use it for service.
- [Arnis] All we need to do now is lay it out
on sheet pans and let it dry.
This will be ready to cook,
hot and fast for service tomorrow
or for the next three days.
(upbeat music)
- A St. Louis trimmed spare rib
has been squared off
to give you a more uniform, evenly cooking rib.
Where you should have 12 bones that are all
fairly consistently sized.
We season the top only,
with salt and pepper seasoning.
In my experience,
very little of the seasoning that would be put
on the bottom is gonna make it to the plate.
Pepper is expensive.
People don't think about it.
Pepper can be upwards of $10 a pound.
We definitely wanna make sure that we're mindful of
not wasting product there.
In most traditional Texas barbecue joints,
you're gonna be served a pork rib that has
been put in foil and then left in foil
until it's being served to the end consumer.
It's gonna have a wet surface.
It's gonna have all of that liquid that was
inside the foil on top of that meat,
on the cutting block and then served to the consumer.
What we do here is slightly different.
We serve kind of a dry surface rib.
In this day and age where everybody is
doing such similar barbecue everywhere,
little nuances here and there
are things that we can be proud of.
I didn't have anybody teaching me
or telling me to do it any different.
And that was,
that was just kind of where
we landed when I said, okay, that will do.
They've been on for about two and a half hours.
And we are gonna wrap those in foil,
just to kind of even out the cook.
And try to render down some of that fat.
It'll stay wrapped for a couple hours,
then we're gonna unwrap and glaze 'em
with our sauce and put 'em back on to finish.
- [Emma] You want a little bit of a bend.
But I'm looking for like that,
split in that fat cap right there.
Cause then you know that it's starting to render.
- You do wanna make sure you don't wrap too early.
If you wrap too early,
you'll get kind of that porky,
steamed flavor in the rib,
as opposed to a smokey barbecue flavor.
Once we get that rack pretty tender in foil,
and we've rendered out all of this juice and fat,
and now we're kind of basting it in this foil pouch,
hour and a half, two hours,
we'll open it.
We can give it a little bend test.
And that's gonna tell us,
whether or not those are ready.
- So what is happening is,
all that connective tissue is breaking down.
But basically right now, this is almost done.
Not completely.
You want it to bend like this.
But then,
once we sauce it, they're gonna continue to cook.
- [Arnis] Take 'em out of the foil.
Glaze them with our house sauce.
And then let those cook long enough to
set that sauce up,
as kind of a dry surface rib.
(celestial music) (restaurant chatter)
- [Arnis] I got into barbecue
as a backyard hobby in Tucson, Arizona.
It was never about a food trailer or a restaurant.
I just wanted to cook barbecue.
That's all I wanted to do.
And woke up one day and thought,
this is what brings me joy.
This is what I look forward to.
My wife, Mallory and myself,
kind of made a conscious decision that if
barbecue is something that we want to pursue as a career,
there's no reason for us to stay and do it
600 miles away from friends and family.
And let's go to Texas, be close to family.
Do barbecue in a region that people appreciate it.
And know what it's about.
Really find out where we stand.
We've been supported by the industry,
by our local community.
And everything else that have ultimately led to us being a
recognized barbecue name throughout the state.
The way that things have gone,
I know I'm doing what I was put on this Earth to do.
Every day is a new challenge.
Every brisket is a new challenge.
The more I did it,
the more I wanted to do it.
To the point that, yeah,
I don't know if I actually like cooking barbecue
or playing with fire more.
But they go hand in hand.
And whichever one it is,
I'm happy to do it.