- It's April in Brooklyn.
- Let's go.
(rock music)
- Tyson, we brought you a lamb.
We're so excited to smoke this thing
because not a lot of people actually
have had smoked lamb before,
but it's so freaking delicious.
- We of course here smoke whole pigs
so that's kind of our schtick,
but like whole animals as a barbecue genre
is underexplored.
It is the oldest style of cooking barbecue in this country
and it's indigenous to eastern North Carolina
which is the style we practice.
Alright, we're gonna toss this bad boy in the smoker,
but can you show me how to cut this thing first?
- Yeah, I guess so.
- And that's how you butterfly a lamb.
We've been using the word butterflying
but just to clear it up that just means
laying it flat so it'll cook a little bit more evenly.
It will also go a little bit faster
just 'cause it's opened up.
Gets more smoke, everybody's happier.
- [Tyson] The reason lamb is so expensive is
it's only this line in the middle
and this half that anyone eats.
Nobody seems to want the shoulder
and especially in America, no one seems
to want the saddle.
- Why we cutting behind the H-bone
or kind of the pelvic bone here?
- The first reason is we want this to cook a little faster.
In any animal the legs are always
gonna cook slower than the shoulders.
We wanna speed this thing up so that
it's matching the cook time with the shoulders.
And plus I like having this little pocket
so that our marinade can get in there.
- Cool.
- [Tyson] Someone's gonna get a little sinew
in their teeth today.
- [Man] That's fine.
- [Man] That's totally fine.
- This episode sponsored by floss.
- Just floss.
- Now that our lamb's all butterflied,
we're gonna throw the mustard on it.
The reason people don't like lamb
is because of that gamey taste associated with it.
That taste is not indigenous to lamb,
it's coming from the oxidation of the meat.
Traditions rub mustard all over the meat
because mustard is an antioxidant
and that actually keeps the lamb from
getting too much of that gamey flavor.
And plus it helps our seasoning stick.
- [Man] What's in our seasoning?
- [Tyson] So this is kind of a Indian-inspired one.
There's garam masala, Kashmiri peppers, coriander
and a bunch of other random things.
Let's go.
(country rock music)
We're just gonna hang out here for about seven hours or so
and yeah.
- We're gonna hang out out here
or by the bar with all the whisky?
So it's been what, six hours now?
- [Tyson] Six, seven hours.
I don't know, time flies.
I took a nap.
- I swear to God it's like a week later
since all the snow is gone now maybe.
- It's definitely a season later.
- [Man] We ready to look at this thing?
- Yeah, let's open her up.
- Yep, yep, yep, yep.
- Is there anything in particular that you do look for
to know that it's done.
- Well basically if your finger goes right through it,
it's done.
- Okay.
- And the temperature at which it starts to shred
is like 180, 190, right?
That's when it really started pulling apart.
- [Tyson] Exactly so we're trying to get it above 190.
- This will totally fit in the doorway right?
- It should.
(rock music)
- [Brent] Lamb (beep) yeah!
Does this ever get old?
- Lamb is one of the best cuts of meat
that America produces.
They're all grass fed.
They have to be grass fed, they don't eat anything else.
It's fortunate that it's so expensive
and it's mostly due to our own consumption
which is why I like featuring the whole animal.
Because once people taste the shoulder
it really opens up their minds on the fact that
this is a premium cut.
- So rack of lamb is $36 a pound.
But a rack of lamb is a pound and half
and there's two of them.
And that's it.
It's $36 a pound because you're only getting two of them.
You still have to sell the rest of the shoulder
and the leg and the saddle and everything else
in order to actually make money on it.
- [Tyson] From a barbecue guy's point of view,
lamb shoulder's the best part.
It's a dark meat, it has the most amount of marbling
and fat.
- It's smoked, it's fantastic.
- [Tyson] This is what we in the industry
call 'barbecue spaghetti' because only when you cook
the belly from a whole animal that it
pulls into nice long strings.
- The fat, that's where it's at.
- [Tyson] You would expect the tenderloin
which is the leanest cut on the animal
to be pretty dry, but...
It seems pretty juicy to me.
- I thought it was just gonna be dry and leathery
and kind of gross.
But it's actually, you're right, it's pretty moist.
- [Tyson] The leg is very difficult to cook.
It's a different texture, it's definitely leaner.
- I prefer the fattier piece but that's still fantastic.
- Right, and so to make Carolina barbecue,
everything needs to be mixed together.
A little bit of the shoulder, a little bit of the ham,
and then everything else in between.
So you're getting a mixture of both fat and lean,
different textures, different flavors
and all in one unified bite.
So the idea of it being the whole is better than
the sum of its parts.
- [Man] So we're gonna tear this whole thing apart?
- [Tyson] Yeah, we're gonna get a big ass bowl
and we're gonna just take all the meat off,
dump it in the bowl and season her up.
- [Man] I need to know more about how a guy from Queens
gets into a specific region's barbecue.
- [Tyson] I went to go visit North Carolina,
I read up on the topic, there was a vinegar sauce
and they cook the whole hog.
Alright, I'll give it a go.
I didn't think I would like it because who wants to eat
a bunch of pork all drowned in vinegar.
I went there, took my first bite of whole hog barbecue
and said, alright I think I found the style I wanna do.
It's hard to do Carolina barbecue without getting
deep into the history of it.
One of the things we're doing in preserving
this old style of barbecue is keeping barbecue
as a celebratory action.
Especially when we tie in with the fact
that the original pit masters of this country
were slaves, African American slaves.
Barbecues were always the end of
the harvest season traditions
of which they were able to finally celebrate.
To gloss over that I think is a big disservice
to American history.
Which is why today we're actually gonna be
cooking a kind of a celebratory dish.
We're cooking a biryani which is usually
used for weddings and parties and birthdays.
- [Ben] It is one of those things, the more you start learning
about the history of something,
especially with barbecue in the South,
the more complicated it gets.
You're not gonna untie any of those knots,
you're just gonna find more.
So much of that narrative is really kind of lost
unless you really look for it
and you really pay attention to it.
- The style is kind of dying out.
So for whole hog barbecue, there's only 20
restaurants in the U.S. still doing this style of barbecue.
- [Both] Really?
- Yeah, only 20.
We are one of 20.
- Really? - Holy (beep)
- [Tyson] Which is kind of sad.
Now that we've got all our meat pulled,
we're gonna season her up.
Carolina barbecue joint so of course apple cider vinegar,
a little lime juice.
- [Man] Vinegar, vinegar, vinegar.
- Of course there's vinegar and pepper.
No defined thing of what peppers,
so we're using some sambal today.
And you can never go wrong with Thai fish sauce.
We're gonna break and mix.
The vinegar pepper sauce in my opinion
is kind of embedded into the human genome.
It is the single best way of eating meat.
When you go around the world, you look at the cultures
like Philippines and Vietnam and Thailand,
the mixture of vinegar and chiles
is the single best way of highlighting fatty meat.
- [Man] Yeah, we were not the OG's of that.
Every culture figured out the same thing.
- I think despite the fact that we're using
a Malaysian chili, despite the fact that we're using
a Thai fish sauce, this is Carolina barbecue.
This is a continuation of the traditions
that were handed down.
- The way you're cooking it.
- That I think is, it'll seem fascinating
in a conversation that doesn't happen enough,
this can still be one thing and be other things too.
It doesn't have to just be one way or the highway.
You're still continuing on that tradition
of cooking this way, but you know what tastes (beep) good
is lime juice and fish sauce.
- [Tyson] I think we're done.
- [Man] Cool.
- What we have here is kind of a Thai-style biryani.
When I was thinking through a lamb biryani,
I really wanted biryani to be part of the American lexicon
the same way that it has now become part
of the Thai lexicon.
This is not an Indian dish, it's not a Thai dish.
It's definitely an American dish.
By cooking the entire animal and mixing it all together,
the quality's consistent.
There's that impression, that sense of occasion.
- Better meat, more diversity of meat,
price goes down for everybody.
- We're pro-diversity here.
- Everybody wins, everybody wins.
(rock music)
Oh man that's really good.
(beeps)
The cinnamon in the rice and the saffron just works
so well with that smoke and that vinegar.
Oh my God.
- I think the best thing is that
you're used to flavor of smoked pork.
You've had ribs and bacon and you usually have lamb
either as a lamb chop or a lamb stew.
Combining those things, it tastes brand new.
- Tyson, you didn't tell me it was gonna be this good.
- Sorry.
- Now that we've all eaten this,
we should probably invite some friends over
to help us with all this?
- Yeah, I mean
we might need a few extra hands on that one.
- Okay. - We can call them in.
(rock music)
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