(upbeat music)
- He's grinding up the meat.
That's going to go in our hot guts.
What it is, is it's trimmings
from the pork butts and the pork ribs.
The part that we trim off before we put it on the cooker.
We add this to it, it's a beef heart.
It like a sort of a springy texture inside the sausage.
Now we're grinding the fat into the mix.
We use a hard white fat,
that's the part that melts the best.
Now we're going to mix it all together.
We're gonna add all of our seasonings to it.
Some curing salts, and we're gonna knead the meat.
The salts that's in the spice mixture
will activate the myosin in the meat
and make it to where... it's almost like gluten.
And then we stuff it in the casings.
And we smoke it on our vertical smoker.
I built this pit to cook stuff a little bit different
than the other ones.
This a vertical cooker.
Underneath me is the firebox.
So heat's gonna come up from the firebox
right up here in the middle,
runs all the way along the sides of the sausages here.
(upbeat music)
It's been about six hours since
we threw the sausages in here,
we've been keeping them real low.
You can see they're firm now.
The fat is cooked but still solid,
which is exactly where we want it.
At this point now, we wanna stop the cooking.
So I'm gonna start taking them out
and throw them in an ice bath.
If you left these out right now to cool down,
steam would be coming off of them.
And that steam is the juice that's in your sausage
and you wanna keep all the juice in the sausage.
When the sausage is cooling down in liquid
steam has nowhere to go except stayed inside of it.
When it's time for service we reheat it
on the big barbecue pits and that reheats it.
It melts the fat inside, which makes it juicy.
And it puts a snap on the casing.
(upbeat music)
It's not the cook that makes the barbecue,
it's the tool that you're using.
And you can't turn out good barbecue
without having the perfect tool.
When something doesn't exist, that's available for purchase,
you ended up making it yourself.
And that's why I ended up making barbecue pits.
It took me a lot of years of trial and error
to figure out how to come up with a perfect design.
Think what we got right now is like
my preferred barbecue pit.
I wouldn't use anything else.
I designed it to make exactly the product that I want.
All right, so we're gonna steal some coals from this pit
over here and get a fire going in this one here.
This is oak.
It's a mix of white oak, some red oak, it's what grows here.
The combustion is so complete in this fire
that you're not tasting hardly any off flavors
from any of the wood.
The one thing we are looking for in the wood
is that it's been aged.
Which has been difficult in South Carolina,
finding a wood supplier that would understand
that we need it aged.
We need it dry or else you're battling
trying to build a fire the whole time.
We're using wood to cook with,
but it doesn't need to taste like a smoke bomb.
So you get subtly flavored barbecue.
Kind of no matter what type of wood you use.
And that's due to this pit.
(soft music)
This is Philip, he's the Chef de cuisine and
he's getting some rib-eyes ready.
Our Friday special is our version of an Arby's
beef and cheddar sandwich.
That's like way better cause it's prime rib.
We take the rib-eye roasts, we trim them.
Then we gotta wet it with something,
it's our own secret blend of juice.
It helps build the bark on here.
It's going to give a lot of color to the meat
and it's something that'll help set up the bark really fast.
So he's going to wet those down all the way,
and just roll it in the rub,
and get a real good coating on it.
And this is just our all purpose rub.
It's mostly salt and bode pepper.
And then a bunch of little secret seasonings in there.
(upbeat music)
So this brisket it's the same...
It comes from the same place that the prime rib comes from
out of Nebraska.
We trim them all the same way.
We're going down to somewhere between
a quarter of an inch, an eighth of an inch.
You don't want too much fat on there.
You want just enough to wear throughout the whole cook.
By the time it's finished cooking the fat has melted down
right to the surface of the protein underneath.
Philip's injecting this brisket,
cause this one's going to be pastrami.
We use this little cooling rack on top and...
it's kind of your grid so you know where to inject that.
It's a salt-water brine.
It's got bay leaf in it, it's got some garlic in it.
Once it's all injected then it gets
submerged in the brine also.
And it'll sit in the fridge, in the brine for three days
until it gets cured all the way through.
Pretty much all our meat gets mustard on it.
It's mustard and pickle juice.
Mustard on its own is a little bit too thick.
You end up with a pasty bark.
So we cut it in half with pickle juice.
As far as if this is going to impart any sort of flavor,
by the end of this long cook, it's not noticeable.
But what it does do is it helps the rub
stick to the meat all over everywhere.
And you don't have to like try to massage it into the meat
or anything like that which is bad
because then you're closing the pores of the meat
and then they can't accept the smoke.
This is pastrami here.
So we're doing a different rub than our regular rub
that we use on everything else.
This has got pastrami spices in it.
It's got a coriander seed, mustard seed, Juniper berries.
And then it's mixed in with our regular all-purpose rub
that we use on everything too.
Our fire's all the way down at the other end.
The brisket is the toughest piece of meat
basically on the cow.
And it takes a long time at a really low temperature
to break down all those connective tissues in it
that are tough and to end up with something
that's a silky juicy piece of beef.
If you cooked it kinda hot you would end up
with like shoe leather.
Usually oxtail is braised in a liquid
and we're gonna be cooking it
inside one of these pits, in dry heat.
If you're braising it, all the a collagen in there
turns into gelatin.
It goes into your braising liquid, you pull this out
and then you would reduce your braising liquid
to make a sauce to go back on top
cause all the gelatin's in there.
But in the dry heat the collagen turns into gelatin,
but it stays inside this piece of meat, not in a broth.
And so they come out like super sticky, delicious.
(guitar music)
Close this up.
(guitar music)
You've got some hatch green chili here.
And we roast a whole mess of this every year
and fill up our freezers with it.
And it makes its way into a lot of the dishes
at our restaurant.
My great grandparents had a chili farm in Hatch, New Mexico.
So my family's always had hatch long green chili
in everything that we make.
Growing up in El Paso, Texas influenced the food,
the products that we're putting out right now.
Well, first of all, there's green chili in everything.
But to use this, first we have to roast it
to get the skin off and that's going to do two things.
It gets the skin off.
It also adds a really nice smoky flavor, a charred flavor.
The skins will be able to peel them off.
There's blackening on the skin
and so we're gonna have a smokey flavor in it as well,
which is great, it pairs with our smokey barbecue.
It used to have a motor on it that broke.
Now we crank it by hand.
So we've got them roasted off now.
They're nice and black on there.
To get the skins off all the way,
we're gonna tie it up in this plastic bag
and let them steam.
Maybe 20 minutes, something like that.
And then we can slip the skins right off of them.
The Juan Luis trailer that we put in the parking lot here,
it's really important to me
cause it's a food that I grew up with
and that my family eats for generations now.
Corn tortillas, this is what we start with right here.
This is field corn, dent corn.
What's nice about it is,
it's got a little bit of a slightly higher fat content
than your normal yellow corn,
which helps it turn into a great tortilla.
This is a bit of a lime right here.
It's calcium hydroxide.
This is what's going to help get the tough outer skin
off the outside of the corn.
We boil it and then let it sit for 24 hours.
This is what we end up with in here.
All that cloudy stuff is the husk that's dissolved
off the outside.
(upbeat music)
One of the key things about this machine
are these volcanic stones that do the grinding.
Corn goes in here, it gets fed into between these two stones
which are spinning opposite of each other
and the dough will come out the outside.
And one of the things that I've found
is to get the really really fine dough
that I'm looking for, masa fina,
I've had to learn how to not use the stones
that come with these machines from Mexico
and re-carve them and start carving my own stones.
So these are the stones that come from Mexico.
What you want in the center is a lot of cutting action
to like chop it down into smaller pieces.
And then it eventually works its way out
towards the outside where you've got the finer lines.
And what I found is these lines are not fine enough.
There's not enough of them.
And the center isn't cut to where it's chopping it up enough
to get the corn out fast enough.
Basically, we're going to go in here with a chisel
and start carving this out a little bit.
And the only reason that we're making tortillas
from scratch for Juan Luis
is because we're in South Carolina
and there isn't a tortilleria that exists out here,
anywhere where you can buy nixtamal,
made from scratch tortillas which we would be doing.
Let's see the difference between the stone
that comes from Mexico and how much finer
you'll be able to make the dough in there.
And you can see where this is all
chopping it up a whole bunch in the middle.
And then works its way to the outside
and just turns out a really, really fine paste.
(upbeat music)
It's a non-GMO corn and we'll run it through our grinder,
through the volcanic stones that I carved.
After that we run it through our tortilla machine.
It spits out round little tortillas
and we griddle them by hand.
So you can see how that really fine dough
that we're turning out because we're carving our own stones
is making the thinnest thinnest tortilla.
It puffs up like crazy, it's perfect for a table tortilla.
It's flexible, doesn't break in half.
When you make a taco, you know how you get your tacos
and they're usually doubled up because they always break,
it doesn't happen with these ones.
All right. So,
our oxtails have been on for about six hours now.
What we need to do is get them cooked
all the way through now at this point.
And so we're just gonna wrap it in foil, throw it back on.
It'll take about another hour to get them tender.
Been in there for about I don't know maybe
about an hour 10 minutes, an hour 20 minutes.
You can see the bone starting to stick out a little bit.
They've gotten a real tender.
We're gonna finish it off by just setting
a little bit of a glaze on it.
This is our original barbecue sauce
that we serve in the restaurant.
It's a tomato base, Texas style, barbecue sauce.
And we've added just a little bit of Chipotle Pepper to it.
And let this glaze kind of shine them up,
caramelize on there.
All of these prime ribs, we're cooking these to medium rare
but this bark isn't all the way where we want it yet.
We gotta let the meat cool back down, and then...
Then we'll spray it with that super secret spray.
We'll throw it back on the pit.
It'll be nice and crusty on the outside,
wonderful bark, wonderful color,
but still medium rare on the inside.
- So the beef and cheddar sandwich,
we start with our smoked prime rib, shave it real thin.
A little bit of our horsey sauce,
that's our horse rash Mayo.
It goes on the bun and our shaved prime rib.
Top it with thinly sliced yellow onions
and then finish it off with a roasted
hatch green chili, cheddar sauce.
(xylophone music)
Our Brisket Reuben sandwich, we slice it up.
We throw it on a rye bun.
(xylophone music)
We've got a Sauerkraut that we put on there
and a Russian dressing.
(xylophone music)
Prime rib, when it's time for service,
we slice a nice big slice of it.
Throw it on a plate with some veal Demi glaze
a veal reduction that we make in-house.
And some of our homemade steak fries.
(xylophone music)
Our beef oxtails are smoked oxtails.
When they're finished, we take them off.
We plate them up with some Mauro Farms, Pinto beans
A little Spanish rice and then we smother it
in our roasted hatch green chili sauce,
a red hatch chili sauce and some cheese.
(xylophone music)
South Carolina, it seems like they're
really steeped in their traditions, their ways of cooking.
But I've been welcomed with open arms here.
And so it's kind of the perfect place to do this.
(xylophone music)