- So we're prepping some chickens now
for our smoked chicken rice and yuzukosho dish.
In Texas barbecue, you know,
you'll find brisket and ribs.
A lot of places will do turkey or chicken.
We have chicken rice as a street food in Asia,
and so that's where the idea for us came from
is to smoke chicken,
but use it in a chicken rice dish
that we kind of ate growing up
that our mom cooked.
So what we're doing here
is kind of spatchcocking the chicken
because when it lays on the smoker,
it's gonna lay nice and flat on the smoker like that.
The second component of the chicken rice dish is yuzukosho.
Yuzukosho, which is a Japanese
sort of fermented chili citrus dressing
that has, you know, lime and lemon zest,
garlic, and some oil.
Today we're doing a dry brine, pretty basic.
Salt and leave it there for two, three hours.
A lot of the flavor is gonna come from the chicken fat
and then the smoke.
This chicken dish will be fortified by the rice.
The rice has a ton of flavor in it.
It has some chicken, rendered chicken fat in there.
It has garlic, ginger.
This dish has been really popular for us.
We did it for the first time kinda experimentally
for a barbecue competition.
We ended up winning the whole Texas Barbecue Competition
with a chicken dish, which is pretty funny,
'cause Texas is a beef state.
(cheerful electronic music)
This is our Vietnamese coffee.
This is how we get started.
The fuel to the cook
is in this little cup right here.
So we do pop-ups.
Usually when we do pop-ups, it's at a brewery.
We'll cook everything here,
we'll put 'em in coolers,
kinda have our tables, our tent and stuff
and kind of move everything to the brewery.
(door closing)
Right now we're trying to build the bed of coals.
We're using post oak
because it's the most ubiquitous wood in Texas,
has a mild flavor.
We really like it because it lets the meat
kind of shine through.
During the cook, we aim to have the smoker,
the internal temp's around 225.
I'd say our fire is pretty consistent
with this sort of new school barbecue.
The biggest difference
between kind of this new school style
is just running it really low, really slow.
In old school it was kinda hot and fast.
We're cooking in the front yard.
The first week, everybody thought their homes were on fire,
but now everybody's used to us doing this.
Once in a while you just gotta
give your neighbor some brisket and some ribs
and everybody has tended to stay quiet
and no complaints so far.
Knock on wood.
We're about to trim some briskets.
We got some briskets from 44 Farms.
Their steers are grain fed,
they treat their animals ethically,
and we think that creates a better product.
I think the main goal for us
is to make it as aerodynamic as possible,
'cause we're using offset smokers
so the smoke comes laterally, so side to side.
And if you play Super Mario,
it's kinda like those torpedoes, right?
It's kinda like round on one end
and then kinda, it flattens out on the other,
and that's kinda the shape that you want.
Beef is pretty prevalent in Vietnamese cooking.
I think that's a function of the French influence.
Vietnamese food in itself is more vegetable based,
a lot of soups, steaming.
The red meat consumption
definitely increased with the French.
And now we're gonna build the rub.
It's gonna be salt and pepper.
The thing is we use kosher salt,
but this pepper is from Phu Quoc,
it's an island in Southern Vietnam.
The seasonings are there
to kinda help accentuate to meat's flavor,
to not overpower it.
So you don't want too much, just kinda,
for us, this coating is perfect.
And one of the dishes that we're using
the brisket for today is pho.
Now we're gonna make some pho broth
to go with our brisket pho.
This is fennel, cilantro seeds,
and then this is star anise.
It kinda adds like a (sniffs)
sweet, tangy sorta notes.
Cinnamon.
These guys here are black cardamom.
So this is kinda what gives the pho broth its flavor.
So we'll tie the bag here.
It's kinda like a slow release into the broth.
The broth takes about four, five hours to make.
Pop it in,
and then the last part we'll put the chicken on.
We like to use a chicken broth in our brisket pho
because brisket is really heavy, fatty,
and so we think it balances out nicely with a light stock.
These beef ribs have already smoked for about 12 hours.
So we use these bones
'cause they already have a lot of smoke infused in them,
and that's what we want in the pho broth as well,
this kind of smoky flavor.
So now we kind of just let time do its thing.
We'll watch the smoker,
make sure the briskets are being cooked.
You can just let the broth do its thing.
Vietnamese food and Texas barbecue go together so well
as they're kinda diametrically opposite.
You know, Vietnamese food is a lot of soups,
steamed stuff, lots of herbs,
everything's light and fresh.
Texas barbecue is savory, delicious, fatty,
and so it's kind of like the yin and the yang of,
you know, you have something really heavy, really light,
they kind of balance each other out.
So these are the beef short ribs.
So like kind of the dino ribs
from the short plate of the cow.
So what we're gonna do right now is we're trimming them.
Ultimately, we'll use the finished product
for our kalbi beef rib nigiri.
We really like this dish
because, you know, we grew up in Houston.
Houston's really diverse.
And so we ate a lot of Korean barbecue growing up.
And so that's inspiration for this dish.
For the Korean barbecue,
the kalbi is just grilled for a few seconds on the table
and then you eat it.
But what we're looking for is imparting a smokiness,
so instead of a few seconds on the grill,
we're smoking these short ribs for 12 to 14 hours.
My brother, Theo, who is the other half of Khoi,
will be helping us make the Korean kalbi marinade.
- So we've got some orange juice, garlic.
So I'm just gonna skin down the Asian pear real quick.
Kalbi is a soy, garlic, and sugar based marinade,
but here we're doing a little twist
by throwing it on our beef ribs.
- It's like Texas barbecue.
The trinity is, you know, brisket, pork ribs and sausage.
I think kalbi in Korean barbecue,
probably like the brisket, right?
- [Theo] Yeah, yeah.
- It's like you can't have Korean barbecue without kalbi.
Growing up in Texas, in Houston especially,
where there's a ton of Vietnamese, Chinese, Indian people,
Korean, Japanese, Pakistani,
has a huge influence on how we cook and what we cook
because when we cook with Khoi,
we ask ourselves like,
what dishes can we kinda riff on
that brings us sort of nostalgia?
Stuff like we ate growing up as kids, right?
Like brisket pho.
We ate brisket growing up.
We ate pho growing up.
How do we combine those two dishes
in a way that is fluid and cohesive and fun
and, most importantly, delicious to eat.
The sausage we're making today,
it's called bo la lot.
Really traditional Vietnamese dish
that involves lolot leaves.
It's kind of like a betel leaf,
the cousin of a betel leaf, kind of medicinally.
Traditionally, ba la lot dish is ground beef seasoned,
and then you wrap the lolot leaves around the beef
into like little ovals,
and then you grill them.
So these are the brisket trimmings
that we're going to repurpose into sausage.
(meat grinder whirring)
What we do is we take the lolot leaves,
we dice them finely,
we take some, we stick it in the firebox
to kinda honor that direct fire tradition,
and then we kinda mix it all into the sausage meat.
The barbecue community has been great.
Even though, you know, we do this part time
we've met a lot of good friends.
Like our friend here, Bryan Bingham,
he's helping us out with the sausage right now.
Growing up, I was really embarrassed
to bring my friends over.
My mom was cooking with fish sauce, you know.
We had pickled cabbage and stuff
and it smelled kinda funky. And I was like, "Oh my God,
my friends are gonna like, you know, make fun of me."
But now it's been great to embrace it.
And so when people come to our pop-ups
they might be like, "Oh, what is that red stuff?"
"Oh, it's kimchi."
And then 10 minutes later they're like,
"Can I have some more?"
Right?
That always brings a smile to my face,
putting people out of their comfort zone,
but then making it accessible through barbecue
and then surprising them,
and then they end up liking it.
(rock music)
So we're making bun bo hue.
So the stock is comprised of, you know, femur bones.
These are really great because they have marrow in it
and which we'll use to thicken up the stock.
We have some beautiful chuck that we'll use,
and then we'll have some oxtail as well,
which is really nice 'cause it's,
it's a tougher cut,
but once you kinda boil it
and cook it for five, six hours,
it becomes extremely tender and really flavorful.
So we're gonna take all these three components
and add it to the broth.
I'm from Da Nang.
My hometown is from Da Nang in Central Vietnam
and a city that's next to us is called Hue.
It was the old imperial capital,
and they're known for a spicy noodle dish
called bun bo hue.
And that's that.
So we'll leave this here and once it boils,
all the impurities will come out
for the next couple hours.
You can just let the broth do its thing.
(calm electronic music)
Viet-Tex means a few different things.
It's just a term that we thought
encapsulates our identity, right?
We're Vietnamese Americans that grew up in Texas,
as simple as that,
but it's also the type of food that we like to do.
You know, we love traditional Vietnamese food.
We love traditional Texas barbecue.
It's kind of what started the essence of Khoi, right?
Central Texas barbecue with an Asian influence.
So it's just the connection between
our kind of cultural heritage of being from Vietnam.
Our parents were from Vietnam.
You know, we speak Vietnamese,
we eat Vietnamese food,
but we're also Texans,
so it's kind of that duality of our identity
and also the food that we want to put out.
(calm electronic music)
Khoi, or khoi, how you pronounce in Vietnamese, means smoke,
so that's where we got our inspiration
because we want to cook with smoke,
cook with indirect fire, indirect heat.
The word that represents what we do
is try to infuse smoke in Vietnamese dishes,
in American dishes, in Chinese, Japanese,
whatever the dish we do,
we think about how to incorporate smoke as a flavor.
You put, you know, two different cultures together,
something great can happen,
and I think in this day and age
with a lot of, you know, divisiveness
that, you know, two different opposing styles
you don't think that might go together necessarily,
but when you do it in a thoughtful manner,
you know, it could work
and that, you know, we should celebrate that.
(calm electronic music)