- I saw a Tweet a couple months ago
of somebody asking for an Austin barbecue place
that specialized in smoked vegetables
and nobody responded and I kind of realized
that there was a big opening there
and there was something that we should be doing.
Our entire thing is just about being different
and kind of pushing the boundaries,
so that's really where we have the best success
is trying to fund that Venn diagram
of like barbecue and then like vegetarian.
Took a couple different tries with the spice rub,
but we landed on a harissa style.
They take almost meat-like qualities.
Cauliflower burnt ends is the dish.
You know, there's people that come up and order
that are just like, "Nope, I don't want any veggies,
no nothing, just give me that meat by the pound."
And we love those people.
We also have people who don't wanna eat something heavy,
who want something vegetarian
and they want to participate in barbecue.
I think us delivering that to them
is just as important as giving
the meat eaters what they want.
And we're gonna smoke 'em all off.
(upbeat music)
We'll season it, we'll smoke it whole,
we'll take it off, we'll re-season it again
and we'll put it back on and char it.
I'm doing Lincoln log pattern
because you want maximum service area
to get exposed to both the fire,
the flames coming up and also oxygen.
You want oxygen in the middle,
you want a lot of air flow.
Cooking with an open fire is just way more interesting
and you can just study how wood goes up into flames
and the different chemicals that are coming off of it
and the different smells, the different flavors
that that produces.
So the white puffy smoke is the kind
of lower temperature smoke.
It's gonna have more acrid flavors in it
and the clean, clear, that kind of thin blue smoke
is basically a hotter burning fire.
So this is post oak wood.
This is the wood that we use to fuel
our entire business and LeRoy and Lewis.
It's kind of the flavor of Texas barbecue really
to me is post oak wood and black pepper.
This is always so cool.
You can see the moisture coming out of the wood.
Take that off and put it in your coffee.
So we have a food truck.
We can't prep anything on the food truck,
there's no cooking equipment on the food truck,
so we have to cook everything at our commissary kitchen.
The downside is that it's not on our property.
Do the circumstances force creativity?
Absolutely.
Where the squeeze, where the borders come from
is the sourcing.
We have absolute highest possible standards.
These are our Akaushi briskets.
It's a cross between Angus and Japanese Wagyu.
So Angus is known to be really meaty.
Wagyu beef is know to be very fatty.
This is Bradley.
He does all of our butchering,
all of our pit building, all of our events,
all of our everything.
- The whole point of trimming for me basically
is trying to maximize how much usable brisket we get
from a finished product.
So it seems like a pretty aggressive trim
that I'm doing, but everything
we cut off gets reused.
- We try to get as much out of it as we possibly can.
That's really two-fold.
A business decision and just trying to respect
where the animal came from.
- [Bradley] The funny part about brisket, though,
is that even though it's the same cut,
like every brisket is a little differently shaped,
which is kind of what I enjoy about trimming briskets.
- Fatty pieces and we've got meat pieces
that still have some fat on it.
All this stuff is gonna become burgers.
We're going to grind it up, form it up,
smoke it and then sear it.
We actually get more money per burger
than we do for brisket
because there's no loss in cooking weight.
The brisket, as it is here,
is gonna lose about half of its weight
and then this is gonna be just 100% burger every time.
- Meatball mountain.
All right, it's big pile of burgers.
I like to tell people I got hired for this burger.
Before I worked here, Evan came over
to my house for a 4th of July party
and I was searing off burgers on a plancha
over an open fire and you're like,
"We should put that on the night menu."
And then you hired me to run the night shift.
- The only thing with that press
is that it's a little too flat and wide.
It kind of looks like a Whataburger,
which I love Whataburger.
I don't wanna serve a Whataburger.
So I want them, just the diameter a little smaller.
I want it to stick outside the bun
and I want it taller and thicker.
It's going to be more dense.
It's gonna be juicier.
We smoke it till it's rare,
then we'll let it rest a little bit
and then we'll pull out a big plancha
and put it in the fire box, so it goes
directly over the coals, it gets screaming hot
and we sear it really quick.
- So basically what we're gonna do is put
the plancha right in the fire box here
over these hot coals so it gets nice and hot,
then we can sear these burgers off.
It actually amazed me the first time
we did this that you can cook a burger to medium rare
and hold it for a couple of hours
and it still comes out medium rare
and it's still nice and juicy, pretty cool.
- Having to get all of our meat from Texas,
from people who are responsible about raising it
and having it be of a high quality enough
to barbecue with, it's hard to find all those things.
So when we do, we find the whole hogs,
we have to use the whole hog.
(grunting)
Since we don't serve ribs,
when we do serve ribs,
we really like to wow 'em with the bacon rib.
We kind of present it like a lot of our people
present the beef rib.
The bacon rib is gonna come from the middle,
from the rib section.
- [Bradley] So right now I'm cutting off these
two bones on the end.
We got the belly running through here.
These are the ribs on top
and this is what our bacon rib will look like.
- It kind of hits the beef ribs size
and wow factor and it also gets us
having ribs on the menu.
This is the cure for the bacon rib.
It's a pretty standard bacon cure,
equal parts salt and sugar.
We use brown sugar
and we're gonna add just a little bit of pink salt
for that color.
I mean if you imagine eating a piece of bacon,
it's really salty.
If you eat a beef rib, right,
it's just crusty on the outside,
it's got that seasoning on the outside.
This is gonna have seasoning all through it.
That's pretty much it.
Bury it.
This is our bacon rib.
It has been on cure for seven days.
I mean, look at it, it's super fatty.
You can see the ribs.
This is a normal rack of spare ribs
and then this is the normal part of the belly.
Bacon on top of the rib, bacon rib.
I'm gonna kind of put the bone side
toward the fire just to protect it a little bit
and hopefully I may cook a little bit more evenly.
The bacon rib rub,
I don't wanna add any more salt to it.
So this is just pretty much equal parts
brown sugar, black pepper.
There's a little bit of cayenne in there, too.
A lot of this stuff also comes from
seeing other barbecue people do stuff
and then wanting to do something like that, but different,
and then it's just a matter of execution after that.
How do we make it better,
how do we make it more interesting?
We're just gonna cook these until they
really render out and they're nice and tender.
Yeah, that's it.
So, we serve beef cheeks instead of brisket most days.
- So these are our beef cheeks,
this is how they come in, vac-sealed up.
If you haven't seen a beef cheek before,
it's a really gnarly looking cut.
It's just like the least appetizing looking thing
you can think of.
- [Evan] Just because of the way that we source the stuff,
we kind of have a split, a three-day, two-day split
between beef cheeks and brisket.
Very similar things, brisket, beef cheek,
as far as how we wanna approach them,
how we wanna cook them.
We want something similar out of the end product
for both of them.
- You can tell it's got all this intramuscular fat
and connective tissue in there,
much like a brisket.
Now we got beef cheek mountain going.
♪ Beef cheek mountain ♪
All right, now I'm gonna grind up this beef fat
and then we'll put it in a pot, render it down
and we'll use that for confitting our beef cheeks in.
- We still wanna give people what they want
as far as something that is like brisket,
a sliced beef option.
That's what people want here in Texas.
So we wanna deliver that to them,
but also get them out of their comfort zone
just a little bit.
(grunting)
- Oh, Jesus.
This is where it looks
its most appetizing out of all of it, yummy.
It's gonna melt and then all the water
has to evaporate and then you'll be left with
pure beef fat.
- These are the cheeks, they're gonna get
seasoned very similarly to the briskets.
It's gonna get completely coated.
And these are gonna shrink up a little bit
so I'm not afraid to have them really hugging, you know.
So they're almost gonna cook as one.
So these cheeks, you saw how they went on,
very raw looking.
They've now developed a crust.
The seasoning is nicely stuck to them.
They've decreased about maybe one-third in size.
So, this is fat that we've used to confit before,
so it's already nice and smoky
and beefy and peppery
and so it's going to increase the beefiness,
it's gonna increase the smokiness of it.
It's just gonna basically concentrate the flavor.
And then they're gonna cook on this smoker.
By the time they all break down,
oh, God it's so good.
This is the hop sausage.
So up here by the door.
Just don't want any of the casing touching really.
It's gonna be colder up here.
Wanna cook the sausage at a lower temperature.
Our sausage has some citra hops in it,
but it's pretty standard pork sausage.
- A lot of people think it's kind of strange
that we use an entire ham for making sausage,
because sausage is typically one of those things
that you just use the scraps.
But I think that's kind of what makes us unique.
And then we got the citra hops.
- It is, it is a really good way
of judging a barbecue place.
Do they care enough to make their own sausage?
What kind are they making?
Are they just doing jalapeno cheese
like literally everybody else.
Cooking with an open fire is just way more interesting.
A lot of people would barbecue, this is all they're doing,
just offset pit.
- [Bradley] This is a tenderloin right here.
- Tenderloin is really good,
super tender obviously.
We can just season it really simply
and cook it directly on the coals.
If you are cooking on the coals,
that's gonna be the hottest way
you can possibly cook.
Why fire cooking is just way more interesting
because cooking method adds the most flavor.
Wood fire smoking, it's gonna add a ton of flavor
to the food and that's really
the most important part.
We're getting ready to make some Texas red chili.
It's really just ground beef and some spices
and red chilis, that's it.
- Beans, too, right?
- Zero beans in chili, I will die on that hill.
If there's a single bean in the pot,
it is then a pot of beans.
- I learned that one the hard way
when I suggested putting beans in the chili one time.
- No f****** beans in the chili.
Some of what we do just comes from our mission
of just wanting to order good meat
and wanting to use all of that.
I think everything pretty much stems
from the sourcing.
Do you want cheese and onions on your Frito pie?
Really can't go wrong with anything on the menu.
What is barbecue to me?
It is a personal touchstone for me.
It's really the way that we try
to express ourselves and try to kind
of bring something a little bit more interesting
to the culinary landscape.
We try to say something about the city,
about ourselves and about the people that produce
the things that we use as well.
- [Customer] What do you recommend, the beef cheeks?
- Yeah, the beef cheeks is kind
of a signature item for its, they're really good.
Very similar to brisket.
I don't know if it's as much as like
my chef approach to it,
but just a creative approach in general.
Just trying to do different things.
I mean a lot of the times you just like,
it's just word association, right.
Thing that like sounds like they would make sense together.
You know you can take a list of techniques
and a list of, you know, meats
and then you just play it like crisscross matching
and you can come up with something crazy
and then one of those every now and then
is gonna be something really special
and it's gonna hit and it's gonna like,
affect people in a certain way.
I want people who leave LeRoy and Lewis
to say that is the best and most interesting barbecue
I've ever had in my life.