- We're gonna get started on our Bangs Island Mussel dish.
- We wash 'em individually,
go through,
and make sure that there are no cracked ones,
dead ones.
If they're dead,
they'll open.
But if they (taps shell)
are alive,
they'll close up when you tap 'em again.
It's closing, it's a live mussel.
See that?
So yeah, we take 'em.
We saute 'em real quick
with a little bit of olive oil
and garlic and white wine.
Not much to it. (pan sizzles)
We don't season 'em with salt or pepper at this point
because they're gonna get smoked,
and then marinated in all the flavor.
- So it's a very simple plate.
It's a mussel on an egg.
Deviled eggs are definitely a barbecue staple,
and this was just our little take on it.
And it was a way to combine,
you know, local seafood with a little bit of
(shells rattle) the smoke from the smoker.
- Just a kiss of smoke, though, really.
(laughs) Sorry.
Oh, I've been wanting to use that line for a while now.
(laughs)
All right, those are done.
(shells rattle)
For our purposes.
(shells rattle)
We throw in some
local seaweed
into the pan
to protect the mussels from the dry heat of the smoke.
We'll put a layer of seaweed right on top of 'em.
In the smoker, it just seems to
help the product retain some moisture,
more than anything.
- Maine has world-class ingredients,
whether we're talking about lobsters,
or shellfish,
scallops,
mussels.
Exploring that with the barbecue
was something we felt we had to do.
(meat hisses)
(mellow rock music)
We've got quite a bit of smoke
on the actual top of the seaweed right now.
It's got a little bit of smoke color.
Although a lot of these have that natural orange color,
but that's exactly what we're looking for.
So we'll take these guys out.
(shells rattle)
We'll cool 'em down.
We'll separate the meat from the shell,
and then we'll put 'em back on
a marinade, where they'll sit until served.
All we're trying to do is get the mussel out
as round and whole as possible.
- Well, there we have our smoked mussel meat,
and now it's,
we're ready for the marinade.
Very simple.
Chili oil
and our
Terlingua house-made habanero hot sauce
round out the flavor there.
They're ready to be served on the eggs.
(mellow rock music)
- It's 5:00 am.
We are going through the big meats.
We gotta get the big meats on first.
These guys are our pork shoulders,
aka the Boston butts.
We gotta get rid of some of the extraneous fat,
just for an even cook,
and then we're gonna score it and season it,
and that's about it.
The scoring,
when these things cook,
what tends to happen is
the shoulder blade section tends to separate
from, like, the coppa.
Like, part of the neck.
You want to give it a way to do it
in a more attractive way.
All we're gonna do is add
a little bit of our house season,
which is top secret.
Just kidding, it's mostly coffee and brown sugar.
A couple of extra spices,
cumin, chili powder,
a little garlic and onion,
'cause it goes boom in your mouth.
And then she's ready for the barbecue.
(upbeat hip-hop music)
Brisket, mainstay of Texas barbecue.
These guys are sourced in Nebraska.
They're prime briskets,
and then you just start carving it down
and removing the fat that is not gonna render itself.
You know, usually when you get these briskets,
you're trimming off about,
at least 25% of the overall weight.
So you might be getting briskets for four bucks a pound,
but after trim,
and after the cook, you know,
you're down to 50% of your products.
I learned
in my backyard
in Austin, Texas.
I took a barbecue course at universityofphoenix.com,
and passed with flying colors.
No, I'm just kidding.
Me and my wife lived there for about eight or nine years,
started barbecuing in the backyard,
watching UT football games.
All right, so this guy is
pretty much ready to go.
We will chuck this guy on the smoker.
(upbeat hip-hop music)
- We're doing our smoked lobster tostada,
and we have some local Maine lobsters from Casco Bay here.
They're live and kicking.
We steam 'em for about eight minutes
to get the meat to release from the shell.
They're just barely, barely cooked,
and then we finish 'em on our outdoor wood smoker.
The heart and core of the restaurant is
Pliny's smoked meats and seafood,
and we've sort of come together to create
a pretty awesome thing that seems really popular.
People love it.
They're just about there.
They need a touch more heat,
but that heat's gonna come in the smoker.
- Yeah, most of what we do is sort of a holy trinity of,
one is the smoke,
one is, like,
the Latin American, Mexican, Caribbean style of Will,
and then the other is the local product.
And so whatever we do, you know,
highlights one of those three things,
if not combines them all.
- So here are lobsters, soft shells.
They've been cooked just barely.
The remainder of their cooking will happen on the smoker.
So we split 'em right down the center.
(shell cracks)
Crack the claws a little bit,
because the claws take a little longer.
The shell insulates the meat,
but with a little crack,
the smoke gets there and can also permeate the meat,
as far as flavor's concerned.
(knife knocks)
So from a here, we're going to
clean out the guts,
and slather 'em in our Guajillo chili and garlic butter,
and then onto the smoker they go.
(upbeat funk music)
- I met Will six, seven years ago.
His vision of what he wanted to do with a restaurant,
representing a lot of his experience in Mexico,
the combination of Texas and Mexico being so close,
having so much,
or overlapping culture and history,
and spices and flavors and profiles,
was something that we were really interested in exploring.
(lid creaks)
Check on these lobsters,
(clears throat)
and they are done.
We are gonna get these guys off.
The lobster,
you know, it's so delicate and cooks so quick,
and we're cooking it at such a low temperature.
We still want to make sure that it's not overcooking.
You can, you know, overcooking lobster is,
it can get pretty rubbery,
pretty leathery, pretty tough, so
we just don't want to do that.
Will, you want to pick some stirs, man?
- Do I ever.
Yeah, we're just getting the meat ready.
It's still gonna get warmed up again in our Guajillo butter,
the same butter we drizzled all in here for the smoker.
This is a Spanish mackerel.
A beautiful, slightly oily fish
that holds up really well to our smoke,
and we're using it for our smoked fish dip.
We don't often see a lot of fish
or seafood, for that matter,
in barbecue restaurants,
but
being on the coast,
we really try and showcase some of nature's bounty.
I'll gut it and take the head off,
cut a couple slices into the flesh
to let the marinade permeate a little bit.
So this is our fish marinade for our smoked fish dip.
Some fresh garlic and fresh thyme,
a little bit of our house hot sauce,
a bunch of fresh lime juice,
some olive oil, salt, pepper,
and they are ready for the smoker.
- We're making barbecue in Maine.
It's not easy to do.
It's not meant to be here, in a lot of ways.
These steel smokers give off a lot of heat.
When it's 90 degrees out,
it's not a big deal.
Recuperating it is not a problem.
But when it's zero degrees,
which it is a lot of times up here,
it makes it difficult.
This is a reverse flow-style smoker.
The firebox is on the side,
but the difference between a one-directional
is the smokestack is on the same side.
So the smoke comes out of the firebox
and goes through
the baffle around this end,
and then across the surface of the meats in the chamber,
out the smokestack.
I was lucky to find
this 500-gallon tank.
It's massively thick.
It's over a half-inch thick,
and we added a Maine-style firebox.
It's a Warner firebox.
You know, they're typically used for heating houses,
but with the efficiency of this
and bringing the reverse flow,
we thought we could get enough flow and heat energy
to really cook pretty efficiently.
And so far, it's working.
Spanish mackerel coming off the smoker.
So we'll cool these suckers down,
remove the meat,
and get it marinated up.
(rhythmic flute music)
This is Tommy.
He's been developing a lot of
our sausage program, as we speak,
and today we're gonna take our chorizo verde
and stuff it in some of these Cavendish quail.
These are
local
to Vermont.
These are called semi-boneless.
The way that they are broken down,
so they have the legs and the wing bones,
but they have no breastbone or anything else.
So we're gonna fill these with the sausage,
and basically cook 'em until
the sausage is at a food safe temperature.
Quail's not something you typically see on a barbecue menu,
neither is mussels or lobsters,
or anything else.
And we're just trying to work with what we've got locally.
(upbeat funk music)
I'm gonna put these on,
and then I've gotta wrap and tamp the meats,
like, the big meats that have been on
since about 5:30, 6:00.
Be fairly quick about it. (clears throat)
(upbeat music)
Quails are on.
It's about 2:00.
We are gonna start checking the big meats,
and wrapping 'em up,
pushing 'em through the stall,
(paper tears) and
hopefully get 'em off to the smoker in a little bit.
All right, these pork butts have been on
for about eight hours.
(paper crinkles)
They're pretty close to being done,
so we're just gonna wrap 'em up,
retain what's left of the moisture.
(paper crinkles)
Barbecue is an exercise of getting rid of moisture.
These guys lose about 40% of their weight
over the course of a cook,
(paper crinkles)
and that weight is water.
So as they're cooking,
they're sweating, sweating, sweating.
It keeps the temperature down.
That's called the stall.
Wrapping these meats
help sort of propel it beyond that point.
(upbeat music) (paper crinkles)
(lid creaks)
(lid thuds)
Well, I think the biggest difficulty
in
adapting
the culture in Maine
to what is typical of Texas barbecue
is the idea that it sells out.
So we sorta had to introduce the idea,
you know, when it's gone, it's gone,
and
we
pissed off a lot of people,
and now we've got the market to sorta
make some extra production,
so we don't ever run out anymore.
(snaps tongs)
(lid creaks)
All right, these quails are looking pretty good.
They've been on for about an hour and a half,
and they are ready to go.
Awesome.
Food's always been important in my family.
I made a decision early on,
I was either gonna go into architecture or food,
and I figured,
if I go into architecture,
I'll be able to explore good food
on the other side of the table.
But after almost a decade in architecture,
and transitioning to Maine,
we just had an opportunity
to reinvent ourselves a little bit.
That's part of what Maine's about,
and we just took advantage of that.
And we threw our hats into the ring,
and went from a backyard self-education barbecue
to a restaurant.
And thank God I had Wilson to help guide me through
some of that process.
(upbeat music)
With Terlingua,
I think we really wanted to transport people
to a certain part of the world,
bringing some of the vibe
that we experienced down in Austin
and that part of Texas.
It's very simple food,
but there's a lot to it.
(mellow music)