- For our gochujang ribs,
we use a St. Louis cut.
We just liked the way they cook,
cook a lot faster than whole spares.
So we have a gochujang rub here that we'll put on the ribs,
consists of sesame seeds, brown sugar, salt, black pepper,
gochugaru, which is a red chili flake.
I'm Vietnamese, I was born in Vietnam,
came over here when I was like two years old.
I like to look at us as using traditional cuts of meat,
traditional cooking methods,
but with just flavors that we grew up eating.
Flavor profile is probably gonna be on the sweeter side.
Does have a hint of spice, but nothing
that's gonna overwhelm you or anything like that.
So these ribs they'll cook for about three to four hours.
We normally like to check 'em at the three hour mark.
'Cause sometimes if you have thinner ribs,
they'll cook a lot faster.
They'll go to about 9:30, 10 o'clock,
and then when we pull them out, we'll glaze them up.
So this is gonna be our gochujang sauce.
We start with gochujang paste,
which is a Korean fermented chili paste, soy sauce,
and we got sesame oil, and a ton of sugar.
And then we use a ginger ale.
Just kind of helps dilute it down a little bit.
You saw how thick that gochujang paste is.
Korean barbecue is one thing my friends,
my family, we would always go try.
So, after a while we were like,
"Hey, we got the Texas trinity down,
now let's have some fun."
So these ribs have been on the smoker
for about three, three and a half hours.
We're just gonna check in on them and see where they are.
You want them to kind of bend, but don't break.
Y'all can also probe it with a toothpick.
If it goes in real smooth, you'll know it's done.
But this one kind of bending at 90 degrees,
without breaking, so it should be good to go.
Let them rest for about 10, 15 minutes.
And then we're going to glaze them up
with our gochujang glaze.
Gochujang is like the perfect condiment.
I just liked the umami flavor, it's kind of earthy.
So once we glaze it up, we just top it
with some sesame seeds and some green onions.
(bright upbeat music)
So here we got our Prime Black Angus Brisket.
We're gonna trim it up today.
There's a certain point off the point side of the brisket
that we use for our burnt ends
and our burn ends steam buns.
Growing up, I loved Peking duck,
so, you know, that's typically eaten with the baos.
So we just wanted to do something, utilizing that.
You know, people don't really do burnt ends
as like where they trim it up
and specifically make burnt ends.
It typically comes from after you smoke it.
So we trim this piece off.
So we'll season this just like our brisket,
it'll get in the smoker, and then when it's done,
we cube it up, sauce it with a hoisin barbecue sauce.
Cook it a little more until it's tender.
And they'll they'll, we'll put that in our steamed buns.
Now we just try to trim off as much
of the fat cap as we can and then just
clean up any jagged edges or real thin edges
that are gonna burn.
So, we're gonna season these briskets
and this little burnt end piece here.
I like to lay a little bit of olive oil down,
just to kind of help the rub stick a little bit.
Do a salt and pepper mix, top it off with our beef rub.
Mix of like garlic powder, onion powder.
You know, we like to spice everything up,
so there's a little bit of cayenne in there.
So I'm loading these briskets.
I tend to put the flat towards the back.
This particular model, of this JNR,
is the little red smoke house.
It actually uses a convection fan.
The heat is pretty even.
I mean, there are still hot spots in here.
During the cook, I will rotate this one time.
And then when I wrap, I'll also find some
of the larger briskets and put them in the hot spots.
Does it assist you a little bit?
Yes, you know, I like to compare it to a baker.
You know, everyone has an oven,
but not every baker's the same.
All right, this prep here is gonna be
for our char siu pork belly fried bao buns.
I love pork belly,
it's basically what bacon's made from.
It has a good fat to meat ratio.
So we're just gonna rub this down with our spice blend.
This consists of brown sugar, salt, and Chinese five spice.
You know, it's something we always grew up eating.
All the different flavors, we get that saltiness,
that umami, just goes really well with pork.
You know, after school, me and the boys,
we would go to the local Asian supermarket
and you could buy char siu, you know,
heat it up and eat it with a bowl of rice.
It was delicious, so this is another one of those dishes
that is inspired from our upbringing and growing up.
So now this is gonna go on the smoker
for probably about six hours.
And then once we pull it off the smoker,
I have a char siu glaze that we'll glaze it up with.
I think we've built one of the greatest teams in the city.
We run a small crew.
Everyone's invested in what we do here,
the flavors that we do, Crystal, Bao,
anyone comes up with a dish,
we'll bounce ideas off of each other.
- So this is called ong choy,
it's also known as a Chinese water spinach.
Today, we like to pickle them.
It's one of the components for the five boa.
Right now, we're about to shock these ong choys.
So they can be more vibrant and more green.
And it just makes it more pretty.
It does kind of help with the texture as well.
Thing is though, you don't want to go over.
Otherwise there'll be like mush.
Now I'm just gonna start mixing
all the ingredients for the brine.
Start out with sugar, white vinegar.
We've got apple cider vinegar as well, and water.
Just give that a little stir.
You want to bring this to a boil.
And now we're going to shock them
to stop the cooking process.
So you can see, it's more darker, more green,
more vibrant, compared to like when it's raw.
So I just gotta drain 'em.
And one thing that's real nice with this recipe
is once you pickle them, they'll hold for a while.
The pickling brine is finished boiling,
so I'm gonna pour it over the ong choy.
With the pickled ong choy, you get your acid.
It's nice and sweet, a little sour.
And it works well with the pork belly,
'cause you know it's very fatty, savory.
- So our char siu belly has been on for about six hours.
So let's go ahead and check on it.
Oh yeah, that's nice.
The tenderness of it, this feels great.
So when it comes out hot,
we take the char siu sauce
and just kind of glaze it on there.
It's important to put the glaze on when it's hot,
I think it makes it stick better.
Especially sometimes if you have a real thick sauce,
like this one, it just kind of helps thin it out.
We'll cool this one down and then we'll cut it
into strips and we'll pan sear 'em to order.
So this is Crystal, she's gonna
walk us through assembly.
- I start with the bao buns, and I will fry these
for, I want to say, not even a minute.
So once these are nice and dark,
I'll transfer them over to the bowl,
and we make a honey syrup.
So we'll toss them in the syrup,
get a nice coat on them.
So now I'll fry up the belly,
get a nice char on it, on each side.
Once these have a nice color to them,
we glaze them with our char siu sauce.
- When we glaze it, it's gonna give it
that nice caramelization.
Yeah, this is one of our more popular dishes I think.
- Then we hit it with some Chinese mustard
and that's when we top it with ong choy
that we pickle in house.
And that's it, they'll go out.
- Next up, we're gonna do our
Thai red curry and chili sausage.
We start off with the pork butt.
We like to experiment a lot
with all kinds of crazy sausages.
It's a pretty open vessel,
you could get real creative with it.
So we do rotating specialty sausages twice a week.
We just wanna have fun, you know?
I don't wanna be stuck cooking
the same three or four items forever.
Double check my recipe real quick.
Don't want to really mess anything up.
I really love Thai food, I love curry.
So I was like why not just mix it all together
and put it in a sausage.
I know some people will make the curry paste from scratch.
It's just so time consuming, so we just get it.
We're gonna go with some coconut milk,
some fish sauce, we'll just mix it up real good.
One thing with sausage, when you do grind it,
you want the equipment and the meat to be super cold.
I just actually grind it through once,
we use a pretty coarse grind.
To the pork, we're gonna add
there's garlic powder in here,
black pepper, some ginger powder,
and then all the fresh herbs.
We have fresh shallots, lemon grass,
cilantro, and I love the heat,
so a lot of fresh Thai chilies.
So we're gonna let this mix
until the meat mixture is nice and tacky.
You don't want to over-mix 'cause then
that'll break down a lot of the fat.
You want that nice fat rendering
when you're actually smoking it.
Yeah, so you can see that this is kind of tacky.
One good test I always do is put in the palm
of your hand, like that, and it kind of
sticks there and falls off.
So now we will grab this stuff
where we'll link 'em all up.
So this is our pork casing,
we use the 32 to 35 millimeter casing.
You know, some people will use the all beef casing.
Beef casings tend to be a little bit tougher.
Pop any little air bubbles you see.
The sausages are going to go on here, about 180,
for probably about three hours.
Over that time, we'll slowly crank up the heat,
maybe ending around like 200, 225 until they hit temp.
So when we make our sausage,
we do a two part smoking process,
just to give it that extra snappy casing.
When we get the nice color, it hits the temp we want,
we'll take it out, chill it down real quick in a ice bath,
let the flavors develop overnight.
And then for service, we will re cook 'em at a higher temp.
The sausage are pretty much the last thing we're waiting on.
I mean, it's almost time for service.
So once these come off, we'll be ready to rock and roll.
(bright upbeat music)
- Steamed buns, for here!
- We smoked off that flap
we cut from the point of the brisket,
cubed them up, now we're gonna sauce it up
with a hoisin barbecue sauce.
This consists of fresh minced garlic,
hoisin, soy sauce, a little bit of fish sauce.
And now we have these nice cubes
of a fatty meat, crunchy on the outside.
So these will go in our steam buns.
That's topped with more hoisin barbecue sauce,
pickled jicama, green onions, and cucumbers.
Yes, sir, what else for you?
We didn't want to be those, oh these are
the Asian guys doing Asian barbecue.
We like to actually call it now Houston barbecue.
Houston's such a melting pot.
There's guys all over the city that are taking
their heritage and putting it into barbecue.
And it's working.
On the ribs, do you want the regular ribs
or the gochujang?
- [Customer] What kind of ribs is that?
- These are gochujang.
- [Customer] Ahh yeah, I like them.
- I think now we've built up that trust,
within our customer base, where our regulars
are trying new items, you know?
Before, when they'd first come in,
it's just give me the brisket, ribs, and sausage.
Now our regulars, and even some new people,
you know what they read about us.
They don't want to try the normal stuff, the regular stuff.
They go straight for our features.
I consider myself kind of a perfectionist
and I want to challenge myself.
Barbecue's challenging, sometimes it's frustrating,
but if you nail it, it's the most gratifying thing.
You know?
You nail a brisket and you get those perfect slices.
It's like, man, I hit it.
You know, there are some people
that will look at what we're doing
and say, it's not barbecue.
You know, you gotta open your mind to it.
Like, who can define what barbecue is?
Sir, what can we get for you?
Come in here with an open mind,
try some of the stuff that you probably
won't see on another barbecue restaurant's menu.
(music fades)