[Music]
[Chris Neue] We are in Holly Hill, South Carolina, which....
is hard to find. You might have to google it.
You're at Sweatman's Barbecue, which is a local landmark in this area....
But folks come from all around to eat with us.
We offer a pretty unique menu. We do whole hog barbecue
over a wood fire.
Also southern sides, hash and rice.
It's pretty basic stuff but it's - it's good!
As they say in the south, "if it ain't broke, don't fix it."
You're gonna start the buffet with your, uh, your classic southern sides.
We got some green beans, some baked beans,
some mac and cheese.
All of it made in-house.
This is just plain white rice. Nothing special about that, but what....
it is, is a vehicle for hash,
basically ground up pork.
It's cooked down and it's
simmered with spices and
seasonings and some secrets that we can't really tell you about.
Mustard sauce is another thing that makes us unique.
Not many barbecue places will
do a mustard-based barbecue sauce as their *main* barbecue sauce.
And doing the whole hog, we don't want them to dry out.
Cooking 12, 14, 16 hours at a time.
They're gonna start skin-side up.
All that fat will drip down and it'll kind of marinate itself while it's on the pit.
Once it's flipped....
then you risk things starting to dry out a little bit.
So what we'll do is we'll take that mustard sauce
and we'll do a little basting....
probably once or twice an hour. It's really more of a feel type thing.
And, uh, the guys back there cooking, it's... it's more sight than anything.
If it looks like it needs some, it probably does.
Once it comes off the pit, and it gets shredded up,
then obviously it's got that little bit of a yellow hue to it, because of the mustard sauce that's already mixed in.
Because it's the whole hog, you have a whole bunch of different types of meat going on.
You've got shoulders, you've got hams, you've got loins, you've got the belly - which is everybody's
favorite - that's where the bacon comes from.
Rib meat - all that sort of stuff.
What we do, you can
notice, that this here has a little bit more of the charred bits.
It's a little bit darker colored.
This one is a little - looks a little bit leaner - it's a little bit lighter colored.
That's exterior and interior portions of the hog.
We separate it out because that's the way it was always done.
When we, uh, when we took over the place, they'd been separating it out....
I think the pro move is to get a little bit of both.
Moving down, we also do chicken. Like I said, that's uh... there are folks that don't eat pork, so...
We take the same care with that that we do with the pork.
It's just kind of an additional item. We...
We cook them on the pits, same way with hardwood coals.
Sauce them while they're on there.
Another unique thing about us ... is ...
*This* was at one point wrapped around *that.*
The meat comes into here for service,
but then you've got all that beautiful skin left over.
Throw it back on the pit, add some heat, crisp it up, and then you've got....
essentially a pork cracklin.'
But it's the actual skin that was cooked on the pit with the hog.
I mean, it's hard, it's hard to beat.
We, uh, we use a mixture of oak hickory and pecan.
What's, uh, what we really strive to do
is have a good mixture of dried wood which has been sitting out for a little while.
It's - it's had a chance to get all the moisture out of it.
It catches faster, it burns faster,
and it burns hotter.
But once you get a better coal, you need them to stay hot for a long time,
so they'll cook the pigs. That's where the green wood comes in.
Fresher, recently felled trees that
still have some moisture in them - they burn slower, they smoke more,
gives you more flavor and also extends your cooking time.
Cut them to about this size, so they're easy to handle.
You feed the fireplace to this side.
If you can get it in. We'll light the fire underneath. That'll burn.
There's a big steel grate right about here,
and as it burns, the embers will fall, so you can use your shovel
to get the coals under the pits.
Got one, two, three, four pits here and four pits going....
back in an L shape in the other building.
Once everything's laid out, we've got a bed of coals, we've got our....
you know, temperature where we think it needs to be,
we'll drop these hoods, and then you just
kind of monitor everything from the thermometers on here.
We get customers from all over the world
tell us how good it is.
And it's gratification for all the all the sweat that goes into it.
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