- Brisket's king in Texas.
If you can't cook brisket right,
then you don't need to have a barbecue restaurant in Texas.
We're serving briskets not only by the pound
but we're serving for tacos.
What I wanted to do is represent what I thought
was true Tejano cooking.
You know, I grew up grilling, smoking, barbecuing
and in the Mexican flavors, kind of just in tandem with it.
And I wanted to represent what I thought was
the Chicano and Tejano culture here in Texas,
pushing out what we do at the home.
We are in south Austin at Valentina's Tex-Mex Barbecue.
For breakfast we have our chicken fajita breakfast taco,
everyone knows what that is.
We're doing spicy eggs, we need some serranos chopped up.
People want barbecue, let's have a good day.
Yeah so here we have our pits,
everything is named after my favorite bands
or their lead singers.
We got Maynard, Cornell and we have Cobain.
This pit actually, the day that I went to go
pick it up from my welder, on the radio
we heard that Cornell had passed away so it was meant to be.
We do like traditional Texas barbecue, right,
except we use mesquite wood.
A lot of people don't use it for smoking
they use it more for grilling 'cause they're afraid of it,
thinking that it's super powerful.
Mesquite puts out earthy and sweet notes to it
and when it's used proper,
it's one of the best things with beef in my opinion.
Whenever these pits are not cooking,
if you put your head down into the barrel,
it smells like kind of like dark chocolate
or like burnt chocolate brownies.
It's awesome, smells really great.
I do try and have a balance of more aged wood
and then a little bit of greener wood.
You can see the difference in some of 'em.
See this right here, that yellow?
This is gonna have more moisture in it.
And I'm looking for some that are a little bit lighter,
like this one right here has a little bit brighter,
this one will have less moisture in it.
You can tell the difference, this is a big log,
this is a smaller one but they weigh about the same.
I like to have the bottom logs
kind of facing out with their air.
This is our high-tech oxygen blower.
Yeah so when it burns, you smell like grass fire,
you know what I mean?
But when you cook,
you get that earthy and sweet notes from it.
All right, so now we got our fires going.
This fire will probably be like you know,
over 500 degrees right here
but the actual internal temp of the pit,
we're looking for about 225 to 240.
We want to be able to trim some brisket right now
and we wanna start loading them up
and seasoning them here soon.
So they're on by about eleven o'clock cooking.
We're trying to make the briskets all the same shape,
like look at this one right here, this one's huge.
And when they go in the smoker,
we don't want to be opening and closing
and have to rotate so much.
We're looking to have most of the briskets
kind of have the same shape and size.
Hartley Ranch has really great Angus cows here in Texas,
been around for a long time.
We use their prime beef, you know, grass-fed.
But then they are finished off with grain at the very end.
We're serving briskets not only by the pound
but we're serving for tacos.
That allows me to treat the brisket slightly different.
See, I'm gonna take most of this deckle out
because it doesn't render anyway.
Our briskets have a lot of marbling,
they have a lot of good juices that maintain in it anyway.
And all the leftover stuff we use
because we only get about 50% yield out of this.
You know this brisket might weigh like seven pounds cooked
and it's probably like, you know, 14 right now.
And so we gotta try and make up for that
by figuring other stuff out,
like that's where we talk about making tips
and stuff like this, this is good for like our sausage
and these beef tips will get smoked and braised
and then I'll make brisket guisada
or street tacos or something like that.
I'm going to finish this one brisket right here
and then we'll get ready to season up.
And we just go to town.
The brisket rub is a combination
of our red rub, pepper and salt.
Our red rub is something that we make here.
It just has salt, pepper and garlic,
sugar, paprika, cayenne and chile powder.
Brisket's probably the hardest thing that we cook,
I think it's like the hardest thing
that anybody cooks in Texas
because you're striving to have 100% perfection.
You'll put on 400 pounds of brisket,
you want 400 pounds to be perfect.
You don't want to lose it.
It is almost 48 hours worth of preparation going in
to produce something that's gonna be consumed
in less than like, three minutes.
Okay so we're looking for - us particularly here -
is to be able to have the briskets
cooked almost evenly all at the same time.
We place the briskets,
depending on the size and shape in different spots.
So we have the ones that are bigger towards the back
and the side of the firebox or the smokestack
'cause you can get a little bit more heat there.
The smaller ones are placed in the middle
but we want the fat edge to be facing the metal of the doors
'cause you're gonna get a little bit more heat on that side.
We're gonna shut these doors and we're not gonna look at 'em
for at least six, seven hours.
These vegetables right here, I'm gonna roast off real quick
for another one of our plates called 'Tampiqueña',
but it's smoked peppers and onions basically.
They need some right now
so I'm trying to get it done real quick.
So our menu's based off Texas barbecue
and then an influence of the Mexican culture.
Those types of things
that are represented in the home cooking.
Coming through!
Where you have barbecue, fresh tortillas, avocado,
roasted corn, roasted peppers
and different styles of using fire and smoke.
Right behind y'all, coming in, hot!
Hey, keep three people on the line,
keep running, cut those tickets down, let's go.
- [Cook] One brisket, one pork.
Get a chico queso ready for this chicken fajita.
- Where are you at on sausage?
So we do, like about 24 pounds of pork
and about 12 pounds of beef.
The fat ratio, we kind of just let it happen naturally,
we try and keep chunks in here
so we get about 25-30% of fat.
When he has everything all mixed up,
then we'll case them here.
- [Elias] And we've been working together
for years before this as well.
So we've had this brotherly relationship
where we can tell each other, you know,
when we're doing something wrong
and accept it and you know, hopefully correct it.
So this is our OG sausage
that we're about to mix right here.
We got onion powder, salt, pepper, garlic, our red rub,
Mexican oregano, here we have some diced poblanos.
Right here we have a garlic and cilantro
that's been blended up.
- The thing that like concerns us the most,
brisket, 'cause you want it to be perfect every time.
But sausage is always pretty intense you know?
Like the whole process to it
is a long process, takes a while.
My brother and I grew up a little bit different
because of our age differences.
You know, I'm seven years older than him.
I grew up on the South side of San Antonio.
I always played sports but I also kind of like,
liked the neighborhood feel
and grew up around the low riders and stuff
and I kind of like that a lot.
And we moved to North Central San Antonio so,
he didn't really grow up on the South side like I did.
- He once told me, "How did I come out so gangster
and you came out so hipster?"
(both laughing)
- I'm just looking for it to kind of fill in the casing
without pushing the casing too much
where it's super tight right now
'cause I want to have some room
so I can link up the sausage.
Barbecue is being able to take a piece of meat
that typically wouldn't taste good
or something that's not preferable and being able
to transform it into something very delicious
and delicate and decadent and juicy
and tender and tasteful, right?
Barbecue is low and slow
just like that truck back over there.
This is a 1961 Apache.
I've always been into low riders and older trucks.
If this truck was perfect, perfect,
I probably wouldn't drive it too much, you know?
I like having a little bit of imperfections with it,
it's just like food, just little imperfections
in all the food too, you know?
- [Elias] Check this boy out that's been going a while now.
Whenever we wrap, we don't ever gauge the temperature,
we go mostly for the way it looks, the color,
so this one's got a nice bark on it,
it's been going about nine, ten hours.
This is what we'd like the brisket to look like
before it's about to get wrapped.
We try to have 'em all come off around the same time
because we have a pretty strict schedule,
especially when the weekend comes
and the pit space that we have.
This one got wrapped about ten hours in
and then it's another three hours wrapped.
- This is what we use, vermicelli fideo noodles, okay?
This box is like 13 cents or something like that, right?
This is what my mom would feed our family on, you know?
All of us.
Fideo's like, it's a traditional Spanish and Mexican dish.
We use the vermicelli noodles cooked with
butter and they're browned and you create a broth,
a tomato-based broth that has spices
and a little bit of chile powder, garlic,
cayenne, maybe, heavy on garlic,
maybe some oregano, maybe not.
I think sometimes with broth or soups,
you start with like, aromatics for the onions.
It doesn't really need that,
it's gonna be so much packed with flavor,
we're just gonna cook these onions down
kind of sweat them into the broth.
It was a favorite dish of mine growing up.
I ate it too much and got sick of it.
When I got older, that's all I could think about
was that kind of food.
The plate that I grew up eating had fideo served up.
We take these noodles once they brown a little bit
and you drop 'em into the hot broth
and you serve the noodles with the broth.
And you have refried beans, which we've already made
and we have ground beef or beef picadillo.
This is some of the meat here, this is that same brisket
that's been ground up and it's been smoked in the pit
to create our smoked beef.
It's kind of like a version
of like Mexican goulash or something.
(chuckling)
Today we're serving our Fideo Loco Taco.
So it's a version of this dish packed into a big ass taco.
You know I remember, early age, like four or five years old,
helping my grandmother make tortillas,
flour tortillas in particular.
In San Antonio, so you're coming from like,
the Northern Mexico and South Texas region
and you have more of like the Sonoran influence
and that's where the flour tortilla comes from.
That fresh flour tortilla and the process it takes
to hand-mix and to feel that dough and to push 'em out
and have something that's like a replacement
for fresh white bread or something.
That's super important for me to have as a component here.
This is a very good size to work with
to where we come in and we're pinching
and we're doing 50 to 60 grams.
So then these will sit for about 20 minutes or so
and then they'll be ready to press.
Flour tortillas has to stand up
to the effort and time that's put into the brisket.
It needs that catalyst to go along with it.
That's important to me because it's just part of who we are.
So this is our BE&SCO mini wedge.
You have two Teflon plates that are heated right here.
Just about 400 degrees inside of here
and you need that to press the flour.
It's just something we don't use for corn.
Corn is a cold press, this is gonna be a hot press.
Just looking at those dough balls that we made earlier,
now they're ready to roll.
Roll 'em up in the flour a little bit,
drop 'em into the press
and then we're looking for this size.
And the tortillas have to cook you know,
roughly about five seconds or so to get the nice color
and little bit of the char marks on them.
Nice, soft, fluffy tortillas.
If I was gonna serve packaged tortillas
or buy 'em from the store, I would get my head cut off
and my hands cut off by my parents, you know?
There's like no way I could live with myself
and they would just kind of put their head down.
Yeah so we made the Real Deal Holyfield earlier.
It's pretty funny man,
'cause it kind of like exploded unexpectedly
when we first opened up, my dad's hanging out and says,
"Hey, make me some huevos rancheros."
So I start frying up potatoes, make some bacon.
I'm also listening to like rap at the same time too,
I'm listening to like, Snoop at the same time.
Instead of giving him his huevos rancheros plate,
I used a roller and rolled out a bigger tortilla for him.
Put it on a plate as the base,
put the refried beans, potatoes, fried egg, strip of bacon
and added a fat slice of brisket to it.
And when I took it out to him, I put it in front of him
and he was like, "What's this?"
I was like, "That's the Real Deal Holyfield."
So it's kind of like a joke at first and my dad loved it,
he came back and was like, "That was awesome man."
Started running it on the weekends, people loved it,
kept asking for it and we put it on the menu for good.
We always wanted to create a culture, you know what I mean,
at Valentina's, it's about family,
it's about making stuff with love,
it's about cooking from the heart and from the soul.
And being able to have some sort of like nostalgic feeling
and connect with people, because that's what food is about.
It's about sharing,
it's about the time that you have with friends and family
and like the conversations that you can have around food.
And that's super important.
If you can't be smiling and happy here,
then you have no business cooking at Valentina's.
You can throw away all the aspects and techniques
of like, proper cooking or whatever it is, experience,
you can throw that all out the door.
Bottom line is, it's coming in here with the right attitude
and the right reasons to cook.
It has nothing to do with skill, you know what I'm saying?
It has everything to do with drive
and the will to want to do it.
Being able to have that attitude allows us to be able to be
like, barbecue for the people kind of thing,
you know what I mean?