How Goldee's BBQ Earned Its Spot at No. 1 in Texas — Smoke Point

All right, good morning everybody. If I could have everybody's attention. We worked pretty much all the big spots out in Austin after high school. We moved out there, lived in the same house, and then at one point everybody had a barfee job. We were all cooking our home like pretty much on our days off. That's kind of where we started like recipe We really liked our food and we felt like okay maybe we can do this and then we just saved up the money without investors. 7 a.m. first thing we do is kind of touch these briskets up to make sure they're all looking really nice. We trim them maybe a day or two ago. Usually on Tuesdays and Wednesdays we'll go through and actually go do our initial trim through the briskets and then days up we'll go back and kind of touch them up and see if any spots we missed like too much fat or like not a good shaping of the briskets. So these are all Creekstone. They're upper two-third choices and now we're seasoning them up with some 16 mesh pepper. We have our own seasoned salt and some table salt mixture right here. So it's kind of like a really good Lowry. So I mean this is really salty. Yeah, it's really salty mix. Briskets, they're such a big cut. They can take a lot of salt on there. So our first day we actually did do 50 briskets. Five weeks after we opened, COVID hit. So then that kind of drew everything back. During COVID, it got like pretty slow. Once we reopened, the text monthly thing came out and then it's been looking pretty good ever since. They definitely have a lot of pull. A lot of people have faith in their rankings. We were doing about 12 to 16 briskets a week and then they said, hey you guys are the best and then we were doing 150 briskets a week. Start loading them up. We like to separate the bigger briskets from the smaller briskets so they kind of cook evenly. The big ones right here just probably have the most heat. I concentrated on this back part. So biggest ones and then the biggest ones against the wall because the walls have like the hotter spots on there too. Then we kind of just funnel it down to like the smallest ones going kind of this way. So the money bite side, you want those against the walls. It's going to protect it a little bit more since they are hot and this is the part that's like covered in fat so it won't burn up on you. So we probably won't wrap these or finish them until about eight o'clock tonight. We actually don't wrap them up until they're done. So we wrap them up in foil and then actually rest them that way. That way it kind of sobs at the bark back up with the foil. Kind of steams it a little bit but it doesn't give it that pot roasty taste that people want. They like wrap it at like 170 and then finish cooking it like that. So yeah. Right now we're kind of in a zone where we have more time to kind of work on some of our specials. Like before the list we were running like a new sausage a week, a new like side every week. But after the list we kind of had to dial back down and kind of focus on like our main core items. So this is a recipe jams I'm working on. It's a peri-peri chicken. Right now we're just dry brining it. Let the salt get all the way through. Yeah I'm gonna do a pretty liberal coat of this rub on there. Damn secret rub. It can take a lot. I went and ate at a spot that had peri-peri chicken. And like I just took a bite of it. I'm like oh yeah we should probably do something like this over at Goldie's. And so that's kind of how some of our specials go. Just eating out of different spots. Kind of taking things from restaurants we like. Trying to implement them here. And then I'm gonna flip it to the top side. And now we're gonna go in with the pepper first. And it'll help the chickens get a lot of nice color. And then damn made a little sauce on the side. So yeah I'm making the peri-peri sauce right now. I'm uh roasting some of these bell peppers to go in there. And I also gotta roast an onion too. So I'm gonna roast them. Let them steam so I can take off the skin. And then I'm also gonna cut up some cilantro for it too. Really kind of like just a salsa. Yeah all the real chefs are gonna be joking on my knife skills. A lot of chefs think they can knock out like barbecue stuff. Yeah that stuff looks easy. Then they do it. It's like all right never mind. I see why. Leave it up to the real professionals. Like I told y'all it's not as easy as it looks. So yeah these are nice and you kind of just want them all the way black all the way around. I'm gonna pull them off and I'm gonna plastic wrap them so they kind of steam. That makes it a lot easier to peel the skin off. And then after that it's really just uh putting everything in the food processor and blending it up. So I got some uh some of my spices right here. Just a little bit of onion powder, garlic powder, white pepper, some oregano, bay leaf, paprika. Tasting good. Yeah it's really good actually. All right so we got our chicken breast done. And usually if we run it for service we probably wrap these in a foil and let them rest down. But since this is a recipe test I'm just gonna cover them with some butter. Pour a little bit of the sauce on here. It's that peri-peri sauce I made. No yeah I mean it's tasting really good. I'd maybe go next time maybe a little heavier on the salt in the sauce. I think the chicken's uh flavored nice but I think it might need a little bit more salt in that sauce. But I think by next week we should have it figured out and ready to run this order so. Goldie's is you know kind of you know running on its own and I know uh you know we could step away and and open another restaurant. Ruby's just kind of came about well we've I think we've always talked about doing like it's kind of like a rib shack um you know just selling ribs and stuff uh because we'd always thought that would just be a really cool concept for a restaurant. So here we're using the uh pork loin back ribs which is just baby back ribs. I'm just seasoning up the uh the top side. That's where most that's where you'll see that I mean most of the meat is and um a lot of people don't really even eat that membrane side. It's not like the spares where like uh you have like a side bite on the spares. This one's is more like a top down bite. They're all seasoned with the same rub going onto the but when you when you order the different flavors that's when we basically add those different flavors to them. It's just a lot more efficient. So at Ruby's the first four menu items are baby backs. We have the original dry rub, the sweet and spicy sauce, the hot honey sauce, and the Goldie sauce and then the number five is the beef back ribs. It is like uh yeah it's an idea that's supposed to be nice and easy and and but still really good and consistent basically. Not really trying to win a James Beard. I'm trying to serve food very fast and like good barbecue very quickly. But Goldie's I'm trying to win a James Beard now. I'm spending a lot of my time here. This place has only been open for a month. We were able to start Ruby's because everything at Goldie's is pretty much running like uh like an engine. I felt like I was able to break away and start a new little restaurant. I'm still heavily involved at Goldie's. Once I get this place set up and going I'll be pretty much able to work at both. So these are beef back ribs. We get them from Heart Brand. Basically they're uh tiny little beef ribs. They don't have a whole lot of meat on top. They're more of a side bite like kind of meat like where you just get that meat in between the bones. The rub on these is just salt and pepper. It's beef so you kind of just stick to the classic. That's it. So that was uh 80 racks of ribs. Not too bad. Not too bad. How we do it is we put the we put the french fries down, the coleslaw, the bread rolls and then we put the ribs last and then we kind of season them in the box before they go out. And it's just that kick like fresh flavor like going right out. The honey sauce has been a big favorite so far. I'm actually working on trying to get it bottled like the like the Goldie sauce. So this is the sweet sauce. We put the sweet sauce on first and then we're gonna put a little bit of our spicy rub on top of that and that's what makes the sweet and spicy. And this is gonna be the Goldie's sauce. That's our table sauce at Goldie's that we're taking over here and just putting on top of the baby backs. And the last one is just gonna be our original dry rub. So you can get this one, you can get the Goldie sauce, the hot honey sauce, the sweet sauce, the spicy rub and you can get that on the side and try to and kind of test it before you order a whole box of that certain flavor. You know it is uh pretty streamlined so that it can be done super quick and really easy. There's not much room for error so it should be super consistent. Friday we're gonna run this uh Brussels sprout au gratin special that we've kind of been tweaking with the past couple couple weeks. It's a really nice cheesy dish. It is pretty heavy. We like to get a little lighter on some of our sides since the barbecue's so so heavy but um everybody likes a cheese dish so we went ahead and ran this. That's one thing we wanted to do open up Goldie's most barbecue spots they might like nail the meats but usually the sides are kind of lacking and that's kind of something we didn't want to do. We want it to be a whole whole meal. So I'm just halving these up and then I'm kind of gonna coat them with some salt and tallow and I'm actually gonna smoke these on our rotisserie smoker at about 250. And I'll kind of roast them a little bit. Start on the sheet trays and I'll start smoking. So these are going on our uh rotisserie got from M&M. Uh we're gonna cook these for about 30 30 to an hour probably yeah around 45 minutes. They should be nice and roasted by the time they come out. So right now Cecilia's uh making our buns for our chopped sandwiches or turkey sandwiches or sliced brisket sandwiches. Um same recipe as our normal bread dough but instead of making it a loaf we ball it up and make it a bun. Um then she's gonna put some sesame seeds on there and make it look pretty. Put an egg wash on there help it get color. We're gonna cook it up. I think it's uh makes it kind of fun too doing like little extra steps and we're just trying to make like our our favorite overall tray that we can and we have to make the bread and buns to do that. These are the loaves. It's basically our take on like a brioche recipe. So typically we try to shoot for like a one slice per quarter pound or if there's like a group of eight then we'll give like two slices of bread per person just so we don't waste any. Some people want to cut them and they want like 10 loaves of bread but uh we'd be baking bread all day if we did that. It's always nice hearing people being pumped up over just the bread. We had one lady she was like 90 something years old she was like oh that's the best bread I've ever eaten. I was like oh wow this lady's actually had some bread in her life. That was a bigger compliment than I think she knew. All right so that's pretty much all of prep today. Now we're gonna go back get some sleep and be back up here at 5 a.m to get it going for the weekend so. I'm Dan Harr from Columbus, Ohio. I'm Zach Hassan. We got here six. I think it was 5 53. We had to be first in line because it's number one. We're on a barbecue tour around Texas. We started in Austin went to Terry Black's and now we're here so yep. Yeah there's people lined up that's why we're kind of they're what is it like 5 30 right now. You really don't have to come in that early. I've had people show up at like times like now and then like the next group doesn't get there just like close to 8 a.m so I'd say around 8. If you want to be like first in line maybe like 8 somewhere around then but if you just want to come eat don't show up to like 9 30 or do what you want. I mean we love it but y'all could be getting a little bit more sleep. So right now we're gonna season all the pretty much all the meats that we're gonna be serving today. We got turkeys here. Justin's gonna be doing more briskets for Saturday and Kim's gonna round that corner doing pork ribs also for today. All right y'all so I'm starting the Friday morning rib prep. So we just take our pork ribs set them rib cage up so we can go ahead and get the bottom side seasoned up. So we just use water as a quick little binder. The meats kind of chill for a day or two kind of depending what we put them on so things do tend to dry up a little so it just helps to slick things back up and ensure that the seasoning is really able to stick well. And so we'll just do a pass on the bottom end of Goldie seasoned salt and that's just to get some nice flavor on the bottom side. There's nothing like an under seasoned rib. There are a couple different binders in barbecue. Obviously the most famous ones are like mustard. I've even seen mayonnaise. People like to do a mixture of like Worcestershire, apple cider vinegar. We really don't use any of that here and I noticed personally that it doesn't really affect the flavor of our cooking in any way noticeable but we just go pepper, seasoned salt, water. Typically we like to find some of the larger racks and we'll put those on the end and those will kind of shield the smaller racks from the harshness of the heat coming through. And we like to, as you'll see as I'm rotating it, we only go on the top racks just because we like to ensure if any juices are going to drip down they've got enough space to kind of flow freely we can achieve a nice spark on them. So these turkeys all I got going on is a pepper. They already come in pre-brined so you really don't have to add any salt to them. And this is one of the items a lot of people really don't like turkey too much but after they try ours they like it. So it's a sleeper item for sure. So yeah this is our backyard pit. It's a little bit different design. We actually have like this 90 degree elbow going in. So we sell these on our website. This is actually the first one made. We're just making sure it works you know before we started selling it. And uh turkeys are pretty easy cooks so that's kind of why we do it with the turkeys. And then we kind of ran out of pit space now for everything else so might as well keep using it. So I like to kind of ball them up so it's kind of the same thickness all the way throughout because the edge just kind of cooks a lot faster than the middle does. And I feel like the slices look a little bit better too. So these are going to cook for about uh maybe three hours yeah probably about three. It's pretty quick cook. So our service is getting close by. We're checking the ribs see which ones are done. Wrap them up with a little bit of sauce let them rest down. It's almost like a Carolina vinegar sauce. So it's like really sweet really tangy but then we don't put a whole lot on just on the top side so it just adds like a little extra flavor. So I'm about to check these uh turkeys out. All right yeah they look good. Yeah they're all ready to go. Just wrapping them up. On the butter. I mean everybody loves butter so uh it kind of helps to stay juicy adds a little bit more flavor to it. Uh so yeah I'm gonna let them rest these turkeys rest down a little bit maybe for like 30-45 minutes and I'm gonna throw them in the warmer after that. All right good morning everybody. We do have a giant menu board here right beside me. We've got all of the meats listed besides desserts. Thank you for your time guys. See y'all soon. I'll get y'all right over here. Okay cool. Let me grab y'all some sample bites of our brisket real fast. And then uh how much brisket were we thinking today y'all? Half pound brisket? People come so far spend so much money and spend all this time that we want to make sure they get something that's like worth their time coming here. So we'll quality control the meats the best we can just to make sure everybody gets a meal that we want to get ourselves if we spend all that money and time. Hopefully like it was worth the trip, worth their money and they like the food, they like the customer service, they like the restaurant. Yeah that's pretty much what we like to do so it's all we're good at. Best barbecue they ever had. That's what I want to hear.