The Biggest Bbq In the World (And It's Not In Texas!?)

Today we are trying the biggest and the best barbecue in the whole of Australia. Now that is what you call a tray of barbecues. We're here in Perth, this is Big Don's Barbecue and this place is an institution. This is hands down the craziest barbecue planet I have ever seen in my life. You walk into the back and each smoker is like a ******* submarine and there's 10 of them. These guys have more smokers than what I saw in Texas. It's absolutely mental. Pork pork to macaroni cheese, brisket, three different types of sausages, cornbread with hot honey, pork belly bites, lamb ribs, a little bit of salad to make my mother happy. Love you mum. And then you get to the tacos. Look at that for a taco, it's literally as big as my waistline. You're gonna say something inspiring to the camera. Where do we even start? I'll tell you where we start, with Big Don himself. What got you into barbecue in the first place? 2015 I bought a Weber and then I went to the Perth places and was like, barbecue is so good and then I went to Texas and I was like, oh wow actually no, the stuff I've been eating here and cooking myself is not good. Mostly it was just cooking brisket, I said I was never going to do sides. Sometimes we can go up to 100 briskets. Do you know how many briskets you get in a cow? Too fat. Too fat, okay well so 50 cows work. How many dishes do you now do on the menu? I reckon we have 200 to 250 dishes. We were a pop-up for five, six years. We only built our kitchen in January 2023. Probably the craziest part is if you google my name or the business, you'll find an article from 2017, 2018 about how I was fined $30,000 for running a restaurant out of my house. 30 people would come down and I would charge them 50 bucks a head. It's basically all you can eat barbecue. The council caught on to us. I was like, you're running an illegal restaurant. I was wrong, it was a bad idea. I was fined $30,000 at two days in Singapore. The next day after that news article came out was Australia Day 2018. We went to the pop-up the next day and we had a queue like two hours out. Everybody came down for the guy who had been serving food from his house. And we had to put up the sold out sign before we opened because I said I'll run out of food before I even start serving. This is enough people. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven smokers. And you only serve barbecue once a week. Yeah, it's crazy, right? It's like and we got 10 full-time staff and then on the weekend casuals were probably up to about 20, 20 people. Once we consistently were like same time, same day of the week, Saturday only, let's snows. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Saturdays only, Saturdays only. Then the routine of every week for customers became like it just shot off from there. So you have staff here 24-7 pretty much, don't you? Pretty much from Tuesday till Saturday. It's the only model that works in Australia to serve food this good. So how many do you go through on a Saturday service? So we advertise about 2,000 kilos. I think today's a little under, it's 1,800 kilos. But if we had a second service on a Friday, it could be 22 to 2,500 kilos. Which is like 6,000 pounds. So on any given Saturday, I'm confident that we are like a top three volume barbecue joint in the world. It snows and fragrance. Put that in perspective, 2,000 kilos is basically a school bus. I think those places that push the envelope like Interstellar or a lot of the good Hispanic-owned barbecue joints, adding in the like really good Tex-Mex, that was inspiring. Where you're like, okay, let's see what we can make and try and eat with that. Do you want to talk us through what's on the menu today? We tried to make extra Aussie. We do have a few staple Australian dishes. I'm Canadian, but I've been here 21 years. So I feel Australian. I ate in Perth that whole time. So we've got kangaroo sausage, which is mixed with fatty Wagyu brisket. So kangaroo on its own is too lean. How many sausages do you smoke per Saturday service? 400. 500 sausages, wow. Yeah, about that. This one is a pork verde. Tell you what, the missus would have a field day with that, wouldn't she? And I heard that we haven't done this since 2022. So this is like the version 2.0 now. Does it have cheese in it? Yes, for sure. Has cheese, has pork, all the good stuff. Whoa, just look at it. On the inside, you can just see the amount of cheese that's in it. These guys do not mess about. So we started making sausage in-house like three years ago. And this was one of our like second or third ones. And we haven't rolled it in ages. It feels like you've had a whole nacho bowl in a sausage. Yeah, that's kind of what we're going for. We came back to it and I was like, I think we can make it even better. Additionally, we just picked up from a friend out east of Pork Belly Lollipop. Yeah, I saw that online. I was like, wow, what do you glaze it with? What are all the flavours? Bourbon peach barbecue sauce. It's just like pork belly cut into strips. And then like a sweet rub, like brown sugar, paprika. And then rolled up, skewered. And then, yeah, just smoke them until they're squishy. We have quite a bit of Asian influence from some of the guys, the chefs on the team. So Pork Belly Lechon, which is a Filipino crackle. So this was cooked yesterday. Just with salt, pepper, paprika. And then what are you glazing it with? So that's a sugar syrup. So it's got like equal parts sugar and water. Yeah. And then just pour it up. Cheers to Dr. Cherry. Dr. Pepper. The secret ingredient, really. Dr. Pepper Pork Belly Bites. And then like all the barbecue staples, obviously like brisket, pork ribs, beef ribs. In this pit, we do have pork ribs. And seasoning would be normally just not straight up salt, pepper, but a little bit of paprika. Nice. That's it. How long do they smoke for? About three and a half to four, five hours max. Okay, wow. Yeah. And you finish them with what salt? This one. So, homemade miso honey glaze. So good, man. You gotta try this. We do mix up the menu a lot, but it's, I think it's because we all have ADHD. That's true. If we did the same menu every week, after a month we'd be bored, so. We've been here all morning just watching the process and just seeing these pitmasters like all come together for their love of smoked meat. The precision, like every single bit of attention to detail is crazy. And now things are starting to ramp up. The meat's all going back onto the smokers. And oh my god, that smell. Oh my god, I'm so excited. So, the time is 3.45. We're an hour and a half into service and look at the queue behind me. They're going into the first warehouse. It's staples around before they can even get their soup. It's roughly a two and a half hour wait time. That's how you know the barbecue is going to be good. And first up, we're going to be trying some of that Australian brisket. Wow. They cook this for like 24 hours. And you can see, look at that for a block test. Mmm, that is sensational. All you have to do is just put it onto your tongue and it basically dissolves. That's as good as any brisket we've had in Texas. Next up, we've got the pork ribs. It's so sweet. Then you get that umami punch of flavor from that miso. I'll tell you what, it's a good job Big Don's is a bit closer to the UK because my breast would be double as large. These are the pork belly bites and they're finished with a cherry sugar glaze. That is ridiculous. That's the best thing we've tried so far. The bar is so high already. And then take a bite of this. Let's just make it go up here. I'm not tall enough to set the bar that high. A quick salad break. Before we start on this, the pork belly lollipop. Oh my god, that seasoning. It's like crack. It's got a kick to it. My mouth is on fire. It's kind of sweet smoky, but there's definitely this big punch of chili. That's just like setting my mouth on fire. I love the crispiness of the juice scoop. The birria has so much depth of flavor. It's spicy. But then you've got like the perfect tanginess to go with it. And these cowboy beans. You can just taste the pulled pork running through them. Look at the hot honey cornbread. Oh my god. I've never had cornbread like that in my life. It's just soaked in hot honey. So in England, typically we'll make a sausage roll with fennel and pork. Here, they're using Australian Wagyu beef to bake the sausage rolls with. Oh wow. Wow. So you get that fattiness from that Australian beef brisket. But there's heat, there's spice. They mix the brisket with a Cajun spice. It's there. It's in your mouth. It's hugging all your taste buds. Giving them a cuddle, but it's not too much. Oh yeah. To summarize this experience, it's been mind-blowing. Just as I said earlier, just the attention to detail. The precision. Like listening to Don tell his story about how he has just become so fascinated with barbecue. And you can tell from all the processes. Watching the guys move all the meats around on the pits. You know, they would open those pits every half an hour. And if it's too hot in one section, they would move the ribs from the hot section on the smoker to the cold section. Then you look at all the different sauces, the marinades, the sides. You could just tell that Don's had so many sleepless nights crafting every single bit of detail on this menu. If you're going to Australia and you're taking that 24-hour flight from London or anywhere else in the world, join that queue. Spend five hours queuing for barbecue food because it is totally, totally, totally worth it. Like, subscribe and comment. Join us on our food adventures around the world. If you can't take a date to Quebec, enjoy. Do you feel a little bit defeated? Yeah, I'm starting to feel a bit defeated and we've still got enough to feed probably 10 people here.