3 Budget Friendly BBQ Recipes to Feed Your Family Under $30

Barbecue is great, but it can be expensive. So today I'm gonna show you how to make three budget friendly options for under 30 bucks each. So let's get into it. All right, the first protein under the $30 challenge is the pork loin. Growing up in my household, we had a pork loin all the time. Usually it was a crock pot type dish with some rice and gravy or something to that effect. It was pretty easy, really, really low cost, wheat night meal. This pork loin was actually 2.99 a pound at the local grocery store Kroger down the road for a grand total of $11.35, which for this challenge, I think we passed it with flying colors. We'll factor in the price of the spices. That's probably, I don't know, 50 cents maybe in spices to rub this thing down, which leaves you, I'm not good at math, but quite a bit of money to fill this out with either some rice or some veggies or something else to make a really, really great meal for a family. So let's get into it. For this, again, feeding the family here, I'm not gonna cut or trim anything off of here. I really wouldn't probably trim anything off if I was serving for the restaurant either. So not worried about it. I'm not gonna cut or trim anything off of here. I'm sorry, I couldn't do it. The little, the barbecue guy in me had to take the sharp edges out. So deduct that from our final food cost, the three ounces there in pork. Cool, now what are we gonna season it with? Guess what? Not 16 mesh and seasonal. We're actually going to go a little bit off the rails here. I've got a pretty simple basic rub that you guys can use. It's right on pork. All right, step one. This is a pretty simple recipe. We will link it down below, guys. Good kind of everyday standard backyard rub. It's a lot of brown sugar, mainly about half brown sugar. So I will have the exact measurements in the description below. Little bit of paprika, granulated garlic, granulated onion. I don't normally measure out ingredients for the family. It's a really mainly more kind of eyeballing ratios. I've made it enough times I know the kind of simple ratio. Now the cinnamon, you just need a touch. Red pepper flake, guys. You don't need a ton of it too. I'm not a big spice guy. However spicy you want it, add more red pepper flake if you want it really, really spicy. Cayenne, same principle. The more heat you want, the more you put in there, okay? I've got two small kids, so can't put a ton in there. They will not eat it. Salt, good heavy pinch. Black pepper, because it's Texas, we're gonna go three heavy pinches. I'm gonna do a little more salt because salt makes everything better. There is the basic rub. I'm gonna mix it up with our handy dandy mixer. Guys, this is a very generic rub. You can use whatever your favorite store-bought rub is. It doesn't really matter. Just go nice and liberal though with it. Don't be afraid to season it up. A lot of this sugar, there's a lot of sugar in this rub though, so be wary of getting your temps too hot. It's kind of a sweeter rub too. It's kind of not bar A-ish style, but your kids will love it. This should be a good family pleasing meal, which at the end of the day, family is what really matters. Cool, we got her seasoned up. We're gonna be smoking this for about 250 for the first hour and then about 275 for half an hour. Then we're gonna finish right at 300. We're gonna be cooking this to an internal temp of about 135. Then I'm going to wrap it with a little bit of butter and some foil. And we're gonna cook it to about 150, 155, pull it off, and it'll carry over to a food safe temp of 160. So let's get the pit fired up and ready to rock and roll for this pork one. All right, protein number two is the classic chicken drumstick. This is nostalgia in a fricking yellow carton here, man. We ate a ton of chicken drumsticks when I was a kid. It was super easy to throw on the grill. You'd have dinner in like 20, 30 minutes. You could put a million different flavor profiles on this and make it any type of cuisine in the world you can derive from chicken drumsticks. So today we're gonna keep it fairly simple though. I'm gonna go the pepper and the seasoned salt on these. I'm going to smoke them. I'm then gonna finish them with a salsa verde, a crema and a Cotija cheese crumble and kind of do a play on the Tijuana chicken, that Burnt Bean, my buddy Ernest and him do at festivals and at the restaurant and it's one of the greatest chicken dishes I've ever had. This was $5 and 17 cents for under two pounds of chicken. Easy, easy, easy for this challenge between, you can also add it and get $24 to play with essentially after you factor in the seasoning, the salsa verde, the Cotija cheese, the crema. I mean, we're probably at like 21, $22 to actually play with after all the ingredients for the chicken and the chicken prep. So you can make a very, very nutritious and filling meal with the budget left over for this. So let's get into it. I feel like chicken is such a universal dish and it takes on essentially whatever you season it with. All right, I've got these seasoned up. I'm gonna get these on the rotisserie. I'm gonna get that fired up. I'm gonna cook these at 250 for probably an hour, hour and a half, maybe two hours. This is a big rotisserie commercial use. So a lot more air to move. So it might take close to two hours on this, but on a standard backyard pit or a Weber kettle, this should take you no more than 45 minutes to an hour to get the temp. So when I am gonna temp these, I'm looking to hit the fattest part of the drumstick on the leg there with a temperature of around 160. When I pull it off, it's gonna carry over to a food safe temp of 165. So again, play the carry over. Don't ever cook your food to the exact done temperature. It's going to keep cooking after it comes off. So pull it a couple degrees shy of food safe temp and let it reach food safe temp. Don't cook it to food safe temp and let it carry over past it and kind of start drying that stuff out. So, but in saying that, always verify it. Let's hit the temperature to safely consume it before you actually eat it, okay? The final protein for this challenge and probably my favorite and the one that we're probably gonna spend the most time on in this video. These are the Denver steak. That is the cut this is. This comes off of the chuck roll, which the chuck roll is the end of the ribeye on the cow. Believe it or not, I actually got these from my local store, the entire chuck roll at $6.25 a pound. I have about three pounds of Denver steak here. So again, this was a little bit more pricey than the other two options were, but this is a ton of meat. And let's break this down a little bit further. So $6.25 a pound, under three pounds total here. It's like 2.7 pounds here, whatever that comes out to. But this was a 10 pound roll that I started with. Of that 10 pound roll, I got these steaks here, which are absolutely beautiful. Marbling is incredible on these things. I got two and a half pounds of flat iron steaks. I got a couple other of the chuck eye steaks. Those are separate from here. And then I got a ton of ground beef and chili meat. So I spent 60 something dollars and some change on this entire thing from the actual butcher. But I got, I said, 10 pounds of meat is gonna feed my family for at least a week or two. So don't be too upset with me. Now, if you go to the store and just try and buy Denver steak, man, they might charge you 25, 30 bucks a pound. Crazy expensive. Just go to the butcher, ask them for the whole chuck roll, break it down yourself. There's a ton of videos on YouTube. I looked it up and dude, there was like 100 on there on how to break it down in like under two minutes. So it's a very, very simple process. Don't be intimidated by it at all. Very easy and you get incredible steaks. Let's get into this process here. All right, I'm going to hit all of these with the same thing, a little bit of the 60 mesh black pepper and then some diamond crystal kosher salt. I've already got my grill getting ready and fired up. Why diamond crystal kosher salt? It's always kind of been available here at my local stores. All of my big distributors carry it. So it's just kind of the one that I naturally gravitated towards. I also think because I'm such a pepper heavy person and I also like to season with pepper first, the finer grains on that salt kind of help get in between the big granules of pepper, the 60 mesh size that we use. And again, guys, this is for me and my family. This is actually dinner tonight. So my wife was pretty excited about these. So that's why I'm not wearing gloves. I washed my hands thoroughly before that. I'm going to get a little bit of pepper on all the sides of all of these. I've got the pepper. I'm not going to be afraid of the salt here. Again, I love salt on proteins. I've had a pretty heavy salt palette as well. And I'm going to probably hit these a little bit of finishing salt too when we're done, a little dusting. And again, guys, I'm also going to brush these with some tallow as I grill these. So I'm not going to be afraid of kind of over salting these guys. That tallow is going to help kind of bland some of that salt out. Anything as well marbled as the Denver cut is, you definitely want a good amount of salt on there. Otherwise, all that fatty richness and turn on this from that marbling can be very, very overwhelming to the palate. But me and my family, we eat a lot of barbecue. So when you eat a lot of barbecue, you get a fairly heavy salt palette. I'm going to let this sit out for about 10 minutes while I get that grill fired up. This is our live fire table from Backline Fab out of Dripping Springs, Texas, just out of the Austin area. We use this tool every Sunday at the restaurant for our smoked ribeyes. And it's a great steak cooker. Now, this is a great tool, but any offset direct heat grilling tool you have, you can just have a stove and a pan will work fine for this as well. The key here is get it really, really hot. I'm about to brush this backside with some beef tallow. Beef tallow does a couple of things that'll really, really help with the flavor, obviously, but B, it's going to really help develop a much, much deeper, richer color for the steak too. So we're looking to pull these. I like my steak medium, medium rare, so does my family. So I'm going to pull these around 120, 122, let them carry over to the upper 120s and let them rest before you slice into these. Again, this is just melted down tallow. That's why you always keep all those beef trimmings from your briskets, render that stuff out and always keep tallow on hand. It's the best thing in the world. I am no, by no means a professional steak cooker. I just know how to semi-cook barbecue. I like to flip my steaks more than once. I like to see it cook. I like to kind of see what's going on and kind of get a feel for how it's cooking. So I know some say only flip it once, don't over-touch it. I don't think it really matters. Just make sure it's cooked to how you want it. And it's cooking how, again, how much you want it to. Sometimes you don't want it as dark as I do. I don't know. But these, to me, are looking beautiful. I'm right in the fat part of this steak. We're at 126, 125. I'm going to go ahead and pull this off now. It should carry over to about 128, 130 or so and let it start resting to get sliced into. All right, folks, these proteins are ready and I'm going to let you in on a little background YouTube secret. We had to cook this ahead because it costs money to have cameras here and people here and so forth. So I had my crew help me out today, knock out some of these dishes with all the ingredients we went over today ahead of a time to help cut back on a little bit of that shoot time. So pork loin glazed up with the beautiful, well, we seasoned it with that beautiful backyard rub we did earlier, lots of brown sugar. It's nice and sticky. It smells fantastic. I'm going to cut into it. Judge how we did. Let's go. Oh yeah. Nice and juicy. Looks great. Let's cut some nice slices. Now, this is how me and my family eat this dish. We cut these about quarter inch slices all the way throughout. These look absolutely beautiful though. I'm going to get all of this. I'm going to get this plated up for Shane. I want to get all three of the items cut up and presented to him because Shane only deserves the best. All right. Protein number dose. The chicken drumstick, chicken legs, chicken fantastic. These again, smell great. I'm going to pay a little homage to my boy, Ernest at Burnt Bean with the Tijuana chicken. Very excited to see what Shane thinks of it because they don't do a lot of Tijuana chicken in Boston. Let's get it on the tray. I'm going to plate it up with the salsa verde that we made, the crema and the tortilla cheese. Now we made our salsa verde because we actually make it every weekend for barbacoa Saturday here at the restaurant. So I went ahead and just used that. But if you don't have one or don't make one all the time, any store-bought verde for this dish will work. All right, I've got the crema and the tortilla. Ernest, I suck at this, but you gave me inspiration. So appreciate you, brother. All right, for the final protein, the Denver steak from the Chuck Roll. Guys, this steak came out fantastic. Perfect medium rare. Turns out a blind squirrel can find an acorn every now and then. I think Shane's going to like this. I'm excited to give him something this spectacular. Hopefully he enjoys it and doesn't make fun of me. Guys, this chimmy, been making it for a while now. It took me a lot of years to perfect it, to get to where it's at. I don't want to say perfect it. Nothing's ever perfected. I'm always tweaking stuff, but I'm very, very happy with this chimmy. We serve this every Sunday with the smoked ribeyes we do. It's a fantastic, nice acidic sauce. A little bit of heat, sweetness from the sugar and stuff in there. If you want the recipe, guys, I will have it linked down below. It does cost a couple dollars. It does support the channel and we greatly appreciate your support. So no good steak is complete without a good helping of... All right, this tray looks freaking awesome. I'm pretty happy with this, but Shane makes all the calls around here. Let's see if we impress the boss man. Shane. What's up, man? What's up, my boy? How are you? How are you, dude? Good, I won in fantasy football today, so I'm feeling good. I'm doing well this year as well. So I'm on six in a row. Let's go. About to run into our number one player though, so I'm a little nervous this week. So we'll see how it goes. It's a lot of pressure, pal. What do you think, dude? I think that these look awesome. Price points are insane too. What was this like? We were under $12 for the pork. We were, again, however you want to view the steak, but $6.25 a pound. That's a great deal. Pretty awesome, especially in this climate right now. And then obviously the chicken, I think we were $5 for a 1.8 pounds of chicken. Oh, dang, that's not bad. Yeah, all the ingredients on there, I think cost us around eight all in, so that's a pretty cool dish. Sick, well, let's get into it. So pork first. Let's go pork one first. This is beautiful. Nice and moist. Yeah. The trick is to undercook it, we're still raw. Yeah, yeah. Give everybody trichinosis. That's a joke, don't do that. Oh, this is good. Very good. I was eyeing that one too, I wanted to try that. Super, super moist. The rub on there is nice. I like that little bit of sweetness. Very impressed so far. All right, so next one, this is- That is what Ernest at Brunk Bean, you know Brunk Bean, number one spot in the state. It's a dish he's done at several festivals. It looks incredible. I've had it before. It's one of my favorite places of eating chicken ever. And then we've done it at our house now since seeing him do it. It's been a family favorite of ours now. Awesome. Cool, dig into it, dude. All right, I'm gonna get into it. Oh yeah, that's good. That has to be good. There's no way to eat it not messy, but it's so good. All right, I think the one I'm most excited about, the Denver Steak from the Chuck Roll. So I want you to get in first. I did it with our chimichurri, which I think is fantastic. I'm stoked about it. I've never had this cut before. Perfect medium rare, and I'm a big chimichurri fan, so. Oh yeah, that is like a nice, rich, marbly cut of meat. And that chimichurri perfectly cuts through that richness in a good way and balances the dish. That sweetness, acidity. And for $6 a pound, there's no steak you're gonna get that's gonna taste like this for six bucks. All right, guys, appreciate y'all watching the video today. Shane, as always, you were an absolute pleasure. Thanks, man, I try. You're the best, man. Make sure you subscribe to the channel, share with your friends. I'll see you next time.