Day In The Life of a BBQ Pitmaster at The Busiest Pit Room In Texas!

These guys have been marinating over 12 hours. We've got salt, pepper, and a little bit of love on there. We'll be arranging them from largest to smallest to start off. It'll have to cook evenly, and we'll do a shuffle halfway through, and it keeps everything cooking nice and even. But once you get used to it, you don't really realize that you're cooking 300 briskets every day. It just feels like a Monday, you know? But then you look at other places, oh, yeah, we cooked all 14 briskets today. Like, oh, I did that before I woke up. But when you're talking to, like, a stranger or something, and they ask you what you do, and you say you're a pit master at Perry Black's, it's got to steal the conversation a little bit, right? Yeah, definitely. Definitely. Yeah, immediately, oh, what kind of wood do you use? You know, how many are you doing a day? You know, what's your method? You know, it's like immediately. Everybody loves barbecue. There's just no doubt about it. It's a universal love, you know? They come from Japan. They come from all over the world. Ireland, New Zealand. Yeah, there's no corner of the world I think I haven't met somebody from. The blacks have kind of, they're kind of the staple of barbecue. So using that post oak, that's, like, the most Central Texas thing you can do. But it has a very light flavor to it. It's a one-time bite because North Texas uses that hickory. South Texas uses the mesquite. They stay on your tongue all day. They're gonna be burping it up and stuff. But that post oak, it's smooth, one-time bite, and it's got that vanilla caramel flavor to it. And yeah, you're not gonna be getting too heavy of a smoke. You're gonna be able to get the flavors that we're putting on top of it as well, which is something that's kind of hard to do with barbecue. Yeah, when we first got here, we were cooking maybe 10 briskets a day sometimes. And now we're, you know, steady doing that 300. It's awesome to have those numbers under your belt, get those reps in, you know. These guys have been on since 2.30 a.m. We got just Salt & Pepper Smoke & Love on here. Now, these guys go on for nine hours unwrapped. They get beef tallow and apple cider vinegar poured over the top when we wrap it up in butcher paper. We'll cook it in that paper for three more hours, and then we'll pull it off and rest it for 12 hours. We're also doing a six-hour beef rib, six-hour pork rib, three-hour turkey, and three-hour sauces, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Today we're loading up over 300 briskets across eight pits. By the end of the day, we'll load up 60 racks of beef ribs on our hoiler, which is a 1,500-gallon rotisserie. So we'll have 300 briskets and 60 racks of beef ribs cooking all at the same time. These guys have already been cooked for three hours. What we're doing now is we're cooking these guys hot and fast so they got that nice snap to it. Yeah, we're gonna get these guys right up to that 165, 170 range, and they'll be ready to go. So up here we got our OG, the bat. We have JC. It's our jalapeno cheese, original sausage. And yeah, that sausage is 80% brisket, 20% pork rib. We're making sure that we don't let anything go to waste. So as we get in, we're, for one, looking at what's already put on the board. As you see, we got all these briskets loaded already. Five's open, seven and eight are obviously getting loaded. See, we got two Lockhart Fins, Lockhart are yellow. Auxton is in blue. Within the next couple hours, we'll get the next schedule to see what we need to do for the afternoon crew. Just trying to make sure that we set up the next crew as much as possible before we get out of here. If you wanna be set up, you gotta set up someone else. Auxton ribs just go on the right. They're gonna get transported around three o'clock. We transport every day because we're supplying them with about 40% of their total product for the day. We also have pork ribs in here, turkeys. Yeah, we got the worst going on. 72 racks of cutting up today. So this is a cut list. They gotta do 35 briskets, 72 beef ribs, and 176 pork ribs. Oh yeah. Average day at Terry Black's, huh? All right, so what we're doing, we're gonna be rotating these briskets. So as you see here, we got the smallest ones up front. We're gonna be shifting these guys to the back to keep everything cooking nice and even. So what I'm gonna do here, I'm gonna take all of these guys out on our nicely placed foil. We try to rotate at four hours. If need be, we'll do a second rotation, but these pits are so efficient, we really don't have to do more than one. I mean, the times change often, like load times, but we always try to stick within the 12-hour window. If you're going too fast, you're gonna most likely have an undercooked brisket too slow, you're gonna probably have an overcooked point, and then your flack can still be underdone. Everybody knows barbecue is a slow process, but once the motions are in action, you gotta be real quick at it. Oh man, these pits go cold within about five minutes. So I mean, you'll see that guy's already done all the way pretty much. The main thing is we have efficient fires. So if you do your fires right, it should shoot right back up, and again, like another five minutes. Yeah, that's why you always gotta be attentive as to like how your fire's looking, and if you need to add another log. A lot of the times, we'll actually get the pit a little hotter than it needs to be right before we rotate so that it can equal out, you know, keep that consistent heat going. Just based off of what you can see here, this side has gotten a little more color on it than over here, so that's why you see me just kind of moving everything the opposite of where it was. These middle briskets, the reason why they're staying there is because this middle path is pretty efficient. You're not gonna have too much difference if you shuffle them around, but these walls, that is what mainly has to be switched around. So as you can see right here, this definitely has a little less color to it versus over here, so it's gonna help everything even out color-wise, and it's gonna help keep that thinnest part of the flat cooking even. The flat here, as you see, has got that skate ramp shape to it. We wanna make sure that that doesn't keep getting color. That'll get charred and gross before the rest of the brisket is ready. So we're gonna add foil there to help it cook efficiently with the rest of the brisket. Now you see that guy is way thinner than the rest of the flat on the other side here. Yeah, you got a good half-inch difference on the size of that flat there. So yeah, you wanna make sure to put that foil on there. The main goal is to use as much of the brisket as possible. I mean, whatever we don't cut on the block, we'll end up putting into our chopped beef. Still, we wanna get the most usable slices as possible. Being outside, I've worked in kitchens where you're stuck in a white box for eight hours, eight to 12 hours, and just feel so disconnected from reality. You're kind of trapped in a prison, and being out here in the world, seeing the trees, seeing the seasons change, and feeling natural wood smoke on your face, it's just, it's addicting, honestly. It's absolutely an obsession to start those fires and just get my hands dirty. There's really nothing that satisfies that itch like barbecue does. Yeah, there's a reason why barbecue's been around for as long as it has. There's a reason why it's lasted as long as it has, and that's because everybody's barbecue's a little bit different, and it becomes almost like a family crest of sorts. You develop your own style, develop your own flavor, and that becomes the standard amongst your family. That's what people become familiarized with, and then it's like, man, I've left my mark. No matter if I'm gone 30, 40 years from now, they'll still know my food. They'll still know exactly, that's my barbecue. The majority of what we're cooking in here with is all Moberg. He's out of Dripping Springs. He really makes a good quality pit. These guys are actually pretty unique in the sense that this bowl here cooks just as hot as the front of the pit. So this one inch gap right here is about a 30 to 40 degree difference. So these ones in the bowl here will come off at the same time as the ones in the front of the pit, if not sooner. When we wrap up, like I said before, that we have beef tallow and apple cider vinegar on there, that apple cider vinegar is gonna keep the bark from sticking to the paper, and the beef tallow is actually gonna tenderize that brisket a lot. It's gonna do what we call a confit. So it's basting that brisket constantly in that fat. And yeah, that makes it really, really tender flat, I'll tell you that. We really feel like the process that we have now is pretty bulletproof. Any brisket, any quality is gonna come out pretty good on these pits. All right, so we have our samples in front of us now. We have our lean, moist, and our pork rib. That lean is looking really good. We got some good rendered fat on there. Now this is the test, the tug test. No resistance really at all. It just fell right apart. Flavor's really good. The fat is perfect. The smoke is there. The salt is just on the money. So I'm satisfied with that. In the moist here, you see we got that nice fish scale look to it. That fat is just right into every little pocket of that brisket. And the bottom of this moist is how I usually determine the texture. Man, right there, the money. Perfect tenderness. Fat's right where it should be. Salt is not too heavy. Primo. Yeah, no complaints about any of this today. Yeah, breaking down the outside of this wood as I'm doing here, that's gonna help build that coal bed a lot faster. Keeping up on it, making sure that you're breaking down your wood as you go definitely helps keep a strong coal bed. And later on in the cook, the coal bed's more important than the actual wood. The beginning process is where that wood is mostly giving off its flavor. But yeah, after a while, it's just about the heat. Just keeping that consistency. So early on in the cook, we're looking for smaller pieces like this that are gonna be a little on the barkier side. It's gonna get you a lot of that flavor. Now, later on in the cook, I'm looking more so for heat. So I'm grabbing larger logs that are gonna burn a little hotter, but they're gonna burn for a little longer as well. The bigger logs do tend to have a good balance between smoke and heat once they catch. Now, what you're seeing right here is a little bit of backfeeding. It's okay because these logs are freshly tossed on, but we don't want that to go on for too long. Too much of that backfeeding smoke can actually cause a little bit of acridity and give it a little bit of bitterness that we don't want. The one thing I haven't touched on yet is the dampers. So the dampers do control that airflow a lot. It's like putting your thumb on a hose pretty much. We're gonna open it up a little bit more. The way you can kind of put it in layman's terms is close is like an oven, open is like an air fryer. As you see, it's nice and wet over the top right here. That's good. That means that the water is starting to render out of that brisket, which is what we want. We wanna render all that water out and get the fat to start rendering. Soon as I open that damper up, that fire is going right out the gate. Now I may have to adjust here and put a third channel log there and do one across the top, but all that just comes with playing with it and learning your pit. So at this point, these briskets are ready to wrap. We have this fat cap right here. If you get a closeup on that, you can see how soft it is. It's like a burnt marshmallow. That means it's full on ready to go. You see how much juice is pouring out of there. We wanna make sure we keep that fat in there because that's gonna help it settle in those intermuscular fibers, like you saw on that piece of moist cut that we had earlier. So I'm gonna take these foils off and then we're gonna get right to wrapping here. If you don't leave with some tears, then you probably weren't even here. Yeah, the name of the game with barbecue is being five steps ahead of everything. Always gotta make sure that your papers are cut, your foils are cut, your bottles are filled. If you're not preparing yourself, you're gonna have a really hard time. The motions have to be done really fast and they have to be done efficiently. So if you're not setting yourself up for success, well, you're gonna have a hard time finding it. You can see right here that deco fat is nice and rendered up close to that brisket, even with the point here. So we've reached the point where we're gonna pull one of these briskets off here. We're getting a nice squeeze on it. You can see right there, it's kinda just doing what I want. It's really pliable right now. But the way I'm gonna check it here, so I'm gonna flip it upside down, I'm gonna open this flap and I'm gonna check the center part of the flat here. That's the thickest part of the flat. And as you see, we're getting that 199. That's like right on the money of where we're pulling. We're pulling around 197 to 200. So I'm gonna pull this guy off right here and we're gonna let it rest on this rack. We're gonna let it rest until it's about 150 degrees. So I just gave Shane some information about where we're standing on the pits. What I'm gonna do now is I'm gonna finish up cleaning. I'm gonna get my grease taken care of, refill the water for them, make sure my floor is swept and all my papers are cut. And now it's just chill out for the rest of the day. All right, man. Well, thank you so much for the day, man. Absolutely. It was good spending time with you, man. All right, dude. Thank you.