The American Bringing Texas BBQ to Asia - Day in the Life of a Pitmaster

Really easy cook. We flip them to get color on both sides. Fail a few times and you get a little bit better, you know. They get this dark red over here. It's better than donkey heads barbecue, I think. So it's called an offset smoker. So the fire is never touching the meat. It's all indirect heat. So yeah, you put a fire in here and only the smoke is going to carry through here. And so it's going to be a really low heat around 250 degrees Fahrenheit. We call it low and slow. So really low temperatures for a long amount of time. And yeah, that's how we get going. So there's no gas, no electric, no fancy equipment. Just fat, salt. That's it. The fire is starting to get going a little bit. And we never want it to be like super, super strong fires. So yeah, we'll just kind of keep a nice even flame like this all day. But yeah, we get our wood. It's called Lam Yai or longan wood. It grows naturally in Chiang Mai. Where I'm from in Texas, we'd be using oak. And yeah, it's a very similar kind of fire. Similar kind of scent. And yeah, just a nice clean fire. Burns really hot. Well, we designed them custom. Yeah. So a buddy of mine who's a master welder, we kind of designed this one together. This one we built and it's a total piece of junk. So it's like I kind of need to get a professional involved now. And yeah, so this thing, it can just sip on wood all day. Really even heat. And it's really, really strong while also being really light. The last door we had on this one, it didn't have these little weights. So it would fall and it fell on my head one time and gave me a concussion. So it's very nice to have these nice even doors like this. So the first thing we put on every morning are the briskets and the pulled pork. The brisket usually takes about 12 hours to cook. So generally we're cooking tomorrow's brisket. We're going to cook it for 12 hours, then we'll rest it overnight. And so it's ready to eat for lunch tomorrow. So we always want to make everything fresh. And then our pulled pork, which is another about eight hours. Both of these, we try to trim and season overnight so the salt can really penetrate the meat. And yeah, it'll create a nice bark, we call it. And it's just this peppery kind of crispy edges that will really pack in a lot of smoky flavor. So these are the first thing to go on the fire. These are our briskets. They're Australian Wagyu. Really tasty pieces of meat. So they're super big. These are pulled porks. And yeah, these bigger pieces of meat can get a little bit closer to the fire and they won't burn up. This is a different kind of cooker. It's called a direct heat cooker. But it's pretty much just like a normal grill. But this one will use charcoal. It has about two feet of space between the meat and the charcoal. So it's a little bit less hot than a grill, but a little bit hotter than the offset smoker. So this, we do chicken on it. It's really good. And we like to do crispy skin, pork belly, anything that you can really crank up the heat on. It'll be faster cooked. And it's something we can't do on the offset, just because the temperature doesn't get hot enough. But yeah, it's fun to play around with. We had some famous Thai YouTuber come here a while ago and really turned us on with the Thai crowd. But yeah, he kind of changed our lives because it opened us up to a different group of people. These are our ribs. So we use just Chiang Mai, everything sourced locally. But these pigs are kind of raised just for us because it's really hard to get thick cut ribs here. So yeah, we kind of work with our butchers to get these things. We're probably the only place in Chiang Mai that gets ribs cut like this. Just want to check, make sure everyone looks okay before we throw them on the smoker. This is what we sold the most of. Just keep it old school Texas. Everything is just like we do it at home. Didn't change anything. Okay, so now we're just going to make sure if there's little bits of fat right here, we're going to cut off, trim them just so they get a little bit more purdy. And then everything that we cut off, we'll grind and make sausage with. So nothing's ever going to waste. And we sell about a half rack. So we'll just cut them in half like that. They're ready to go. This will just be for lunch. So we generally do about 50 racks a week or 50 racks a day. So yeah, we'll do a morning cook. These take about four to five hours. So we'll put these on in the morning. They'll be ready for lunch. Then we'll throw another batch on that will be ready for dinner. It's nice having done this a long time. I forget how nice it is here in the mornings. It's kind of therapeutic. Okay, so now that we're trimmed up, it's time to season them. We do a really simple Texas called a dry rub. It's just two parts pepper, one part salt, and a little bit of garlic powder. That's pretty much what we put on everything here. Just give it a nice little dusting out like that. And that's it. Okay, these go back onto the smoker. So we see we're right up against 250 right now. And that's the temperature that we want to be cooking at for the whole day. Usually takes like 30 minutes to an hour for this thing to start getting up to temperature. But after that, it'll just kind of stay right there all day. So that's generally like our lunch cook. And these will kind of just keep going for a few hours. In about three hours, we'll wrap the ribs in some some foil with a little bit of extra sauce. But other than that, these things just kind of rock here all day. We might move them around a little bit just to see where the hot spots are. Make sure everything's cooking evenly. But now we're kind of just tending a fire. So every 30 or 40 minutes, we might play with it a little bit. Put another log on. Just make sure we're burning a nice consistent clean fire. We don't want too much smoke. A lot of the times you'll see, you'd think that the more smoke, the better. But really, you can get some really acrid flavors. So I've lived here over 10 years. When I was in college, I had an opportunity to come here for an internship. And I just ended up really liking Chiang Mai and liking that work that I was doing. I worked as a teacher. Did some freelance writing. All that kind of stuff. And then during COVID, kind of like everyone, I was just so bored. And I kind of started playing around with a kind of homemade smoker in my backyard. And started making food for my friends. We'd do little pop-ups. That kind of thing. And ended up just really liking, kind of falling in love with the process of barbecue. And my girlfriend, she's worked every job in a restaurant. From washing dishes, to accounting, to everything. So we kind of felt like with her knowledge of restaurants, and my love of barbecue, maybe it would work. And yeah, it's kind of working. A lot of trial and error. A lot of really bad barbecue. And you fail a few times, and you get a little bit better, you know. That's just kind of how we got into it. See it? I'm gonna smoke you guys out. Yeah, so this is our pork belly as well. And yeah, I'm kind of just out of space on the smoker right now. So I'm gonna use this one to cook these guys a little bit faster as well. And then, so we're about three hours into our cook. And you can really see the difference of the colors of the meats. So we're starting to get this nice dark bark color. And yeah, so in a little bit we'll be able to wrap these. And then all those ribs that we just threw on, are just about to be wrapped. So you see the juice is starting to come out. We flip them to get color on both sides. Yes, get nice, nice color on these. We're just about to wrap them with some barbecue sauce and let them finish off that way. Tortillas, we use beef tallow that we render from the briskets. And then with the extra meat that we cut off, we grind and we make burgers, we make sausage, we make different kinds of tacos, birria tacos and stuff. So we make sure to always use every part of the animal. And yeah, don't waste anything. Yeah, yeah. I mean, everything we do, we make in-house. So all of our sauces are made. We make a Texas barbecue sauce, we have a Carolina mustard sauce, a jalapeno sauce, another vinegar sauce. Everything is made in-house. We don't outsource anything. These smokers are running all day, every day, every day of the week. And then, yes, this is our barbecue sauce with a little bit of beef tallow in it that we melt down in here and a little bit of maple syrup. And so these ribs, once they get the color we like, we'll dip them in here, we'll wrap them in foil, and then they'll go on a little bit longer until they're nice and tender. Just about ready. Just grab a rib, dip it in the sauce, and grab it. One of my best friends, we would go rock climbing and crabby during smoky season, and he started calling me donkey head because I could be clumsy sometimes. And, you know, it's just like, hey donkey head! And then other people I didn't know started calling me donkey head. Dude, I hate this nickname. This sucks. And the next day he called me dinky, and it just kind of stuck. The timing of it kind of worked for some people. But here we are. It's better than donkey heads barbecue, I think. Yeah, around 200 degrees means the meat's nice and tender, and we can pull it off and let it rest. So once the ribs are ready, we'll let them cool down in this cooler, and let them rest for about an hour. And they'll stay nice and hot in there for really until like five or six o'clock. It's really central Texas barbecue. There's a little difference between all the different areas of Texas. Really, it's like a bunch of Germans, and Polish, and Eastern Europeans moved to Texas, and they brought their food with them. So like sausage making, that kind of stuff. And then in Texas, you also have great beef and cattle ranching. So it kind of brought those two techniques and types of food together. And yeah, so that's kind of where it all started. This is pork belly. And yeah, this is done. Really easy cook. Just salt, pepper, garlic, like we did before. And about three hours. It's almost like brisket. We call it a bacon brisket. And this is beef tallow that we are going to wrap our briskets and our pulled pork in. So we've been open about four years. That little shop across the courtyard is where we started. It was just two tables and a little tiny smoker. So we've been in this brick and mortar shop for a little over a year now. And it's nice. We have air con inside and all that stuff because we were just all outdoor. And it was pretty brutal for our customers and for our staff. So nice to have the wrist bites. And let's see here. This is the pulled pork. It's a pork shoulder. And this dark blackness. A lot of people think it's burnt, but really what we're trying to do in barbecue is create, we call it a bark. And just that black pepper is going to catch the smoke really well. Develop this nice crust and it picks up the flavor of the smoke a lot better than if we didn't have all that pepper. All of our sausage is made in-house. We grind it in-house. It's from our Wagyu brisket trim, our pork belly. Just to make sure we're not wasting anything. But this style of sausage is kind of like a kielbasa maybe. But pretty common to see in Central Texas. So here, these are our hog casings. Maybe not the most beautiful thing in the world, but just all natural pig intestine. So this is the most difficult process. Getting it on. Make sure you're not bursting anything. Now we need to poke a little hole just in case there's some air to get through. And just try to make about six inch lengths. We'll let these dry out overnight in the refrigerator. And yeah, so these are from yesterday. They cured overnight and now they're ready to go on the smoker. We want to make sure, yeah, the casings are nice and dry. A lot stiffer, which is going to make sure we have a really snappy sausage. And that's what we want. We want it to break in half like that. We just need to cut them up before we throw them on the smoker. So yeah, this is kind of what they look like after a day. Okay. And yeah, so we already have some on the smoker here. These have been going for about one hour or so, so far. You can see they're getting this really pretty red color. And that's letting us know they're almost there. So usually about three or four hours. But they're, yeah, starting to look really good. And we'll just place some more on. About four hours, we're cold smoking them. So they're going to cook at about 150 degrees Fahrenheit. So it's not a very hot fire. Just to make sure the meat cooks. We get some really nice color on it. The first two years, it was just me and my girlfriend every day. And that's kind of how I learned to do everything. But I'm very glad that I don't have to do everything all day, every day. Except for today. A lot firmer. They're just about ready. So once they're ready, they're cooked, we put them in here. And this ice water, and that will stop the cooking. Just to make sure they don't start to render out too much fat. So we can see these ones are still kind of that brown color. Once they get this dark red over here, that's when we know they're done. They feel really firm to the touch.