Shownotes
I state that the central point of our conversation is that authentic Texas barbecue is defined by cooking with wood and by regional adaptation of techniques and equipment. I explain how different Texas regions favor distinct approaches, from Hill Country fire discs to large offset smokers made from oil tanks. We discuss the rise of backyard smokers and regulated oiler smokers and how those designs have spread beyond Texas. I note that barbecue television shows spur interest but do not teach traditional technique, and that competition methods can differ from restaurant practice. I emphasize that proper barbecue requires respect for the animal and careful cooking and service. We thank Daniel Vaughn of Texas Monthly for joining us and encourage listeners to seek his writing.
Companies mentioned in this episode:
- Painted Hills Natural Beef
- Barbecue Nation
- Texas Monthly
- J and R Manufacturing
- The Beast
- Marriott Hotel
- Moberg Smokers
- KBQ
- Liquid Smoke
This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis:
OP3 - https://op3.dev/privacy
Transcripts
This is Barbecue Nation after hours with J.T.
Speaker A:You know, the conversation that took place after the broadcast ended.
Speaker A:Hey, everybody, it's JT and this is a special version of Barbecue Nation.
Speaker A:It is brought to you in part by Painted Hills Natural Beef.
Speaker A:Beef you can be proud to serve your family and friends.
Speaker A:That's Painted Hills Natural Beef, everybody.
Speaker A:Welcome to After Hours here on Barbecue Nation.
Speaker A:I'm JT along with all the guys in the studio.
Speaker A:And today, we're very fortunate to have Daniel Vaughn from Texas Monthly magazine with us.
Speaker A:Daniel is their barbecue editor.
Speaker A:And like I said in the previous show, I think he's the only one in the country that, for a national magazine that's got that title, which is pretty cool.
Speaker A:We were talking about the different regions just as we wrapped up the regular show.
Speaker A:Daniel, you know, if you go to North Carolina, they're talking about, you know, vinegar based, you know, South Carolina's this and Georgia's this, and.
Speaker A:And, you know, it just kind of goes all over the place.
Speaker A:But when you.
Speaker A:To Texas and we.
Speaker A:And you just kind of highlighted some of the various regions, and we talked about the influences there, but those regions tend to influence other parts of the country, and I've always found that kind of fascinating, because if you come up here to the Northwest, they'll say, real Texas barbecue.
Speaker A:Well, what the hell does that mean, you know?
Speaker B:Well, to me, I mean, if they're saying it's real Texas barbecue, then it better be cooked with wood.
Speaker B:Yeah, you know, that's.
Speaker B:To me, that's the number one stipulation.
Speaker B:But, you know, you go out to the Hill country here in Texas, and they're cooking over wood coals, which I guess if you look back at the.
Speaker B:The old ways of cooking barbecue, that's one of the oldest ways of doing it, cooking directly over wood coals.
Speaker B:But that is like the least popular way to cook these days in Texas.
Speaker B:The offset smokers have sort of taken over completely.
Speaker A:Right, right.
Speaker A:Well, and then you've got the ones out in West.
Speaker A:The west side or the Hill country over there that.
Speaker A:The boys down there sent me one of these.
Speaker A:It's what they call it, a fire disc.
Speaker A:And where the guys working out in the fields or working with the cattle or whatever part of the agricultural economy they were working with, they took an old disc wheel and turned it into something they could cook on in the field, you know.
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker A:And of course, they didn't particularly have propane and stuff.
Speaker A:They used.
Speaker A:They used wood to heat it up and that.
Speaker A:But I mean, even that is Something a little different.
Speaker A:And I always find this fascinating in Texas because they're, some of those guys are quite creative in what they're making as far as cookers and smokers and this and that.
Speaker A:I'm really a rudimentary guy.
Speaker A:I'm kind of basic.
Speaker A:I mean, I've got a lot of, a lot of machines, a lot of cookers to choose from.
Speaker A:But I, you know, I am still pretty basic and I just find it interesting that they adapt to their surroundings to use what is there to create something.
Speaker A:And I find, Yeah, I find that really fascinating.
Speaker B:Thousand gallon smokers.
Speaker B:Yeah, that we, that I was talking about, these big offset smokers, I mean they're, they're really just using old propane tanks.
Speaker B:And that's where, that's where it started.
Speaker B:Was.
Speaker B:All right, this old propane tank here, this thousand gallon tank has no other use really, but it is like the perfect shape for a smoker.
Speaker B:So as, as long as you make sure there's no propane left in it, make sure it's fully empty, you hit it with a cutting torch and you can build yourself a smoker.
Speaker B:And it's really interesting to see how quickly those caught on in Texas and then almost as quickly caught on across the rest of the country.
Speaker B:At least the places, you know, the locations that will allow cooking in that sort of smoker.
Speaker A:Well, Dan.
Speaker B:But then go ahead.
Speaker A:No, go ahead, finish what you were going to say.
Speaker A:I'm sorry.
Speaker B:Well, I was just going to say then the places that don't allow that sort of cooking, the oiler smoker, specifically from J and R Manufacturing, Mesquite, Texas, you know, they meet a lot of like UL regulations and are, I guess, a lot more looked on a lot more favorably by different health departments that wouldn't even consider allowing a restaurant to be cooking on a thousand gallon offset smoker.
Speaker A:Sure.
Speaker B:So the oiler smoker is one of those that has been found.
Speaker B:You know, I went to Paris, France and ate barbecue and they were cooking it at the Beast with an oiler smoker simply because that is one that the, you know, the locals, the local health department would allow.
Speaker A:Right, right.
Speaker A:Yeah, I had one time I bought a.
Speaker A:Well, we're big up here on used to be in ground heating oil tanks and you could get 250, 500,000 gallon tanks put in for your house.
Speaker A:Okay.
Speaker A:Well, I bought a thousand gallon tank one time that had never been used, never had a drop of oil in it, but somebody had converted it to a offset smoker and I guess they weren't successful.
Speaker A:I'm not even sure how they were using it.
Speaker A:Okay.
Speaker A:I don't know if it was in a restaurant setting or just they did catering, whatever.
Speaker A:Anyway, I bought this thing, didn't cost much money, and we started a little catering business and stuff.
Speaker A:But the one thing that I learned with those great big smokers, when you had those great big smokers, you tended to cook more product, whatever it was briskets, turkeys, didn't matter than you probably needed.
Speaker A:And also you had to stay up all night and tend the fires.
Speaker A:Was a good excuse to drink beer all night long.
Speaker A:But sometimes your calculations got off a little bit.
Speaker A:That was directly proportional to how many cases of beer were sitting around.
Speaker B:But it takes a lot of fuel to get those things heated up.
Speaker A:It does, it really does.
Speaker A:It really does.
Speaker A:And at 5:30 in the morning when the sun's coming up and you're sitting out there, when your eyes are blinking like a frog on the pavement and you look by and there's a pile of empties off to your left hand side and there's still wood over here on the right hand side, you probably didn't do it right.
Speaker A:Anyway, I sold that eventually.
Speaker A:Got the, you know, common sense got the better of me and so did my wife.
Speaker A:And so I sold that, but got a more reasonable.
Speaker A:Got it.
Speaker A:More reasonable.
Speaker A:What do you use at home to cook on?
Speaker B:Well, I've got several different smokers in the backyard, but the one I used this weekend, so Aaron Franklin has an offset smoker that's like more of a, I don't know, 125 gallon size.
Speaker B:It's a backyard version.
Speaker A:Sure.
Speaker B:There's a number of different places around Texas that have started to make these smaller models for backyards, like mill scale.
Speaker B:Some Moberg smokers does one as well.
Speaker B:So it's, you know, it holds maybe three briskets, holds six, eight racks of ribs, depending on the size.
Speaker B:Sure, yeah, that's what I use if I'm gonna be cooking something like that.
Speaker B:And then I also have.
Speaker B:It's a KBQ smoker.
Speaker B:And that's what I use a lot, especially if I don't want to do so much to tend to it.
Speaker B:Because the kbq, it's a strange smoker actually.
Speaker B:It's all wood fired, but it's an inverted firebox.
Speaker B:And so it uses a fan to actually suck the heat down from the fire.
Speaker B:That's the firebox which is sitting above the cook chamber.
Speaker B:So you do have to plug it in.
Speaker B:But the only thing electrical about it is the fan bringing the heat down into the smoke chamber.
Speaker B:But if I want to.
Speaker B:If I want a light smoke on anything, that one's great.
Speaker B:And if I also just don't want to pay much attention to something or if I want to cook it a little bit higher heat, that Franklin smoker is great for, you know, 250 to 300 degree cooking.
Speaker B:It's tough to get it to cook much hotter than that.
Speaker B:So if I want to cook something a little hotter and faster, that the KBQ works out real well.
Speaker A:Sure.
Speaker A:What do you think of barbecue competitions?
Speaker B:I mean, I love the camaraderie of a barbecue competition as far as judging it.
Speaker B:Like, there's.
Speaker B:I don't know if I'll ever judge a barbecue competition again unless it's charity or something.
Speaker B:It's just the judging part is no fun to me at all.
Speaker B:I like to connect food to a story, to a person, to technique, to whatever.
Speaker B:And, like, the whole point of judging is that you're never able to.
Speaker B:To make that connection, to connect what you just ate back to someone or some technique or some piece of equipment.
Speaker A:Sure.
Speaker B:At the end, you get up from a table and you're just like, well, all right, I guess I ate some tender, sweet ribs today.
Speaker A:And you can't walk and your hands are all swollen up.
Speaker A:So anyway.
Speaker B:Yeah, exactly.
Speaker B:So I judged the jack one year, and I got reprimanded because afterwards I was hanging around some of the cooks and talking to them about how they cooked and eating their food and was like, oh, the judges aren't supposed to talk to the cooks.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker B:What are we doing here?
Speaker B:Like, the judging's over.
Speaker B:Like, I want to learn about what these people were doing back here.
Speaker A:Yeah, yeah, I get it.
Speaker A:Which kind of leads me to my next question.
Speaker A:Do you think TV shows out there, like, you know, the challenge, the barbecue challenge, shows Pitmasters?
Speaker A:I mean, they're fun to watch if you, like, kind of like reality tv.
Speaker A:But, you know, Myron would be the first one to tell you there's nothing real about reality tv.
Speaker A:I've been in a couple of reality TV shows.
Speaker A:They sucked as far as I was concerned.
Speaker A:But do you think those shows have helped or hindered barbecue?
Speaker B:I think they've helped.
Speaker B:Just because you got people who might not be interested in cooking barbecue at all, all of a sudden, are they see other people doing it, they see how to do it, and they get an interest.
Speaker B:As far as the techniques and stuff go, I don't think you learn much about it.
Speaker B:Like you said, they're reality TV shows.
Speaker B:They're not cooking shows.
Speaker B:They're not trying to teach you how to actually cook barbecue.
Speaker B:They're trying to set up stumbling blocks to create drama, right?
Speaker B:And, you know, that's the part that I hate.
Speaker B:So my brother back in Ohio, he cooks a bunch of barbecue now.
Speaker B:Like, he's, he's got a couple of smokers and I mean, he's, he's big into cooking barbecue now, but never was until I had the job that I have now.
Speaker B:But when he started out, he would ask me, like, what are these guys like, the briskets that you like, the places that you like to go, what are they injecting with?
Speaker B:It's like they don't.
Speaker B:Yeah, none of these people are injecting anything.
Speaker B:Well, you know, it's like, you know, well, what's in their rubs?
Speaker B:Like, what are the secret ingredients?
Speaker A:Salt and pepper.
Speaker A:Salt and pepper, yeah.
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker B:So, you know, I think just from the techniques, a lot of the techniques that they like to highlight in these shows are techniques used to speed up the cooking and to retain moisture, you know, sort of artificially.
Speaker B:And it's like so much of barbecue competition, the way that they cook is for that 30 minutes, that 30 minute lag between when they slice it and when somebody actually eats it, right?
Speaker B:It's, it's to overcome that, that, that big delay that has to happen between the slicing and the eating.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker B:And that, luckily for me, just doesn't happen at barbecue.
Speaker B:Jo?
Speaker A:Yeah, I've, you know, I've judged a few.
Speaker A:In fact, they, a couple of years ago, they, they called me at the last minute and wanted me to fill in at the jack, and I couldn't do it.
Speaker A:I mean, it was like I had five days, you know, and my schedule just was like, no, you can't.
Speaker A:And of course, they've never asked me back since then, but I have judged some other kind of nothing really on a national scale, but more regional.
Speaker A:And they were always for charity events and stuff, and which is fine.
Speaker A:But, you know, I remember we were sitting there and we were actually in the Marriott Hotel right across the street from a waterfront park in Portland.
Speaker A:And that's.
Speaker A:They were bringing the food over to us, you know, and I remember they came in and they opened up this one.
Speaker A:They, they bring them over little Styrofoam containers.
Speaker A:They open this one up and you could smell the liquid smoke.
Speaker A:I mean, it was just gas, just ghastly, you know, and that's not what I said at the time.
Speaker A:But I've been on A campaign.
Speaker A:You know, let's put it this way.
Speaker A:Liquid Smoke will never sponsor this show.
Speaker A:But it was just so horrible.
Speaker A:I mean, we took one bite and I just spit it out.
Speaker A:It was like, nah, you know, you get.
Speaker A:You get a one for the box, you know, and you get another one for the parsley, and that's it.
Speaker A:So, you know.
Speaker B:Well, I did a barbecue competition.
Speaker B:I judged a barbecue competition several years back, and the first category was beans.
Speaker B:And I think they hadn't really thought through how the judging should work.
Speaker B:And so they just had every judge taste everything that came through.
Speaker B:And I think There were like 35 different batches of beans to taste.
Speaker B:That was not a good way to start off.
Speaker B:Barbecue competition.
Speaker A:Probably wasn't a good way to finish either.
Speaker B:No, no, no, not at all.
Speaker B:But if you think people can mess up a brisket, man, it's amazing to see how bad people can mess up some dry beans.
Speaker A:Oh, yeah.
Speaker A:Oh, yeah.
Speaker A:I've been exposed to that, let's put it that way.
Speaker A:And I'm pretty finicky about that stuff.
Speaker A:I'm not a finicky eater.
Speaker A:I mean, I'll try anything and.
Speaker A:But when you.
Speaker A:There are some basics that if you're going to make it, you should really learn how to make it.
Speaker A:You know what I mean?
Speaker A:And one of them is like, beans, you know?
Speaker A:So, anyway, one last question, and because we're not on the.
Speaker A:On the regular radio, I can say this, of course, I could say it anyway, these days, but what's the biggest thing about.
Speaker A:What's the biggest thing that pisses you off about barbecue?
Speaker A:If there is anything.
Speaker B:Hmm.
Speaker B:Man, it's a tough question to answer.
Speaker B:What's the thing?
Speaker B:I mean, I hate going into a place ordering food from anywhere.
Speaker B:It's just obviously they don't care anything about what they're serving.
Speaker B:It's, you know, it's.
Speaker B:I'm a meat eater.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:I eat a lot of it.
Speaker B:But there is something that bugs me about wasting the life of an animal by just absolutely not respecting it in any way.
Speaker A:Sure.
Speaker B:Through the way that you cook it and serve it.
Speaker B:And, you know, if you don't have that respect for the animal, you don't have that respect for just your own business, for your customers.
Speaker B:That pisses me off.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker A:Or it's like taking a standing river, roasted, boiling it, you know?
Speaker B:Right, Yeah.
Speaker A:I mean, there.
Speaker B:There are things.
Speaker B:There are places where I go and I eat their food and I don't really particularly like it, but I know that other people do that they're doing it this way for a reason, because their customers enjoy it this way.
Speaker A:Sure.
Speaker B:And then it's easy to tell the difference between that and somebody who just does not care at all about the food that they're putting out.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker B:That they're serving to you.
Speaker A:Daniel, thank you for being with us.
Speaker A:I've really enjoyed talking with you and getting to know you a little bit, and I hope you will come back on the show one of these days.
Speaker B:Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker B:It's been great talking with you as well.
Speaker A:Yeah, it's been fun.
Speaker A:That's going to wrap it.
Speaker A:For this week on the After Hours here at Barbecue Nation.
Speaker A:We want to thank Daniel Vaughn, the barbecue editor at Texas Monthly.
Speaker A:You can just, you can either, you know, Google Daniel.
Speaker A:I'm sure some of you already know who he is, or you can go to Texas Monthly and see his stuff there.
Speaker A:It's great.
Speaker A:And you can subscribe to it and, you know, have some fun with that.
Speaker A:And we'll be back next week.
Speaker A:But again, thank you, Daniel.
Speaker A:I really appreciate it.
Speaker B:Thank you.
Speaker A:No problem.
Speaker A:Okay, everybody, have a good week, and we'll talk to you next week.
Speaker A:Take care.
