This podcast episode features an engaging discussion with Chef Ray Sheehan, who shares insights from his recent endeavors in the barbecue industry. Chef Sheehan reflects on the challenges he faced while operating his restaurant, Raised Roadside Kitchen, which specialized in comfort food and barbecue but ultimately did not succeed as anticipated. He emphasizes the importance of adhering to one's culinary strengths and the necessity of adapting business strategies in the competitive food landscape. Furthermore, he discusses his aspirations for the future, including potential new writing projects and a renewed focus on barbecue sauce. Our conversation underscores the resilience required in the culinary arts and the ongoing evolution of food trends.

Links referenced in this episode:

• paintedhillsbeef.com
• heritagesteel.us
• oregondungeness.org
• barbecuenationjt.com
• pigpowder.com
• ration.com

Companies mentioned in this episode:

• Painted Hills Natural Beef
• Weston Kia
• Heritage Steel
• Oregon Dungeness Crab
• Pig Powder
• Bear Mountain BBQ
• Magna Chef
• Sweet Baby Rays
• Dave Raymond

Mentioned in this episode:

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It's time for Barbecue Nation with JT So fire up your grill, light the charcoal, and get your smoker cooking.

Now from the Turn It, Go Burn it studios in Portland, here's jt.

This is an encore.

Hey, everybody.

Welcome to Barbecue Nation.

I'm JT along with my co host, Barbecue hall of Fame member Leanne Whippen.

And we're coming to you from our respective Turn It, Don't Burn it studios on opposite ends of the country.

One in Portland and one in Tampa.

We'd like to thank the folks at Painted Hills Natural Beef, the way nature intended to be.

Find out more about Painted Hills, just go to paintedhillsbeef.com well, we're very fortunate to have our friend Chef Ray Sheehan back with us as our first guest of the year.

Yay.

Clap.

Ray's been busy.

Besides writing cookbooks and.

And doing his barbecue stuff.

He had a restaurant and now I.

We're going to find out if he sold it or not.

And he's been very busy always creating.

Ray, welcome to the show.

Well, what a great way to start the new year.

Thank you for having me on the Barbecue Nation, one of my favorite shows.

Thank you.

Well, you're welcome, and we appreciate that.

So what's going on in New Jersey?

Oh, man, it's just been, you know, quite a roller coaster the last year.

Looking for bigger and better things in 24.

I think the last time we spoke, my book came out Big Green Egg Basics, and I'm here to report that it was Barbecue Book of the runner up Barbecue Book of the Year for the National Barbecue and Grilling association last year.

Thank you.

So I think Meet Mitch's book was in first place, so I was in great company.

So a lot has happened since then.

Towards the end of 22, I a sauce and seasoning company, and I sold the trademark to the name.

And if in effect, I basically closed that chapter or I was going to rebrand and temporarily closed it.

And we opened a restaurant called Raised Roadside Kitchen.

It featured handcrafted burgers, Southern fried chicken, and barbecue specialties.

And we became known for having one of the top bowls of chili in the state, some of the best fried chicken.

But ultimately and unfortunately, the restaurant didn't work out as much effort as we all put into it.

Had a few partners, and in the end, we ended up closing.

And then it.

It got to a point where, you know, I had to do some soul searching, hence the, you know, moniker.

Chef Ray Sheehan.

I went back to my roots.

I have 25 years experience in the hospitality and restaurant and food industry.

Yeah.

So, you know, creating recipes and, you know, getting back to my writing, I write for the Barbecue.

Barbecue News magazine.

I do recipes, articles, product reviews from time to time and, you know, and cookbooks.

So I've tried to get back to that and, you know, doing my.

Basically, like, private events, private chef catering and corporate catering.

And so it's.

It's been a challenge.

It's been a little bit of a challenge.

And as you both know, with restaurants and sauce and seasoning companies and all that, I mean, it's.

It's.

Right.

I mean, it's.

It can pose its challenges.

So, yeah, you're.

You're talking to the right group of people here.

Ray, you also said that keyword partner.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I mean, you know, a partner, a partnership is like a great.

Is like a marriage.

Right.

And it's great when it works and when you're both on the same page or however many of the partners there are, are on the same page.

But if any one of the partners, respectively, is in a different direction, it really poses some really, really big issues for your business.

Sure.

Yes, it does.

Even if there's good intentions, I mean.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

I think there's always, for the most part, good intentions.

But my experience, and I don't want to go too far in the weeds on this, and like, Leanne can certainly.

That's a whole nother show.

That's a month's worth of shows.

Yeah.

And I'm not just talking about your experience, but.

All right.

Yeah.

You know, like you said, a couple of business things I've been in over the years where there were multiple.

Multiple partners that never worked.

That.

That just didn't work.

Because fictitious scenario here, if you had three partners and yourself, three of you, as you said, might be on the same page and one wants to go to Botswana or something.

You know what I mean?

It just.

Yeah, it just doesn't work.

And so you try to reign them in, and then that undercurrent starts to wear on the other partners.

And, you know, if.

If you're the managing partner or whatever, it can still erode the enthusiasm and stuff, and it's very, very difficult.

So I commend you for giving it a big, good old college, Princeton try there.

The reason I say Princeton is because we watched Oppenheimer the other night.

So I've been thinking about New Jersey.

But the point is, is restaurant business, food business is tough.

It's very tough in its own right.

It's very tough.

Right.

And I was the managing partner the day to day and it just, there's so many reasons why a business will succeed or fail and having great food is really just the start.

There's so many other things that need to be in place.

Well, I, I liked it.

What I read about it.

I've never, I never got to go to it, Ray, but of course, but what I liked about it is you were a, and you kind of address this at the opening of the show.

You were kind of a home style restaurant with a, with an accent of barbecue, not a barbecue restaurant with an accent of home style.

And that last description, if you will.

And I'd like Leanne's take on this.

That's what a lot of barbecue restaurants do.

A lot of pit stops and stuff.

They're like, hey, we've got barbecue, but we've also got grandma's macaroni and cheese here.

And yet when I looked at your menus and stuff a few times, it was always, we've got the fried chicken, but we've got a touch of, you know, bourbon sauce or something.

So I, I, I really liked that motif, if you will.

Yeah, I mean, it was basically somewhat of a country style comfort food really.

I mean, and on, you know, Saturdays we feature, well, Fridays and Saturdays we had slow smoked brisket, we had our pulled pork on the menu.

Then we used the pulled pork to do slow smoked Cubano sandwich and, and then, you know, like the homey kind of comforting Mac and cheese and, and then we would do some, some nice special.

So we, we weren't a diner like a New Jersey diner, but we had a little something for everybody for lunch and dinner type place.

Yeah.

Leanne, when you're, you've done this a lot.

I know when you put together a menu like that, I mean, we're all very familiar with, with food and restaurants and stuff here today.

But when you're looking at putting a menu together, how do you decide the direction of the, the offerings on a menu?

I mean, because that really is the tale of what the restaurant is about.

Right.

People are looking for what they're in the mood for, you know, Italian, Greek barbecue.

So you have to focus on what the name of the restaurant is and what it represents.

You can certainly add things to the menu.

I mean, you know, vegetarian craze, you know, in order to get a group that's going to come in that has vegetarians, you got to put a couple veggie items on there so that they will come because that one person might, you might lose that Group.

So you have to think about things like that.

Specials are always a good Dr.

But you do have to focus on, you know, the specialty that you're trying to or the cuisine that you're trying to convey.

Because if you get into that too much mishmash, you're going to lose your identity and you're going to turn into a diner, you know, and you.

And that's what happens.

You can't.

A lot of the diners here in Jersey, the menus are so big and I do love diners, but it's.

When you have a huge menu like that, it's really hard to keep everything fresh.

So try to keep it a little bit smaller of a menu.

And like our burgers were ground fresh every day.

We didn't use a frozen patty.

You know, those types of things I feel like make a difference if you're able to have a butcher do that for you every day.

Yeah, I mean, I would.

That's what we wanted to do.

So I got to ask you guys, when I go sit down at a restaurant and Leon's been in the little town I live in, and you can go to them and they're, they're fine, they're there.

Some of them are diners, some of them are a little better.

Not much, but you go there and you look at the thing and you look at the menu and like you said, the menu is a little lofty, a little bigger than, you know, what you were directed at and yours or Leanne's.

But I look at that and I'm reading that and I go, okay, that comes from Cisco, that comes from Food Services America.

You know, I look at.

That comes from cash and carry.

And I doubt if too many people sitting at the restaurant when my wife and I are there are thinking in those terms, but that's the way I look at menus anymore.

But when I go to a diner like yours, Ray, and they say, you know, we grind our, our burger every morning, you know, or right, you know, we, we go to the fish market every morning.

Something like that.

That gets my attention.

Well, it's just like I love onion rings.

And the first thing I'll ask is, do you make the onion rings in house?

And they have to tell you.

And so obviously, if you want Cisco onion rings, they do not.

Yeah, they look at you and go, no, but we got a 50 pound bag back there in the freezer for you.

You know, we can whip some up.

But you know, five guys, they focus on their fries being fresh cut and made, you know, to order, you know, those are the draws.

And.

Yeah.

You know, makes it more home cooked than it is out of a box.

Yeah.

And I do that.

And I, and I also look at that.

I don't eat too many of them or drink too many of them.

But if they offer milkshakes, for example, and it's summertime, I want to know if it's not a powdered confectionery, if they're actually putting a real ice cream in there that doesn't come out of a soft serve.

You know what I mean?

It's not formulated.

They put real strawberries in there.

They have to put something a little sweeter sometimes in real strawberries, for example.

I like strawberry milkshakes.

But when you look at that, that, that's a sale for me or from me, you know, like that.

I look at that.

We're going to take a break.

We're going to be back with chef ration and Ms. Whippen here on Barbecue Nation.

I hope you all had a great holiday season and a good new year.

I made black bean soup for New Year's.

Anyway, we'll be right back.

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This is an encore.

Welcome back to the Nation Barbecue Nation.

I'm JT along with Leanne Whippen.

Real quickly, if you want to email us, you can just go to the website which is barbecue nation, jt.com There's a contact icon there.

You can do that.

You can also send it to info @becue nation jt.com you follow us on Facebook.

Both Leanne and I and Ray also we have, you know, large Facebook paces pages, got other platforms.

X formerly known as Twitter and Instagram.

Leanne's big on Instagram.

I know that.

And so just go out there, follow us, have some fun.

We're talking with chef Ray Sheehan today.

And Ray's been on the show before.

Before.

He's.

It's my first show back, so I'm getting a little tongue tied here.

I haven't talked this much in five weeks.

I want to follow up with just one more thing on the restaurant.

Ray, what's the biggest thing you learned out of that experience?

Now, you had plenty of experience going in with, you know, being a chef, being a caterer, being in food service for a while.

We don't have to date ourselves this morning.

But what.

What's the biggest thing you think you learned out of that?

On the food side.

Let's keep it positive on the food side.

Absolutely.

I think on the.

On the food side.

You know, when I.

When I sat down with the partners to come up with the concept for the restaurant, the concept became like, comfort food, a take on, you know, with some barbecue specialties.

And, you know, the burgers were big and the fried chicken.

In this area, there wasn't a lot of fried chicken.

And we.

We created.

I created this, like, the dredge that you would dip the chicken into, and it was.

Had a real nice Southern crispiness to it.

But I guess my biggest takeaway would be stick with what you're known for.

I am known in the barbecue space.

And everyone that walked through the door wanted to know why there wasn't more barbecue on the menu.

And when it came clear to us that we should pivot, not.

We.

We didn't pivot in the.

In the right way to.

To make that happen.

So I think sticking to your guns, to what you.

What you know or what you believe in your heart will work.

That would probably be one of my biggest things going forward.

Was there anything on the menu that you thought would be a hit that was kind of halfway to where you expected it?

You know, you didn't.

So in.

Believe it or not, I. I mean, I don't know one particular thing, but, like, we.

People would walk through the door.

This place had been a breakfast lunch place for so long.

People would walk through the door and order breakfast.

I mean, or they would order stuff that wasn't on the menu, or they would.

Wouldn't even look at the menu.

And that was just really frustrating.

Like, if someone just walks in your door and it starts ordering, but they don't even look at the menu.

That was really hard.

That was.

Yeah, that was like, you know, that was challenging.

I know one thing that when I do get to come to New Jersey and see you in person, I want you to cook that part.

That fried chicken for Me, that stuff looked phenomenal.

Thank you very much.

You know, I've had to go back to my roots and in a way, reinvent myself.

For the last 10 years, I've had, you know, a barbecue business of some sort.

And one of the things that I've gotten to do that was pretty fun, that I didn't have time to do before is occasionally, now I'm a guest co host on the Baseball and Barbecue podcast.

So that's really.

Yeah, that's really fun to me.

And something that I'm working on that I'm writing.

I've gotten to do a lot more writing.

I've gotten to interview a lot of people in the.

In the barbecue space and a lot of hall of Famers.

And one of the people that I got to talk to was Dave Raymond, and he gave me some advice about sauce business and if I was to rebrand, and I mean, like, I don't know what other community would be so helpful in every, every single way possible.

Like, here's someone who built their sauce company into a behemoth and then sold it and is just so gracious to help others.

I mean, you know, I can really appreciate that, and I hope one day I'm in a position to help others as well.

Oh, absolutely.

Dave's been on this show.

He was a hoot to talk to, and that was quite a journey he's had, I'll put it that way.

Like that.

Are you a big baseball guy?

I love baseball, yeah.

I mean, I haven't had as much time to watch it as I used to, but, yeah, I do love baseball.

So, Ray, we got a couple minutes before we got to go to break.

You were talking about kind of rebranding and getting back to your roots.

What are you working on right now?

Another book or anything?

Well, I do have.

I'm working on a book proposal, and I'm also working on a big writing project which will probably discuss later this year, but it's.

It has to do with barbecue sauce.

So I'm.

I'm doubling down on the barbecue sauce, doubling down on writing about barbecue in.

In every way.

Like, with the barbecue news, I'm trying to expand my.

Like, not just submitting a recipe, but also, you know, upping my article, my content creation.

So, Yeah, I mean, 20, 24, I have a couple.

I have.

I'm going to be featured in some other people's cookbooks.

One is going to be a pretty big one, and the other one is a friend of mine who's got a great book coming out on mushrooms.

It's called Mushroom Gastronomy.

That one is coming out this spring and I have, you know, a little feature in there.

So I'm.

I'm really just trying to focus on me as a brand.

My website's going to be up probably in the next month or so, ration.com where you'll be able to get recipes and tips and tricks and info, information on events and classes and stuff like that.

And there'll probably be some products at some point.

I just.

I'm not ready to jump in with both feet just yet.

Definitely you'll be able to get my cookbooks on there.

And I've also gotten to spend some time creating content for company other companies and working with other companies like Forge to Table Knives and Bear Mountain BBQ and Magna Chef and some of these other companies that I really can appreciate their products.

I know you guys from when I was listening to your show that you're going to be working with some great companies as well.

Yeah, yeah, we are.

We're going to take another break.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah, we're going to take another break.

So we're going to step away for a couple minutes.

Be back with chef Ray Sheehan right after this.

You're listening to Barbecue Nation.

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This is an encore.

Welcome back to Barbecue Nation.

Thank you for being with us today.

We appreciate that very, very much.

It just didn't ever occur to me.

Anyway, we would like to thank the folks at Painted Hills Natural Beef Beef the way you are, nature intended.

And you will like, you can go to their website@painted hills.com and you can order online there and come right to your door.

And also, drumroll, please.

Pig powder.

Pig powder was voted the best rub on the planet.

Pig powder is, I won't say, the creation of Ms. Whippen.

It was the creation of her father, but she is the general at the helm now of pigpowder.com and by the.

Way, it did really help me win on the Flay vs. Simon show and Bobby Flay.

I've been on two shows, a throwdown with him also, and in both times, he commented on the Pig Cutter how much he loves it.

I was going to tell you after the show, I actually used it in some other dishes over the holidays just to kind of mess around with stuff, and it worked out very well.

But I. I don't want to take up the time here in this show and tell you that because it may be something you can incorporate into one of your recipes or something.

Anyway, we are talking with chef Ray Sheehan.

Ray's been on the show a number of times over the years.

We always appreciate his time and efforts to be with us.

So you were talking before we went to break, Ray, about you might bring out some products, some sauces or rubs or something like that.

So I'm going to pose a hypothetical to you.

Do you think there are too many at this point that people get confused about them?

And.

Yeah, I mean, so that's kind of my hesitation.

So, I mean, I did it for a long time, and I've won a lot of awards for the sauces, but, you know, I feel like you really have to have some money behind it and you have to be able to continuously reinvest into it.

And from what Dave Raymond tells me, you have to buy shelf space, which I never did.

Yeah, but you have to buy shelf space.

So, you know, I don't want to be on a hamster wheel and just sell enough to be able to buy more like, you know, been there, done that.

And, and, yeah, I mean, there's a lot of sauces, but there's a lot of great sauces.

Oh, yeah, too.

I mean, and I feel as though I really had something good to offer or great to offer the barbecue community with my sauces.

It's really just a matter of how much or how deep I want to get into it again.

Like, I've gotten help, two other brands with their products, and I really kind of like that.

Like, I like, you know, being able to help a brand bring their product to market.

And so I'd really like to get a licensing deal with my sources.

That would be great.

Like a big company that wants a private label.

You know, these sauces, maybe the seasonings as well.

But that, that.

That's very appealing to me.

I can.

I Can give you a prime example of what you're talking about there, Ray.

There's a lady that lives down in Philadelphia.

She's a.

She's a minister, and she follows me on.

On Twitter and stuff.

She's a very nice lady.

I don't want to throw her name out on there.

And she makes some great sauces.

One day in the.

The UPS guy brought me these three big jars, Mason jars of sauces.

And I tried them, and they were wonderful.

But she doesn't really have any money.

She doesn't have the licensing and the branding and all that.

And I know that she's hoping, like a lot of people, that Kraft or McCormick or somebody comes by and says, that's great, we got to have it.

Chances are that.

And I, I actually called her on the phone one day because she asked me for help, and I said, you can, you know, you can hope for that, but that's.

Chances of that are pretty slim, really.

But how.

How do you break through?

How do you break through if you're an individual like that?

I mean, Leanne's big power.

She's got her dad's name as the inventor.

She's got her name on it.

She's got notoriety.

Her dad had notoriety.

But that's a.

That's a long road, too, you know.

Yeah.

I mean, how do you break through?

First of all, I have to order some pig powder.

I haven't tried it yet, so there's that.

I will ship you, but I definitely have that.

God bless you.

But, but it's you, you know, it's a lot of work.

Even, like I said, Dave Raymond even told me is as popular as Sweet Baby Rays was, as it was a growing company.

He would do ride alongs and go with the distributor and talk it up to the stores and then do demos.

I mean, you really have to work it.

It has to be.

Other than now, other than having your regular job and making money, doing the sauce has to be your number one priority or, or, or seasoning.

It's.

It's a lot of dedication.

There's a lot of influencers to think, oh, you know, gee, I'm going to have a rub or a sauce.

And.

And then they do it and it goes nowhere because they don't realize that, yes, you may be popular right now, but there's people that maybe haven't seen you on that show, and you need to get it out there.

You have to get people to try it.

And it is a lot.

A lot of work, a lot of money and a lot of time.

So it's the same thing as a restaurant.

Having a great recipe is really step number one.

There's a lot of steps involved, and you have to be willing to put the time and the work in.

As they say, fame is leading and not being disparaging to anybody.

But I think your point there is well taken, that you may be an influencer.

Good for you.

I hope you're doing well.

But are you still going to be that person a year and a half from now when you've got $10,000 worth of product sitting in your garage and it's not going anywhere?

You know, it's very difficult.

And I've done store demos.

I know Leanne has done store demos.

We still do them if the right people ask us to do it.

And you get out there, and that makes a huge difference.

But you got to cover a lot of ground, not only with a particular individual store, but with a chain or a geographic region to get started.

It's a lot of hard work.

You know, I think that the mistake that a lot of people that I talk to that are trying to build us a brand, a sauce brand, one of the things they say is, oh, well, I got my product in five stores in my county or whatever in my area, but I really want to get the next state over.

I really want to get two states over from there.

What you need to do is start and get a nucleus and build that nucleus and build that momentum and get like, you know, the first couple miles around you and then build out from there.

You don't have to be in California.

You have to sell.

You have to be in 240 stores, let's say, in your area first.

Don't worry about getting, because shipping the product, that's a whole nother issue.

Like getting it.

Like, I had glass bottles, they were heavy.

There's breakage, you know, and if you, if you sign with a distributor, there's all kinds of rules that you have to go by.

If the customer drops a bottle, you bought it.

If they return it for any reason or no reason at all, you bought it.

So focusing on, like, I focused on independence because they could, the decision makers, you didn't have to pay for shelf space.

They can decide whether they want to bring you in.

It's easier to set up demos, but start with that nucleus and work your way out versus worrying about getting it in, you know, 10 states away where you have to ship it.

I have some folks that I know here that created some barbecue sauces.

They were pretty good marketers but when they went to what is now part of the Kroger world up here, and the gentleman was telling me this, he said, yeah, he said, you know, they're taking, you know, four cases for these 10 outlets and blah, blah, blah.

And I said, how many cases do they want for free?

You know, and, and he said, well, four.

So you're, you're talking only four.

You're talking eight.

Well, we're really talking eight.

Well, you know, when you got eight cases times 10, that's 80 cases.

Pretty soon those numbers add up to be, you know, huge is the best way to put it.

Huge.

It's a tough gig if you make it.

I think, you know, anybody that's made it has done a remarkable job.

But selling that at the retail level, I think sometimes I think if you've got a big enough deal, big enough claim to fame and all of that, just doing the online sales, or maybe even the Amazon sales, you know, are much better.

I, I did a lot with, with my online store and, and then I, you know, I had some business owners who, like, say builders or car salesmen who had a lot of clients that of, like, I had one guy who had a roofing business, and every time he did a job, he would mark down, okay, they like barbecue.

I don't know how he asked them, but at the end of the month, every month, I would get like an order for like one dozen or two dozen gift boxes.

And that paid the bills, that kept the lights on, you know, like over and over.

If you have a couple of people like that, I mean, the more you can sell yourself to sell the product yourself, the more money you're going to make.

Retail is very difficult.

You know, it going with all the rules, like you said, the paying for shelf space, the returns, the, oh, we're opening another location.

We want, you know, two cases of each SKU that you have and say if you have five SKUs, that's 10 cases.

I mean, you know, yeah, it adds up.

Yeah, it's a tough gig.

My hat is off to people that finally make it and can get even if it's regional distribution, if they really want to do that.

But I think, like, the way Leanne does it and what you have been talking about here, that may be the smarter way to go, because all of a sudden you do not have 10 layers of bureaucracy and rules and regulations between you and the, the deposit slip.

You might say, you know, and also too, you're, you know, the, the sauce manufacturers, you know, they have minimums.

I had A bottler who started me at 50 cases, and by the time we were done, there were 600 cases of each flavor.

Yeah.

And I'm like, I'm out.

I can't.

Where am I going to put it?

Who's going to finance it?

I mean, it's 600 cases.

You know, it's only good for two years.

You got to move it.

Yeah.

It's a lot of sauce.

It's a huge amount of work.

We're going to take a quick break here.

We're going to be back with chef ration and Ms. Whippen hall of Famer, right after this on Barbecue Nation.

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Hey, everybody, it's jt.

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Hey, everybody, J.T.

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Foreign.

This is an encore.

Welcome back to Barbecue Nation.

I'm jt.

We'd like to thank the Oregon Crab Commission.

They're supporting this show and the golf show.

Excuse me.

In fact, Leanne got taste of Oregon Dungeness crab.

Amazing.

The first time this year, this last year.

It's a new year.

I gotta do that.

It's great stuff.

And you can go to the Oregon Crab Commission, their website, and take a look at how it's harvested and all that stuff.

But you can find it in most major retailers all over the world, actually.

So, anyway, we do that.

As I said, we're talking with chef Ray Sheen today.

Where do you think?

Go ahead, Leanne.

I was.

So do you have a new book?

You're doing a proposal.

So it hasn't been accepted yet.

You're just working on it, correct?

Yeah, I see.

I've.

So the first two books that I did, I did Unagented, and it's my desire to seek an agent now.

So in order to do that, I'm contractually obligated to show my publisher this proposal first because they have right of first refusal.

But I really want to try to get this agent that I have in mind.

So I want to really do a great proposal, and then I can, you know, so if it doesn't work out, to go with the current publisher, which I hope it does, but if it doesn't, then it can be shown to various other publishers.

That's not an easy.

Yeah, that's not an easy gig either, Ray.

Writing books.

Well, no, I mean, honestly, the way we did the first two, it was easier to just.

The proposal process for that was so much easier than writing.

Like, this proposal has to be so much more thorough because it's the business plan for the book, so.

But I love to do it.

I honestly, like, I just get in a zone.

I love to write and I've.

It.

It's a process of revision.

So it's kind of like you're molding, like, a piece of something down into something more concise and, you know, understandable and great for the reader.

Do you.

Do you find it sometimes it's hard to get inspired or just things just pop into your head and.

No, things just pop into my head.

It's almost like there's too much, like.

Because you could sit there, right?

Like, I'm sure Leanne could think of 20 things she could write a book about.

Right?

She could write, you know, ribs, tailgating, you know, women in barbecue.

I mean, there's so many things that you could do.

But then when you sit down, you have to say, okay, which one of these things is relevant today?

And what do I think is going to sell?

Because by the time you're done, it's going to take almost two years.

So in two years from now, what is going to be something that people are interested in, you know, and purchasing, and why do they need it as a book as opposed to a news, newspaper or magazine article or, you know, what makes it a book versus that?

So, you know, there's.

There's a lot that goes into the thought process of, like, you know, so it's just I.

There's just so.

So many things that I have thought of, but Then I'm like, okay, well, that's not really a book.

You know, like, that's.

That's more like a.

A splash.

That's not a.

Well, there's a trend.

Leanne and I have talked about this a little bit at times off the air, but there's a trend that you can do shorter abridged versions, if you will, and sell them as an ebook, for example, for Kindle.

I'm just giving you that.

Yeah.

And there.

And, you know, some of them can sell for 99 cents, and you think, well, that's not much money.

But if you sell, you know, 15,000 of them, that 99 cents adds up.

And it's very easy for people to, you know, if they're into the Apple stuff or whatever, their.

Whatever platforms and stuff they use is irrelevant.

You make it available on all the platforms.

And I know Meathead has done that a few times with, you know, he wrote a little quick book about sous vide because he's a sous vide savant, but he.

He did that, but it sells a lot, you know, and then he moves on to the next one.

But that original is still there and available for people as time goes on.

So I don't.

I don't think we'll ever get away from hardcover books, if you will.

I'm still a guy that likes to hold a book in my hand and read it and put it on the shelf when I'm done.

But sometimes that if you.

I don't know.

I want to sound like a dinosaur here, but the new age way of doing things is a.

Actually affords a quicker return, I'll put it that way.

So I don't know if you ever considered that, Ray, but.

Yeah, I've definitely thought about it.

But I think ultimately right now, I'm like.

You like?

I prefer.

I like.

I love going to the bookstore.

My wife and I.

That'll be like a hot Friday night.

We'll go to the bookstore and go to the cafe.

It's like, you know, get a new book and, you know, a coffee.

I mean, I love coffee.

I'm into roasting coffee now, too.

Oh, it's one of my favorite things.

But maybe that's a book.

Yeah, maybe that's a way you tie it in.

You tie coffee with barbecue and Starbucks backs, the whole thing.

You never know.

You never know.

It could do that.

Where do you see yourself, hopefully four or five years from now?

Four or five years from now?

Honestly, I would like somehow to be making a bigger contribution to the world of barbecue.

I mean, that's something that the paper that I'm working on right now, which we'll be able to discuss probably around June, that's going to be a big piece of it.

And.

And I, like, I. I want to be.

I want to be somebody who made a contribution to, not just, like, to help other people, not just to, like, oh, what am I going to get out of it?

You know, so, yeah, that, to me, that's.

That's where in.

In four or five years, whether it's more books, this paper teaching, more like getting, you know, I. I love the future of Q with.

That's put out by Barbecue News Magazine.

I love the fact that it's inspiring our next generation of pit masters and grillers and keeping it going.

And I'm not the type of person that, like, if I learn something great about brisket, I'm going to keep it to myself.

I want to be able to share it with others because I would like there to be more great brisket, not just, you know, in certain places, like in the south or in the West.

I mean, so to me, that, that.

That means more than anything that I would accomplish.

Just like, for me personally, you know, that would be rewarding.

Enjoy barbecue.

And I think right now we're in a very good place.

Yeah, I think so.

You know, what do you think, Leah?

Always.

We're always in a great place, and there's always new things, technology, people, their twists, you know, on barbecue.

That's going to be it for the time of this part.

We're going to do after hours in a second, but we want to thank chef Ray Sheehan.

When's your website going to be ready?

Should be ready by Valentine's Day.

Ration.com.

Okay, so that, that.

That's not too far away.

So we want to thank Ray, and I want to thank Leanne, as always.

And you can go to our website, barbecue nation, jt.com or leanne's got a website.

And I've got another.

I got a couple other websites, so you can check them all out.

But we will be back next week here on Barbecue Nation with another edition of the show.

Until then, remember our motto.

Turn it, don't burn it.

Take care, everybody.

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