AL BBQ LEGENDS

I'm a small business but I'm a good business a place where you can get friendly people friendly service delicious barbecue but my morning starts out early I get here early in the morning start with cleaning pools mopping sweeping because when you're on bottom and the restaurant business you have to do a whole lot of work to try to stay on top over here would kill you so I have to do a lot of this work myself what I love it though [Music] [Music] I'm fella than what we produce here it's a lot of work like I said it takes a lot of time I come in four in the morning and hopefully I'm done by 2 to 3 o'clock and afternoon most days I am well Who am I Graci Bishop Julius son a Big Daddy so then dad hitchhiked to Selma confirming him and Eddie unbeknown what he was getting into off his restaurant the first three months and we were open I didn't sell any important people would come in give me a barbecue sandwich I got verse skipping I don't want Christian barbecue you know and I said unless all I've got and someone get mad and leave since 2009 I think we sold a little over 46,000 often but my passion of barbecue is a passion that my father had years ago and his passion is my passion when we when we started this out we didn't have anything so it had nothing to lose nothing has changed from the counter to the back door in 58 years I make a fire like I make a fire I took the food too active the food from the counter forward oh yeah we've changed we don't wait on tables we got a mobile app no matter where you go who you talk to they will be glad to tell you with a smile on their face where they came from who has the best barbecue and who's the big best kick-ass hander country it is it is absolutely phenomenal people's love to hear good blues when they in barbecue so we may it please and barbecue come on des [Music] turn across the street and the destination in on your left a destination on your last 21 concentrate alright we open this restaurant in January 2003 just after I got a laid off from a job so it was kind of a lot of a blessing you know when that door closed and I had to come up with something it was Christmas time you know we didn't have any money me and my wife and kids so that's what we came up with and I had been previously like barbecuing out in the park with the kids or whatever and then you know why we were doing that some people come up that could they buy selling something that kind of like gave us an idea right there and we started from there well I got a phone call from my dad how I started in the business at a early age of about eight years old and they called me down said his dishwasher didn't show up it's kind of something that happens a lot in the restaurant business so I got the phone call and my mom brought me down and once I was down here was okay I kind of was in my comfort zone and begin with at home and I didn't want to come down but I did like it once I once I finally came down I used to do barbecue competitions I started in 1993 and over the course of till about 2013 did about 250 competitions well I came to Alabama mainly to be with my family which was already living down here I had stayed back in Ohio to stay in competition and it definitely was worth it to be with the family but getting into this culture of barbecue was something I didn't realize people are set in their ways here you know they like they like very sweet food here from up north when we're cooking they it's more spicy my dad said when he hadn't laying out their biology bug laying so laying out about a hospital about is here he said two things gonna do the restaurant a little muscle area I don't think I don't like there for too much whether they were with him but his money that oh there's money those want to play with they feel the way we have no fuel on all this one thank God for the rest one really well what is money yellow here a good man now some time I was getting to get a free loan that'll go people down here they elect raiser now man after high school I went to Johnson & Wales for culinary school in Charleston South Carolina and received an associates in culinary arts came home and a dort force did some fine dining and catering lots of catering and decided that I really wanted to do barbecue instead of that whole pretty fruit free world I've got cornstarch and sugar in here Alton I have coconut milk and middle sorry I actually met my wife that when we were in culinary school freshman year she was there to study baking and pastry hearts I usually do all the baking and like the middle of the night because it's so just monotonous and boring and turn on music and dance around or whatever when we decided to open a restaurant it was really neat that it could go hand in hand and she does all these different types of homemade desserts for us good pie takes time I'm from a family of cooks I can tell you my daddy wasn't cooking on moms of cooking my uncles of cookers all my you know my granddaddy cookers I'm just braided up in me was to cook you know I'm just in with destiny you don't go see much when I cook my food it's great you know thing like it's like you know if you ain't never taste it it's something to taste I put it like that I just put it something to take everything from scratch nothing important homemade coleslaw homemade baked beans homemade potato salad we even got homemade banana pudding we're cooking it on the stove this ain't that out-of-the-box bill this really when I started trying to define Alabama barbecue I started with what the person who eats it which is just about everybody in the state everybody in this state has an opinion on it you know if you live in Alabama you had to be four Alabama Auburn if you live in Alabama you got to have a favorite barbecue joint just as well Alabama barbecue takes the best of a lot of different regions and has worked with it for you know four hundred years bringing in all these different flavors and making them their own it is it is something that the South does right but there are so many different versions of it that it's a little bit like a southern accent people warrant from the south here southern accent to them it all sounds the same but once you actually get into the South and you listen to the way people talk you realize that there's a hundred different southern accents arguably there's a hundred different types of barbecue food the difference is between accent barbecue that everyone thinks their barbecue is [Music] Big Bob Gibson was my grandfather my mother was the Gibson movie he actually had five children they all went to barbecue business luckily for me my mom and dad when he visits from November so that's why I'm here today you know I'm from North Alabama originally Florence Alabama about an hour from Decatur so I grew up and know when the Big Bob Gibson name I went to University of North Alabama in Florence and that's where I met my wife my wife happened to be Big Bob Gibson's great-granddaughter like I said he had five children an aunt and an uncle when they business here in town the compounding called their business little Bob Gibson two other children went to Huntsville and so that in Huntsville there's a Gibson's barbecue and a David Gibson barbecue and then since my mom and dad went in business my grandfather we got to keep and I got to keep the big bug gets the name we started in 1985 my father and I did we bought a Cotswolds pizza location over in Southside and 30 days after we bought it we got to see some themselves five letters saying they couldn't sell transferred the franchise so we took sign down and we were like what are we going to do and we decided we were going to do barbecue we started out in the trucking and cattle business in Montgomery right here close to us and dad and I used to run about 50 livestock trucks and we bought and sold cattle haul cattle fed cattle commercially in the Texas Panhandle and we were started cooking for our youth group here at church and people started encouraged me that it was some pretty good barbecue I just start barbecuing in the backyard like everybody else always does and so we had some guys that committed to an opportunity for us to open up a barbecue restaurant and it came true for ition about a year later and they bought this place and put us in here as tenants not as partners and we opened up Fat Boys barbecue ranch [Music] when I was in the chemical business we cooked a lot when we cooked on weekends for church functions and stuff like that and so we smoked a lot of need for almost 30 years we kind of perfected what we want to do time just you know came about but we just say we won't go into barbecue business it's a lot of difference I mean we were doing it for fun and then when you start doing it for living it it really takes you know takes a life of its own [Music] today we had two catering jobs and one of them was two hundred and one was low five hundred and we basically had to have both of them out same time ago and kind of pretty hectic day for us good day but hectic pretty stressful we give about 250 pounds of chopped for probably 150 chickens whole kidding dressing then a 15 gallon of potato salad and one we did 10 gallons of the other one 24 gallons of green beans 600 you throw 200 sliders cons for one and about 115 gallons at sea [Music] everything went well we were we at least they believe that's bigspin his customers please well we came to Madison 1990 I'm from Texas and I was in the oil field out there I was a mud engineer or quite a few years got the barbecue and out around the rigs a little bit some moment eat it and some of them wouldn't and so I just kept working at it and decided to move back here after retired from the oil field because she's from here and so this building came open and I wasn't doing anything right then so we decided to put in a little barbecue and see how it went and it's just it's been phenomenal that's been little over six years ago most of my life all my my house became and done mechanic work on University stock and view it getting automatic transmissions and the river here in the 220 viewers the next 27 years Stockton Buick University and it's document he passed away when he passed away I started Mammon's auto my own business Samwell never lotto and I've done that on my year starting this with Papa Q so [Music] barbeque so those are here yellow days like you saw met with me when I was a girl we had a stockyard I did me film and I had a box it comes with a basket on it and I used to go out to the stockyard and get to haul in the mail at tides feet Thursday and put it in the basket and I would bring it back home and they would kill the Hogs my stepfather he start then pit in the yard and I'll put the Y over this you know the pit and that's the way you did to Bobby Q now we've set it out of the house you know big samples it's at home [Music] so my daddy came to Birmingham probably in the late 30s like a lot of people Birmingham was the Magic City and he met my mom Maxine my mom grew up during the Depression and her mother used to cook meals and take in boarders and that's how they got through the Depression was preparing food and selling it daddy went off to war as all the men did and probably didn't see each other for over three years but my mama during that time went to work for Belcher McComb and she started wiring the b-25 bombers and she was so good at that that she became the head wiring inspector and she inspected all the wiring on the b-25s I say that to say this my mother was never going to stay at home and raise children and wash clothes my mother was already a businesswoman she wanted to make money she wanted to control her destiny she liked making business decisions this wasn't that common back then mama said one of the greatest disappointments of her life was when all the men came home and they called him in one morning and said we don't need y'all anymore and boom it's over with [Music] katelyn my fiancee she and I met in Costa Mesa well we actually took a direct hit from the tornado in 2011 we were in force like okay we pushed the couches up against the doors and everything we're all in the hallway with pillows and mattresses on top of us and everything started shaking the doors started you could just like hear like the wind was just like sealing them shut it was the scariest thing we were here in trees crack and we were all looking up we didn't know where the trees are going to land and then also it was over so we went outside and just everything was demolished we couldn't even get out the front door for the tree was in the front of it we had to go out the back and go around and just everything was gone everything naturally after the tornado any time a storm would pop up we would have anxiety being up there so we decided we've moved down here where we do have hurricanes but at least we have a little notice you know I mean the tornadoes just pop up on you and it brought us down here which eventually led to us taking ownership bagua BBQ one with a little different twist on southern barbecue how it will be G twist so we try to be unique with everything you do it's amazing and everybody thinks I just say that but I wouldn't have anything on our menu that didn't taste good the first time we thought we had all of my family come in here and to try everything but we couldn't believe how good it was looking we cook [Music] well there was a server station I can urge 70a Frederick came along 79 to destroy the station and the pump I thought it worked on my father with the mechanic and we worked on cars well I was working on the local paper something new on strike and I decided to come in the parking lot and build me up it and I started barbecuing well after the strike I came back a couple of times and I said dad I can't do this I'm working midnight shift no I stopped harvest and he said well babies people still coming what am I going to do and so he decided to fill the pit the first 50 ambulances what he did and that was the beginning of Mexican water in the beginning when I uh but I started in uh you know like I said I was learning out of cooking what I would do is I would go out and looking at tracks and see what people do away that's how I knew I wasn't cooking because you would see you see some ribs something somebody threw away mama sees like some blood and they're like oh they wasn't done so that's why they didn't eat them so I knew I had to go back and practice cooking on that little more we have 34 locations now main reason why we grew was to give our employees an opportunity to be a part and so we have a operating partner in every market they bring up which we don't franchise it's a family-owned business and their scams in the game and they treat their business if I can serve because it is so it's been able even though we've got our families gotten bigger we still think small and it's made a big difference for the success of the business restaurant business is a tough competitive business and when we split out and my uncle went to caller beer left me here it's a lot of work on one guy you know I'm saying I got a good proof that works off but like I said I'm here my will said eight days a week and I never will figured I'd be doing I worked at plants I did all type of stuff man but being my own boss ain't nothing like it but it's a lot of work in it but they conducted liking it man well man come here five years ago he was on the side what he was on naming and he went home and watched that Dewey Cox story and do we caught with a magician trying to get started in the business and he kept having stumbling flowers some applause and everybody telling me couldn't do it you couldn't do it you can't do it you know same way they were telling my Uncle Joe you can't do it you can't do it we'll do it later hit song walk hard and went to the top officer that's what we're gonna do we're gonna walk hard to the top and the barbecue business and that's why I said until you taste this mmm ain't none like it barbecue really goes back to the very earliest days of state Valvano barbecue is something that Europeans picked up from Native Americans really from the very earliest years of contact in the 15th and 16th centuries Native American tradition was to cook on to smoke over coals Europeans traditionally were more in the roasting game thing but but they picked up pretty quickly that this was a technique that they could apply to their own cuisine and so by the 17th century you have colonists in places like Virginia who are roasting or smoking a pig over an open hole and that is something that by the time you get to the early 19th century when you have the first really the first waves of European migration the first waves of African slaves were brought with Europeans to places like the Alabama territory they're already bringing that custom and tradition with them they're using early on it's not exclusively pork barbecue it becomes pork barbecue traditionally over the course of time but early on Alabamians would barbecue pretty much anything any animal that's really available pigs were wild they were cheap they were plentiful so pay was probably the most prevalent but you see references to people doing things like mutton goat any kind of animal that really could be made into food that would favor barbecue smoking David can walk live barbecue when you see the smoke today no dope so we've got our Boston butts here over the flame currently and we're getting a nice color on those getting a sear on the outside we've also got our st. Louis truck ribs here off to the side getting good smoke color on them right now we've got half chickens and our turkey breasts all smoking at the moment so this is the part people kind of try to avoid by having a nice big southern pride smokers we have real fire down here that we have to kind of tend to and make sure that it's not burning everything on the pit pit versus smoker is a great question I got to tell you I am there's some purist out there I'm going to shock you but I'm an in-between guy I think the smoker has a purpose if you know how to dial it in and use it and I don't think you're not a true barbecue guy if you have a smoker in your restaurant I myself prefer a commercial style cooker which is gas assist wood thermostat control the temperature I keep the temperature exactly where I want it versus the big pits that people might carve out of an old gas tank and smoke those do a nice job but it's hard to get that consistency there where you may get more toughness and your texture can be a little grisly some people use a commercial smoker and if it works for them that's great but I just simply don't believe you can come up with the same product I did look at one a while back that's this natural gas and you just load the meat into the pit and turn the gas on at night and come back in the morning and your meats cooked and that takes all the personal touch out of it all the character if you ask me you're able such a temperature on these it has a digital setting and so you're able to maintain pretty well at constant temperature which helps in a cooking process because you don't have to stay up with it like you used to back in the old day we just had the strictly wood burner it's not a set and forget that type thing where each and say I want my pet to be 275 degrees exactly at all times it's more of a hey it's hot over here and it's not over here kind of thing so it's really more of an art than a science because you have to pay attention to it you have to have a feel for what you're doing we're using a rotisserie gas-powered wood-fired Pitta as most all restaurants are your bigger ones I mean that's what's revolutionized the barbecue business is these these pits Old Hickory in different ones it eliminates labor eliminates overcooking and that kind of stuff but in my heart I like the old show the coals under the knee you get a lot better bark and that kind of stuff but as much as we sell it it's just a thing of the future what it is to me a smoker is what a conveyor oven is to a pizza it cooks a good piece and it comes out on the other end just about the same every time I'm more the guy that's got that brick fired pizza oven to sticking that paddle under there going hey I think the fire is a little hotter over here will I let me push this over here a little bit I mean I got to put another log on here and when that teacher comes out each one is almost different because you've set there and hand on it the smoker the pit is the same analogy you've got to stand there and subjectively think open the right door that far and slide that part of that door that far open and when you've stood there all those years you understand when you open the right side the left side gets hot you know here's something else we don't really a barbecue pit burns different every day what's the dew point sigh how's the wind blowing what's the temperature you know and there's a high humidity point it's hard to get a fire to burn but when there's a low dew point too low humidity you got heat coming out the wazoo over there so there's a subjective call in it it's really not about just you know start and firing going to meet up there there there really is at one point or two in the cooking process you've got to make a couple of decisions that are going to affect the way that comes off with it even though it's what you do every day you know you have a choice when it comes to barbecue and a lot of people don't see it that way they say think that a direct fire and direct grilling and barbecue two totally different things and you can't intermingle the two I certainly don't believe that take for instance the whole barbecue chickens you actually get some residual drippings off the chicken and some renderings going down and hitting the hot coals okay so you get a certain charred moisture that you just can't get cooking exclusively with indirect heat I think it gives our chickens in our pork and just a little bit extra punch here at the restaurant so I I like versatility when I cook so I certainly believe that there's a need in barbecue for both direct and indirect heat basically just our primary pit everything is over Hickory we do the chicken and ribs on this you see we've got some that are coming off right here right now they're generally about a four to six hours just depends on the cut of meat depend so much fat's in it but just to you know to get a good it's a feel so there's probably like a seven to ten minute window on it before they're either going to be under dawn or overcooked so we just have to keep an eye on it and these guys do it enough that they just feel them and let go when they're ready to go these are our exhilarates that's what we use for the pull pork just for the sheer volume we do we can't do it all on the pit so these will basically holds about three cases of pork apiece and these are generally running 5 days a week you know Big Bob Gibson started back in the early 20s cook in his backyard in a literal pit in his backyard but when we came to the restaurant we had to take that pit and actually elevate it so now we actually got sort of like a brick coffin oh nice those chickens are ready to go we cook all hickory wood you'll notice our fire is on this side right here and all our coals and we will draft all the heat and smoke across the chickens and then go up the flue on this side we've got both a chimney over the fire and then we've got a flue on the other side so we can control exactly how much heat and smoke comes across our chicken so we can control the temperature with airflow when the pig guys get here in the morning usually we drop on about 75 whole chickens and that's just to get us to the beginning of lunch as soon as these come off we're going back on with another 75 a hot sizzling fire is really important when you're cooking actually when you're putting the sauce on these ribs you're get you're caramelizing the sauce so if you don't have a flame it won't sizzle that sauce right into the ribs so that's that's one thing we do here we cook with a hot grill even though this meat has been smoked for numerous hours this is a finishing process here and this gives that skin a nice crusty outside keeps the meat nice and juicy on the inside when we're talking about the cooking process here dream length of fire dictates that entire process because we don't we don't cook with smoke or steam we cook with direct heat so the bigger the fire the fan of the ribs and smaller and so on and so forth so I said that's why we try to focus on everybody's cooking with a good even base fire that way we can heat our whole Pitta that way all our ribs cook at not the same time but the same temperature and speed we've done our first flip which is when we try to sear the meat side of the reel before we flip it over to cook it through the bone side and when I mean weak side I mean this top half of the meat we're here the part that you let see with heat as opposed to the bone side which will be what's left where you get in the pit requires so much attention and a man editor you know attending it at all times because the fire can get wild it can be burning one second and docile the next and it's wood and see if we would a big a lot more efficient for us if we were inside it's not very much fun in the rain we do have tents as you can see but when it rains you get wet and but the thing about having the smoke right here is that when the wind is right and the smoke just kind of sits on the road business is goes up about 20% and you know we have people up and down our heads one guy come in when they said good God have been driving up and down this road I got to have something to eat it smokes killing me well if you want all the heat in the morning you do all the heat in the morning then like say around 12 o'clock hopefully it's all burned down the coals and just lets you spend the rest of the day just a low slow fire after that but it needs to be hot in the morning get all the big part of the cooking done then the technique is low temperatures slowly cooked for a long time and then that way the meat breaks down and develops more and better flavor so if you want to look at it in temperatures basically it's between 185 and 200 degrees is that kind of low cooking temperature you know if you want that pork ultimately to be up to one hundred and eighty-five hundred ninety degrees well if you don't ever have the fire much hotter than that it's going to cook for a long time and it will become really flavorful and juicy and so I'm a kind of a big proponent of long slow cooking at low temperatures a lot of people talk about pool pork I'm not too sure what that is we've been doing this a long time before they ever started talking about pool pork but what we do is a disassembled the shoulder take it apart piece by piece we'll clean it off any fat that's only we take that off and if there has to be happens to be something hard we cut that off so the time it gets to the customer is pure meat there's no fat no waste at all it's 100 percent for you go back to the earliest days when people reference barbecue Road about barbecue talked about barbecue it was often tied very tightly to politics and stave Alabama so it would be an excuse to pull voters together essentially a place where candidates could speak to voters party a little there with voters treat the voters right on that goes back really to the 18th century that custom of elites and elites tended to be the ones who were running for office really providing food and often drink as well for voters and so barbecue originally in the state seems to have happen most commonly in a political context a race for public office all the candidates come together speak to the voters and people will come together if you can provide them with a free meal but there definitely are stories of the way politicians relate to barbecue that can go very well and they can also go very poorly you know there's a story about John Tyler Morgan when he was running for an office very early in his career he gets up there to barbecue and he starts giving speech and about halfway through the speech apparently he just abandoned it and he sort of jumped off the stage and decided that they were going to eat first and talk later and that worked out really well for him as you could imagine voters voters really liked back quite a bit on the flip side of things you had in the late 1820s barbecue actually became sort of controversial politically there were people particularly in in and around Huntsville which is one of the more populated portions of the state then there were people who felt that that treating the voters having politics that was so democratic that really any white man could participate in it it was unseemly somehow it seemed undignified for politicians to to sort of cater to voters literally and figuratively at a barbecue and so there was a campaign to try to stamp that out to try to say that politics and barbecue really shouldn't be the way it goes and people should vote on the merits rather than on how good a meal that they get so one of the newspapers in Huntsville apparently challenged all the candidates in race to abstain to not go to political barbecues for this race I think it was a treasurer's race but I'm not I'm not positive about that so there's nine candidates the way the story goes only one of them refused to attend the barbecue he finished seventh out of nine whether or not he would have done better if you got the barbecue is unclear but not going clearly didn't help okay this is a good part about making good barbecue make sure it's trying to write what it okay let's just discuss some wood I mean basically let's clear it up you Hickory is indigenous in Birmingham mesquite is good for Texans but I can get mesquite over here it's going to cost me a fortune and people mention the word pecan I mean people need to look that up and google that because pecan and hickory are the same so let's just establish that Birmingham is Hickory it has a great flavor if you put your hand over the hickory smoke fire and just just smell the aroma right afterwards you'll understand that it is it penetrates deep into the meat we don't need another wood there's not some magical unicorn wood out there somewhere it's Hickory for Birmingham and it does just fine around here's a lot of Hickory but up north we get a lot of pear and cherry and Applewood you can pretty much use any good fruit wood or hardwood to kind of adjust your flavors you know when people ask me about wood and barbecue you always give the advice select the wood that is native to your area and learn to cook with that for us it's Hickory that's what we've been using here in Big Bob Gibson since 1925 we use history straight equals smoked hickory wood oak and pecan charcoal is our main source of heat we we put pecan wood on top to smoke it's really hard to find someone that can give me a steady supply of hickory wood I've got some wood out there now that's Elm a guy brought and unloaded that was supposed to be here in and when I got here I saw it was there and tried to get him to come back and get it and he wouldn't but I have a real good man now he has a sawmill over in Cleveland and he knows what a Hickory is and he's prompt and because it cuts it the size I want in the length I want that's a big part of it when the wood is right it cuts way down on the mantel where have to do a lot of people tell you well when you're cooking barbecue you got to have a hickory and you know the oak and heartwood this gives you the flavor but it's what you put on it that makes the barbecue so anybody who could barbecue buddies and sauce that you put on that makes it what it is yes we have about seven different sauces we have a sweet sauce tangy sauce we have a fire and whole which name explains everything and then we've got a Carolina sauce cassabi sauce a white sauce we've had people come in that's never eaten here and they line every one of the sauces up and they'll try every one of them I don't want that solves to cover up all that work that I've been doing over there and if you put too much sugar in it and you make it too sweet I could have just cooked that in the oven and you have same thing well we have very unique sauces we have barbecue pineapple sauce which is very unique and we have sweet and tangy all of our sauces and our butter no he's not a extreme amount of salt but we do make it a little saltier than most as you know the Gulf and everything salt water the South they not like myself so I got all my sauce I make from scratch and man I'm telling I call it that comeback sauce and once you come here and you tried you to come back one of the things I did when I was researching the book was to eat the meat and not sample the sauce and until the very last thing because if the meat doesn't have the flavor then it doesn't really succeed a real river without the salt you know you heat up the grill it's a really good taste sauce has thoughts had a bad real like the hickory smoke you know people don't know what it's all do it to another well you want to travel about with you either without the sauce that's a true real sauce wasn't defined in Birmingham in the 50s so there were three restaurants that kind of defined it and it was a tomato based sauce so what happened was after the 50 60 70s the definition was in and this is part of our I would say tradition people ask people I don't have a white sauce of vinegar because I'm traditional and I'm staying forward staying true to the tradition that we've helped establish we helped formulate it and define it so it's a tomato based sauce in Birmingham Alabama and one thing that sits North Alabama apart is Big Bob Gibson and the barbecue white sauce is original white sauce and that's what we're known for in North Alabama as well as cooking hold shoulders and things so we really hang our hat on our on our barbecue white sauce have our tasted some of the other sauces I can tell you this as far as white sauce mayonnaise and vinegar doesn't doesn't send doesn't set my world on fire I mean no I think our sauce is way more complex you could probably give that recipe to somebody okay put salt pepper mayonnaise and vinegar together and just start in a bowl but if I told you my sauce it would be way more complex and it's a balance of ingredients that is moving toward a perfect sauce and I firmly believe that the barbecue should stand by itself the sauces there are option for our customers trying to trace back when particular barbecue techniques are pioneered can be tricky the the sources that tell you things about barbecue the further back you go the less specific they tend to be so you're not going to find barbecue recipes from before the Civil War by and large you're not going to find you know certain kinds of sauces and specifically how those things were made this great grandfather if it goes back that far would be in the early 1800s Hedges sauce in California during the gold rush times and it passed down from generation to generation and my father eventually ended up it we tweaked it a little bit with a little edge to this and left something out and as what we have today is Hancock barbecue sauce back whenever I was a kid I wanted to learn how to barbecue and it was an older man in the town we lived in named red Sanders and everybody's called mr. red there was an old black man and so I went down to him said Mr red I'd like to learn how to cook barbecue can you teach me he said I can't teach nobody nothing but if you come work for me I'll show you some things he would show me stuff and he kept he always had a philosophy and say you got to know what's going on inside there with that firing with that meat and he had great barbecue people come there and he only cooked so much a day when they run out it was out but anyway Mr Sanders had that barbecue sauce and when he got ready to pass on I guess he kind of knew it was getting close he handed me an old piece of paper and I still got that had that recipe on and even his son didn't get it because his son wouldn't come down and help him out and I don't want to say much about that in case he hadn't see this I don't want to make him feel bad but he come and asked me if I had the recipe and I said yeah and he said he wanted and I said if your daddy wanted to give it to you it lets you have he gave it to me about eight years ago I was introduced to a gentleman by the name of bill Naaman which is the godfather of the local food movement he's out of California and he came down the Birmingham we run around state of Alabama Mississippi and we were trying to locate pig farmers and there was very few and so I decided at that point that we needed to get that fixed [Music] you know quality of work really has gone down for decades and decades up until the last 10-15 years and now we're getting some of our better places that are sourcing better quality pork that to me is very very important and is a big step in the right direction the interesting thing to me about the fatback Pig project is that a lot of the narrative today in American food is about you know heirloom varieties of pigs and you know everybody talks about the importance of reviving these Airlines varieties of pigs the way southerners talk about is we're going to start farming the way our grandparents farm we're going to start raising the same pigs our grandparents raised there you know our history our legacy and I think that's what's smart about what Nick is doing there's a big difference in local and locale so you won't find avocado farms in the state of Alabama but there's not a better place to raise hogs than our state and so we use four million pounds of pork a year and we feel like that we have an opportunity to offer farmers the ability to be successful and grow and make money it just it's just going to take time to build that infrastructure I would love to see the day when more Alabama barbecue used Alabama raised hogs that were raised by farmers that made a good living and the Hogs were well taken care of and that when we eat local barbecue indeed we are eating local barbecue and not just mass-produced commodity hogs that have been inside some confinement pin for all their lives we want hogs to be raised like they would live naturally they're healthier they get to run around southern meat when you get to meet it's a very dark red very marbled meat versus the campaign several years back where they said porks the other white meat it's not the other whitening you know and it should have never been that you want well marbled pork that has big flavor in the older breeds have incredible flavor the meats a little darker the inter muscular fat or marbling is much better I just thought it was a pretty sad thing to be in this part of the country where it's not such a natural you know place to farm and we weren't farming but it's putting people back to work it's putting farmers back to farming and I think it's a great opportunity for us as a state to make a statement to get that going again [Music] as far as barbecue places go and as restaurants you know you've got to have dessert [Music] there are places that really put a lot of care and love into the cooking definitely going to put it into the desserts and I think about you know to me one of my favorites is lemon meringue pie so when you go into a barbecue place and you see this meringue all over this sweet lemon custard cracker crust you know I love that [Music] what's really interesting about this pie filling is that it will go from being liquid to being gel in a matter of new time we just have to keep your eye on it and be really really careful it's turned into the gel I was talking about I've got egg yolks here in this bowl and I'm just going to mix some of this filling in with the egg yolk called tempering so that when I pour it back on me high the eggs don't scramble my egg whites have started to foam up so now I'm going to add some salt and some cream of tartar to help to stabilize the egg whites we've had an entire cream pie go flying across before hand on the face honestly because someone's grip here at Chez Fonfon of course we put a lot of our dessert out front so a lot of it is that visual appeal of seeing a dessert that you know kind of pulls you in barbecue has become something that has really exploded beyond the South in the last 20 or 30 years I think and has become sort of a almost a national phenomenon not in the sense necessarily that you'll see barbecue places everywhere although you can find barbecue places in some very unusual spots parts of the country you would not expect to see it barbecue does seem to be a thing that that can draw people to the south in a way that I don't think it did in previous generations everyone knew that the heart of barbecue was in the south but you see way more in terms of books television shows cook offs competitions and you know you go to a barbecue competition there's teams come from everywhere all over the country sometimes from not even in the United States but barbecue for whatever reason has gone from being something that's just sort of iconic of the south and really is something that that has come out of the south and now appeals to the rest of the world in a way that that I don't think you would have seen certainly not 4050 years ago and I'd venture to say probably not even twenty or thirty we're in the midst of a real renaissance now in American barbecue Alabama barbecue there's better barbecue being cooked now that when I was growing up more people care about it more people are dedicating their lives to growing good pigs and cooking good barbecue so the prospects are great barbecue is going to continue to change going to continue to evolve people are curious about the South in general our region like no other region in America has a mystique about it it's a little scary to some people it's it's intriguing to people because we don't fit the way the rest of the country sees themselves and we have an interesting history a complicated history and so people are curious as to what the South is about what Alabama is about and so they know that they have some preconceived notions and they come and they want to find out if those notions are true or not and barbecue is a great way for us to welcome people in so that they can see something that really started in the south and that is I think the excellence is unique to our state's I think southerners have a sense of pride about our connectedness to each other through barbecue and how all different types of people different colors different people of different incomes come together and are all the same at a barbecue joint and I think food brings us together in a way and I think barbecue does that in a very special wonderful way I have not had anything like Alabama barbecue or even southern barbecue outside of the US I've had some good smoked meats around but nothing like this this is a very specific type of food that is made only in one place and it is ours barbecue is is not just a job there's a life barbecues a lifeblood for me it's what's what's keys to keeps me going is what I do every day during the week it's what I do on the weekends is a hobby when you see somebody grab a ribbon and really enjoy it this is pretty neat going baseball player hit a home run I started in the distance amounts of 19 I'm 57 now and I love it parking lots part of my family's life so it's not a job it's way of how we live our lives so I couldn't be happy people come in all the time Charlie knows if well we don't have any food we'll hang with I'll pick some some peas you know give him some D because a lot of people are less fortunate so you have to help one another and that way the Lord keep on blessing the best fun part about this is my custody we interact with everybody take time off the person and be with them and they like that they like so the personal touch we care about this you know you got to keep my cell know to get a little that look at all right you don't care about your job you can have nothing good about it right so they were here though try to steer people louder that's that's with no to RTS unit you know it was a free way to be working at dreamland barbecue matters in Alabama as a total of black and white it's a shared creation that's why residents one reason southern food ready because black and white can see their hands on our food I mean this is my life literally if you took this restaurant away I would have to find another purpose I couldn't just go to another job because I was bred to do this I mean it 8 years old your dad calls you in and you work with them for 20 years side by side we mentors you and this is the only job I've ever had so this is it as far as barbecue goes it's the true American food no I can't do that tell me how to fight I will not tell you how to make it I'm the only person with the recipe by the way would you give me your recipe to see how to let go myself Nelson I won't get risky I can't I have to keep that to the Shivering I can tell you what's my life thanks and I'll take a Spanky but can't tell you what's in it I can't do that which I could I would I really do I mean tell me how to make your shop tell you how to make myself but I tell you what you become 305 it doesn't work well by your photo or gathering it whatever you like I'm sorry I misspoke because the old friend of a dude I got you [Laughter] you know better than to ask if you can have the recipe for the song [Music] [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Alabamatourism

Views: 1,237,126

Rating: 4.6053495 out of 5

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Id: HzhTqo8ayHU

Length: 56min 49sec (3409 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 03 2017