Viewers like you make this
program possible. Support your local PBS station. (upbeat music) (fire crackling) Welcome to BBQ with Franklin. Here in Texas, beef
is a huge part of BBQ. And it's easy to just go
to the grocery store and pick any random
piece of meat. But there's so much
more to it than that. On this episode, we're gonna
to dig a little deeper, and talk to some
experts about beef. (guitar strumming) (blues music) Louie Mueller's in
Taylor is one of the grand-daddies of Texas BBQ. The smoke is soaked
into the walls, the menu is super traditional,
and you won't find much more in the rub
than salt and pepper. Three generations of Muellers
have been at the helm here. And these days, Wayne Mueller
is the man behind the pit. Over the years I've
become friends with Wayne, so let's go talk to
him about beef ribs. Hey buddy! (laughing) - What's up! How you doing, Aaron? - I'm doing good, how you doin'? - I'm doing wonderful, man. Just cooking a little beef, you know all about that, right? - I've heard of it before. - Yeah, that's
what I understand. Beef ribs, oddly
enough, are the one menu item that has
been consistent from the time that
we first opened. - [Franklin] Really?
I didn't know that. - [Wayne] It's the
oldest standing item that we have on our menu. It's gone through
many iterations. Many different cuts, many
different butchering. But it is still been
a beef short rib. The building that
we're in right now was built in 1906,
just coincidentally the same year my
grandfather was born. My grandfather is
not a native Texan. He was born in Collinsville,
Illinois, son of a barber. - But he got here
as soon as he could. - He got here as soon as he
could, by way of Montana. He bought a little red
and white grocery store. Fresh meat market,
and refrigeration was just horrible in 1946. As all these meat markets in the Central Texas area
did, he had to minimize spoilage, so what
you did, you smoked it, you dried it, and you
made it into sausage. Grandpa retired
'74, Dad took over. He was a butcher, and was
working with Fred Fontaine. Fred Fontaine is kind of like, the grandfather of
Central Texas BBQ. The stuff that that guy was
doing, we still do today. We utilize all of
the same equipment that we've been
utilizing for years. We've added some new
pieces to help us with volume, but
ultimately, the process, the wood, all of
that is the same. It hasn't really
changed, and I think that's one of the
beauties of what we do. - [Franklin] So you want
to tell me a little bit about how you cook beef ribs? - Yeah, it's about
heat, it's about time. Salt and pepper is all we use. - [Franklin] Yeah, pretty
heavy on the pepper though. - [Wayne] Very
heavy on the pepper. I've said it a
million times, for us, black pepper is a
fifth food group. - [Franklin] The way that
pepper cooks into the fat, it melts together, it
gets almost buttery. It takes on a whole
'nother flavor. - [Wayne] The fat
just coats every little piece of
pepper, which really mutes down the heat index. But it acts more as an
aggregate in concrete. It helps to build this bark on the outside of this thing. As you can see, we use a
horizontal configuration. Something that
you're familiar with. Instead of being closer
to say, a 220, 225 temperature in the
back end, these are up closer to 3,
325, and it helps render out that fat
a little bit more. I do all meat side up. That bone actually acts
as, both as an insulator, and absorbs that heat,
and then pushes it back up through in a more
consistent fashion. That bone makes
all the difference in the world in my opinion. - [Franklin] You get so
much flavor out of the bone. You get like the marrow cooking out of it and everything. - [Wayne] Have you ever
cooked these without the bone? - [Franklin] No,
no, I never have. I bet it's a totally
different thing. - [Wayne] It's a
whole different thing. It doesn't break down the same, it doesn't taste
the same, it's just a different piece of meat. Each one of these is
like a child, right? You want to give it
everything it needs to be president. (laughs) - You're gonna go to the moon! - Exactly, so, what
does this rack need, that that rack doesn't? Well it needs a
little bit more heat, and it needs it on this side. Or, it needs to be
set back, it needs to rest a little bit more,
it's going too fast. Find out what it needs
and give it to it. - Wayne Mueller, king
of analogies. (laughing) - So, I'm told,
so, I'm told. - You've got one for everything. - I do have one for everything. (upbeat music) I feel blessed to be in
a third generation spot, standing on the shoulders
of those men that came before me, doing
everything that they did. So much of what Texas BBQ is, wouldn't be around
if it wasn't for those people before me, here, and in other places as well. It's more rewarding
in so many levels, that I would have never thought. - Well, I can say from
my own personal opinion, that I think you've taken
this place to new levels. You've taken the
torch and run with it, my good friend. - Thank you very much. - And I think I'm going
to go stand in line and reap the benefits
of it. (laughing) - I think you should! Let me grab one for ya! I got just the one for ya! - [Franklin] Beef ribs
are one of the more straightforward cooks
at the restaurant. They go on, we take care of 'em, and about eight hours later, they're ready to
come off for lunch. (guitar strumming) (symphony music) We're here at Texas A&M
University for beef 101. Class is about to start
with our instructor, Bossy the Cow, and
we're going to learn about beef carcass anatomy. Let's go, come on. Texas A&M has been teaching
beef 101 for 20 years, and they cover all
the basics of beef. - We've not fed her too well. - [Franklin] They follow
a cow from the farm to harvest, all the
way to the plate. Today we're dropping
in for a breakdown of where all the cuts
of beef come from. - You almost have
to start at anatomy, so that's where we're
going to start today. When we rib at the
12th and 13th rib, we have a hindquarter
and a forequarter. We're gonna cut all
the way across today, to remove the
chuck, the brisket, and the foreshank from
the rib and the plate that are all in
this forequarter. - [Franklin] There
are so many cuts that come from a side of beef. More than a dozen different
steaks, and all sorts of ribs. For BBQ, it all starts here,
(bell dings) at the shoulder. Down here's the
brisket, and there's only one on each side. Just behind the brisket
are the ribs. (bell dings) The top section is
where the rib roast and back ribs come from. But down underneath are the
short ribs and chuck ribs. Them's BBQing ribs. As we head back towards
the hindquarter, we start to see some
familiar steaks. T-bone, porterhouse and sirloin. And then, the
round. (bell dings) Where stuff like the
rump roast comes from. A cow is a big, big
animal, and a lot of different cuts of meat
come from a single side. (slow music) Now that we know
a little bit about beef anatomy, we're
gonna butcher up some forequarters,
let's do this! - [Leslie] Dr.
Griffin always kids, that when you're done
with the forequarter, you're like, "I'm
done cutting meat, "I'm really glad I'm in
the position that I'm in." Which is absolutely true. There's a lot of
different muscles that we'll take apart today. As we separate the
chuck, the brisket, the foreshank from the
rib and then the plate, we want to to right between
the 5th and the 6th. I'm gonna mark that off here. I will have to
admit, when it's been a stressful week, I
love cutting beef. I do, because it's
like an exercise, can relieve some stress. Usually when we're cutting, I'm the instigator of all
the bragging and stuff. Only because it
gets them riled up, and it could be a long day. Did you get all the way
through that sternum? - [Franklin] Maybe not. - [Leslie] There we go! So we've done a major
cut here, right? We've separated the rib-eye
roll from the plate. Now, along here,
this muscle here is that brisket muscle, called the deep pectoral. We'll go approximately
an inch from there. The reason why we
go to one inch is, according to the IMPS,
the meat specifications, you have to have a fat
tab on the brisket. If your brisket
doesn't have a fat tab, it was cut too short,
so you're really being cheated quite a
bit of that muscle. That's all in the
way it was cut. It's not that brisket
come with a fat tab, it's the way that we
process and cut those, that's why they have that. We're looking for the
cartilage of the first rib. And we're gonna kind of follow
that down this direction. Now look, it lines
up pretty well with close to an inch
from the deep pectoral. Now, we always tease about how animals don't have hundreds
of sets of ribs, right? They have 13 on each side. The way they're fabricated,
determines the type of ribs that they are, where they're
located anatomically. These are in the chuck,
chuck short ribs. So the next thing that
we're gonna do is, go ahead and remove the
brisket off of the chuck. Be sure you stay in the seam, because if you're
out of that seam you can ruin the
point of our brisket. So if you want to set this here. Here, you see how
there's a ledge now, you've got fat and
then it dips down? You are going to end
up taking your knife. You just wanna put
kind of, shave it away. So, back ribs, if we come
in and cut a section here, we have rib, short ribs. Plate, short ribs. What we're going to
do today, is remove the rib initially
from the plate, and we're going to remove
it to a three by four. You can take your knife
then, and separate that. So Aaron, are these
startin' to look a little bit more like
what you're seeing in terms of BBQ realm? - Yes, they're beautiful ribs. - Okay, to finish
these, we're actually gonna remove this
outer muscle here, and you'll peel it right on off. The thing that a lot of
people don't realize, is this muscle here,
and if we flip this guy right over, which is
kind of a neat thing. Have you ever seen an
animal out in the field shake their body to
get rid of the flies? That's this thin muscle
here that does that. - [Student] It almost
looks like bacon under... - [Leslie] Well if
you think about it, - [Franklin] That's
the same part. - [Leslie] Yeah, a
side of pork, that's where the belly would come from. (cow mooing) - So we just left the
Rosenthal building, we were breaking
down forequarters. Now we're gonna find
out where these things come from, with my
friend, Dr. Jeff Savell. Jeff, thanks for having us. - [Dr. Savell] This
steer right here is probably 18, 19 months old. So, it would have been
born, it would have been weaned at about
five or six months old. It would have been
raised, would have had some grass back in its
background at some point to get it to grow
a little bit more. Then it would have
eventually gotten to more of a grain based
diet, more towards the later months of its life. - [Franklin] You
know, a lot of people ask me about grass fed. I think it's really
good for fast cooks, like steaks and stuff,
but it's not so good for long cooks because
it doesn't have the fat. - [Dr. Savell] It's
very difficult on a
grass finish program to get the animals to
the same level of fatness for the grade, or
for the acceptability by a lot of the markets. You almost look at those
as two different markets. There is a niche
market for grass, and we see that
around the country. Still the biggest market we have is for grain finish animals. - [Franklin] Yep, they
tend to be the best. - [Dr. Savell] Well,
and especially for
export markets too. They love the grain
finished product that would be here
from the United States. You were just talking
about the forequarters, where you get a
lot of the product that you cook with. Plate short ribs, are
ribs six, seven and eight. You'll hear people
talk about, "I have a "three-rib rib,
or a four-rib rib. So the three, then
they're in this area right here, and that
section is about like that. They're about nine
or ten inches long. - [Franklin] And those are
the huge Brontosaurus ribs that everybody's excited about. - That's right, those
the ones, when you go to a BBQ place, and
they're great big ribs. If you want to impress
friends, and cook those low and slow a long time. Or go find somebody that
does that for a living. (laughing) - Alright Jeff,
sure appreciate it. - Thank you for coming by. - It's always a
pleasure, good times. (cow mooing loudly) (upbeat music) Ordering a beef rib
can be pretty daunting. They're big. Around a pound and a half. Usually enough for
a couple of people. But a beef rib done well, is really something special. (guitar strumming) So butchers are always
finding different ways, like different seams,
and different ways to kind of butcher things. I wonder if the brisket exists from those guys
in the old times, like in Central Texas, actually
coming up with that brisket. Because it's two muscles,
there's no reason for those two muscles,
the point and the flat, to still stay connected. - [Daniel] Well, I was
curious about that too. I asked Joe Capello at
City Meat Market in Luling, because he was
originally a meat cutter. - Always wearing a hard hat. - Always wearing
a hard hat, yeah. Never know when
that beef carcass is going to fall on your head. (laughing) He said that some
of those guidelines that are still used
today on carcass, are just guidelines
from way back. You go talk to even Prine's
BBQ up in Wichita Falls. - [Franklin] That's
one of the oldest places in the state, right? - [Daniel] Yes, Alan
Prine even remembers, before he got the responsibility
of cooking the meat, his job was to take
the forequarter and cut it into 12 or 13 pieces before they would
put it on the smoker. That all changed
in the '60's, when the big meat companies started with their boxed beef program. So all of a sudden,
instead of having to order whole carcasses in
and figuring out where to store them, and
get racks to hang them on, you could all of a
sudden order individual cuts of beef in a box, all
wrapped up pretty for you. So you could now
start ordering a box of five different briskets. - [Franklin] Which,
these days, if every BBQ place had to
get whole animals, or just forequarters
or whatever, they wouldn't know
what to do with that. - Right, they would
really be forced to go back to trying
to figure out ways to cook all those other cuts. These days, we've
really narrowed it back to just brisket and beef ribs. Big, giant plate short ribs. - I started cooking
brisket because, "Oh, it's brisket, it's BBQ." Then also, it was really cheap. It was like $.70 a pound. - Who smokes a chuck
roll these days, or beef shank? - Yeah, you can get shanked
for that kind of thing. - You can. These things that were
once really common around Texas, especially
in the meat markets, they really disappeared. - Yeah, but that's
what Texas BBQ is. Maybe it doesn't matter
so much how we got there. The point is that you're there. - Very nice. - No BBQ pun intended. (upbeat music) Looks like I'm here at
my local grocery store, looking to buy some beef ribs. I'm going to pick a number,
talk to the butcher, see what they've got. - [Butcher] Number 89, 89. Number 93, 93, number 94. - [Franklin] Hey!
- Hey, how's it goin' today? - Good, how you doin'?
- Not too bad. - Nice.
- What are we looking for? - Well, I'm looking
for some beef ribs. - [Donovan] You're in luck! I have several types. The basis of most of these ribs are going to be off
the chuck plate. This is the plate here. From that plate,
you can get your English style cut,
which is thick cut, good for braising or smoking. Which are going to
be cut cross-wise, and then this way
in individual ribs. Here you have your
flanken style rib, which is just cross-cut thin, and that's good for grilling
or Asian style stir fry. - [Franklin] Gotcha. - [Donovan] Then we
have the back ribs here. That comes off the primal
cut of the rib-eye. - Can I look at the
three-bone plate ribs, and the back ribs?
- [Donovan] Sure. Right here would be, one of your
three-bone plate ribs. - [Franklin] It's pretty. - [Donovan] These big guys here, are pretty awesome as well. - So these are the back
ribs, and these are up by the spine.
- [Donovan] Correct. - You guys hand cut these.
- Yes we do. - Obviously, they're beautiful. - [Donovan] So you're
gettin' all that good rib-eye meat there, but you're
not paying for rib-eyes. - This is the plate rib, so
it's got a lot more meat. It's got a lot more
fat in there, too. It comes from a little
lower on the rib cage, so... - Better protective tissue. - I'm going to go
with the plate rib. - Good choice, my man.
- Heck yeah. So, I went with
the plate rib here, because when you
go to a BBQ joint, you get those huge
Brontosaurus ribs, that's what they're cookin'! That's what I cook
at the restaurant, so that's what
we're cooking today. So, when you go to the
butcher, ask for plate ribs. It's cool, cause
they're a lot smaller than the ones I
normally cook, so that's gonna be like an hour less time that I have to stand there
and stare at the fire. - And we always love that. - I like it.
- Here you are, sir. - Thank you, much appreciated. - Alright, talk
to you next time. (guitar strumming) - The question I
get asked the most, is "How do you cook beef ribs?" Well, turns out, it's
just about the easiest thing there is to cook. So today, we're
gonna cook beef ribs. This one's pretty small, it's plate ribs from
the grocery store. I think it's gonna take
about six hours to cook. If you had a bigger
one, you may be looking at closer
to eight hours. First step, I'm gonna
slather the beef ribs in Louisiana Hot Sauce. You could do anything
you want, really. You could use oil, you
could not use anything. I like the hot sauce, it gives
it kind of an added tang, and it helps the rub
stick a little bit. I'm just gonna... Slather a little bit,
kind of get a little wet. Then I'm going to
sprinkle on some salt. I only use Kosher salt. Table salt's too fine. So kind of get all sides. I like to do the salt
first, so you can see how much you're putting on. Then a ton of pepper. You could put any kind
of rub you wanted to. And then the fire, I'm
looking to cook these beef ribs about 285. I tend to go a bit hotter
than I do with brisket. It's got bones in there. Bone side down, kind
of helps shield it, it kind of helps insulate
it just a little bit. Also helps it cook a lot faster. One thing to be a
little careful of with the beef ribs,
is if you cook really, really hot,
you'll cook out a lot of bone marrow and
stuff out of the bones, and they tend to get
a little bit gamey. So, on it goes. (upbeat music) Alright, so it's been
about 5 1/2 hours. I'm gonna spritz
it, keep it moist, keep the edges from
getting too crunchy, and I'm gonna actually probe it. With my trusty thermometer. Just to kind of get a feel
for what's going on in there. It's lookin'
really, really nice. Got a good bark, not
getting too crunchy. What I'm feeling
for is to see if it's feeling pretty
tight, or it feels like it's starting to get tender. Starting to get
tender back here, but still has a
ways to go up there. Shut the lid, and come
back in a little bit. (upbeat music) So these beef ribs are
about 6 1/2 hours in. I'm thinkin' they're
pretty close to done. I'm gonna probe. Oh yeah, those feel great. So I'm gonna take 'em off. Always use a towel. Kind of pick 'em up,
you want these ribs to be tender, they should almost fall apart, but not quite. But what I'm really going for, is I'm gonna probe inside here, but I'm going right
in between the bones. When you poke through the bark, it should feel like melted
butter on the probe. You're not really
looking at temperatures. If you were, it would
be around 200 degrees, but each beef rib's a
little bit different, so, super duper soft, and
right here, there's that second membrane between
the bones and the meat. When you go through,
you can feel the probe poke right
through the second membrane, and that's what you're
really going for. If that feels tender,
this rib is done. Don't forget to let it rest. Just for a little bit to let it reabsorb some of
the juices, too. A lot of people ask
about beef ribs. It's really no big deal. Salt and pepper,
spritz it with water, some vinegar, apple
juice, whatever you want. But the point is, cook
it 'til it's done, don't cook it too hot
where you burn it, and don't cook it low enough
where you don't render fat. Piece of cake. We're going to head out to... somewhere, and learn somethin'. Talk to some experts about beef. ♪Beef experts, eew, eew (low singing voice) ♪Animal -You know our technical term for
that? It's Fatty McFattersons Nope.
You good? You get it?
Hello friend. ...help pay for that video tape. Especially if it knocks me down.
Give me that phone.
