How a Vietnamese Pitmaster is Bringing New Flavors to Texas Barbecue — Smoke Point

so we're uh prepping some chickens now for our smoked chicken rice and yuzu kosho dish in texas barbecue you know you'll find brisket and ribs a lot of places we'll do turkey or chicken we have chicken rice as a street food in asia and so that's where the idea for us came from is to smoke chickens but use it in a chicken rice dish that we kind of ate growing up that our mom cooked so what we're doing here is kind of spatchcocking the chicken because when it lays on the smoker it's going to lay nice and flat on the smoker like that the second component of the chicken rice dish is yuzukusha use yukosho which is a japanese sort of fermented chili citrus dressing that has you know lime and lemon zest garlic and some oil today we're doing a dry brine pretty basic salt and leave it there for 2-3 hours a lot of the flavor is going to come from the chicken fat and then the smoke this chicken dish will be fortified by the rice the rice has a ton of flavor in it it has some chicken rendered chicken fat in there it has garlic ginger this dish has been really popular for us we did it for the first time kind of experimentally for a barbecue competition we ended up winning the whole texas barbecue competition with a chicken dish which was pretty funny because texas is a beach state this is a vietnamese coffee this is how we get started the feel to the uh the cook is uh in this little cup right here um so we do pop-ups usually when we do pop-ups it's at a brewery we'll cook everything here we'll put them in coolers kind of have our tables our tent and stuff and kind of move everything to the brewery right now we're trying to build uh that of coals yeah we're using uh post oak because it's the most uh ubiquitous wood uh in texas uh has a mild flavor we really like it because it lets the meat kind of shine through during the cook we aim to have the smoker the internal temps around uh 225 um i'd say our fire is pretty consistent with this sort of new school barbecue the biggest difference between kind of this new school style is just running it really low really slow in old school it's kind of hot and fast uh we're cooking in the the front yard the first week everybody thought their homes were on fire but now everybody's used to uh to us doing this uh once in a while you just gotta give your neighbor some brisket and some ribs and everybody has uh tended to stay quiet and no complaints so far knock on wood we're about to trim some briskets we got some briskets from 44 farms their steers are grain fed they treat their animals ethically and we think that creates a better product i think the main goal for us is to make it as aerodynamic as possible because we're using offset smokers the smoke comes laterally so side to side and if you play super mario it's kind of like this torpedo so it's kind of like round on one end and kind of it flattens out on the other and that's kind of the shape that you want beef is pretty prevalent in vietnamese cooking i think that's a function of the french influence vietnamese food in itself is more vegetable based a lot of soups steaming the red meat consumption definitely increased with the french and now we're going to build the rub it's going to be salt and pepper the thing is we use a kosher salt but this pepper is from fukuoka it's an island in southern vietnam the seasonings are there to kind of help accentuate the meat's flavor to not overpower it so you don't want too much it's kind of for us this this coating is is perfect and one of the dishes that we're using uh the brisket for today is pho um now we're gonna make some uh pho broth to go with our brisket this is fennel cilantro seeds and then this is a star anise it kind of adds like a sweet tangy sort of notes cinnamon these guys here are black cardamom so this is kind of what gives the broth its flavor so we'll tie the back here um it's kind of like a slow release into the broth the broth takes about four or five hours to make pop it in and then the last part we'll put the chicken on we like to use a chicken broth in our biscuit fall because you know brisket is really heavy fatty and so we think it balances out nicely with a light stalk these beef ribs have already smoked for about 12 hours so we use these bones because they already have a lot of smoke infused in them that's what we want in the fab broth as well as kind of smoky flavor so now we kind of just let time do its thing um we'll wash the smoker make sure the biscuits are being cooked you can just let the broth do its thing vietnamese food in texas barbecue go together so well is uh they're kind of diametrically opposite you know vietnamese food there's a lot of soups steamed stuff lots of herbs everything's light and fresh texas barbecue is savory delicious fatty and so it's kind of like the ying and the yang of uh you know you have something really really light that kind of bound each other out so these are the beef short ribs so like kind of the dino ribs from the short plate of the cow so what we're going to do right now is we're trimming them ultimately we'll use the uh the finished product for our calobi beef rib nigiri we really like this dish because you know we grew up in houston houston is really diverse and so we ate a lot of cream barbecue growing up and so that's inspiration for this dish for the korean barbecue the cowbee is just grilled for a few seconds on the table and then you eat it but what we're looking for is imparting a smokiness so instead of a few seconds on the grill we're smoking these short roots for 12 to 14 hours my brother theo who is the other half of koi will be helping us make the um korean cowbee marinade so we got some orange juice garlic so i'm just gonna skin down the asian pear real quick cowbey is a soy garlic and sugar based marinade but here we're doing a little twist by throwing it on our beef ribs [Music] it's like texas barbecue the trinity is you know brisket pork ribs and sausage i think cowboy and korean barbecue probably like the brisket right it's like yeah you can't have korean barbecue with that growing up in texas in houston especially where there's a ton of vietnamese chinese indian people korean japanese pakistani has a huge influence on how we cook and what we cook because when we cook with koi we ask ourselves like what dishes can we kind of riff on that brings us sort of nostalgia uh stuff like we ate growing up as kids right like brisket fur we ate brisket growing up great growing up how do we combine those two dishes in a way that is fluid and cohesive and fun and most importantly delicious to eat this sausage we're making today it's called bala lock with a traditional vietnamese dish that involves la la leaves it's kind of like a beetle leaf the cousin of a beetle leaf kind of medicinally traditionally palalok dish it's ground beef seasoned and then you wrap the leaves around the beef into like little ovals and then you uh you grill them these are the brisket trimmings that we're going to repurpose into sausage [Applause] what we do is we take the level of leaves we dice them finally we take some we stick it in the firebox to kind of honor that direct fire tradition and then we kind of mix it all into the sausage meat the bbq community has been great even though you know we do this part time we've met a lot of good friends like our friend here brian bingham he's helping us out with the sausage right now growing up i was really embarrassed to bring my friends over my mom was cooking with fish sauce you know we had pickled cabbage and stuff and it smelled kind of funky and i was like oh my god my friends are gonna like you know make fun of me but now it's been great to embrace it and so when people you know come to our pop-ups they might be like oh what is that red stuff oh it's kimchi and then 10 minutes later they're like can i have some more right that always brings a smile to my face putting people out of their comfort zone but then making it accessible through barbecue and then surprising them and then they end up liking it [Music] um so we were making boom boom bah so the stock is comprised of you know femur bones these are really great because they have marrow in it and which we'll use to thicken up the stock we have some beautiful uh chuck that will use and then we'll have some oxtail as well which is really nice because it's it's a tougher cup but once you kind of boil it and cook it for five six hours it becomes extremely tender and really flavorful so we're going to take all these three components and add it to the broth i'm from da nang my hometown is from da nang in the central vietnam and uh a city that's next to us is called huay was the old imperial capital and they're known for a spicy noodle dish called and that's that so um we'll leave this here once it boils all the impurities will come out for the next couple hours we can just let the broth do its thing via text means a few different things it's just a term that we thought encapsulates our identity right where vietnamese americans that grew up in texas as simple as that but it's also the type of food that we we like to do you know we love traditional vietnamese food we love traditional texas barbecue it's kind of what started uh the essence of koi right uh central texas barbecue ate with an asian influence so it's just the connection between our kind of cultural heritage of being from vietnam our parents are from vietnam you know we speak vietnamese we eat vietnamese food but we're also texans so it's kind of that duality of our identity and also the food that we want to put out koi or koi how you pronounce in vietnamese means smoke so that's where we got our inspiration because we want to cook with smoke cooked with indirect fire indirect heat the word that represents what we do is try to infuse smoke in vietnamese dishes and american dishes in chinese japanese whatever the dish we do we think about how to incorporate smoke as a flavor you put you know two different cultures together something great can happen and i think in this days and age with a lot of you know um divisiveness that you know two different opposing styles you don't think that might go together necessarily but when you do it in a thoughtful manner you know it could work and that you know we should we should celebrate that you

Channel: Eater

Views: 926,378

Keywords: barbecue, bbq, Vietnamese barbecue, Vietnamese brisket, Vietnamese-Texas barbecue, Vietnamese-Texas bbq, brisket pho, smoked chicken rice & yuzukoshō, barbecue brisket pho, Texas barbecue, Texas bbq, asian barbecue chicken, Asian barbecue, Asian barbecue brisket, Vietnamese-style barbecue, Don and Theo Nguyen, Khói Barbecue, vietnamese texas barbecue, vietnamese food, asian barbecue, eater, eater.com, food, restaurant, dining, dish, foodie, chef, food show, texas barbecue

Id: URNBfR-EW3M

Length: 11min 19sec (679 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 28 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/IronChicken68]

Interesting choice of t-shirt. A few years ago I saw Thich Quang Duc's car (in the background) in a museum in Hue.