How Texas Pitmaster Miguel Vidal Perfected the Brisket Taco — Smoke Point

[Music] briskets king in Texas if you can't cook brisket right then you don't need to have a barbecue restaurant in Texas we're serving briskets not only by the pound but we're serving four tacos what I wanted to do is represent what I thought was true that how no cooking you know I grew up grilling smoking barbecuing and then the Mexican flavors kind of just in tandem with it and I wanted to represent for what I thought was the Chicano and Tejano culture here in Texas pushing out what we doing at the home we are in South Austin at Valentino's tex-mex barbecue [Music] for breakfast we have our chicken fajita breakfast taco everyone knows what that is and we're doing a spicy egg so we need some Serrano's chopped up people want barbecue just have a good day yeah so here we have our pits everything is named after my favorite bands for this lead singers they got Maynard Cornell and we have Cobain this could actually the day that I went to go pick it up from our welder on the radios we heard that a Cornell had passed away so it was meant to be we do like traditional Texas barbecue right except we use mesquite wood a lot of people don't use it for smoking they use it more for grilling because they're afraid of it thinking that it's super powerful the Mesquite puts out earthy and sweet notes to it and when it's used proper it's one of the best things with beef in my opinion whenever these pits are not cooking if you put your head down into the barrel it smells like kind of like dark chocolate or like burnt chocolate brownies it's also so it's really great I do try and have a balance of more aged wood and then a little bit of greener wood you can see the difference in some of them see this right here that yellow this is gonna have more moisture in it and I'm looking for some that a little bit lighter like this one right here it's a little bit brighter this one will have less moisture in it you can tell the difference so this is a big long this is a smaller one but they weigh about the same I like to have the bottom logs kind of facing out with our with our air this is our high-tech oxygen blower yeah so when it burns you smell like grass fire you know what I mean but when you cook you get the earthy and sweetness from it all right so now we've got our fires going this fire probably be like you know over 500 degrees right here but the actual internal temp of the pit we're looking for about 225 to 240 you want to be able to trim some brisket right now and we want to start loading them up and seasoning it on here soon so they're on by about 11 o'clock cooking we're trying to make the briskets all the same shape like look at this one right here this one's huge and when they go into smoker we don't want to be opening and closing has to rotate so much so we're looking to have most of briskets to kind of have the same shape and size Hardy Ranch has really great Angus cows here in Texas been around for a long time we use their prime beef you know grass-fed but then there are finished off with grain at the very end we're serving briskets not only by the pound but we're serving four tacos that allows me to treat the brisket slightly different see I'm gonna take most of this deco out because it doesn't render anyway our briskets have a lot of marbling they have a lot of good juices that maintain in it anyway and all the leftover stuff we'll use because we only get about 50% and yield out of this you know this brisket might weigh like 7 pounds cooked and it's probably like you know like 14 right now and so we got to try and make up for that by figuring other stuff out like that's where we talked about making tips like stuff like this this is good for like our sausage and these beef tips will get smoked in braise and I'll make brisket you saw the or Street Stoppers from now I've it I'm gonna finish this one brisket right here and it will get ready to season up we should go to town the brisket rub is a combination of our red rub pepper and salt our red rub is something that we make here but this has salt pepper and garlic sugar paprika cayenne chili powder risk is probably the hardest thing to me cook I think it's the hardest thing to anybody cooks in Texas because you're striving to have a hundred percent perfection you put on 400 pounds of brisket you want 400 pounds to be perfect you don't want to lose it there's almost 48 hours worth of preparation going in to produce something that's gonna be consumed in less than like three minutes okay so we're looking for us particularly here is to be able to have the briskets cook almost evenly all at the same time we place the briskets depending on size and shape in different spots so we have the ones that are bigger towards the back and the on the side of the firebox or the smokestack because you're gonna get a bit more heat there the smaller ones are placed in the middle but we want the fat edge to be facing the metal or the doors because you're gonna get a bit more heat on that side we're gonna shut these doors and we're not gonna look at them for at least six seven hours these vegetables right here I'm gonna roast off real quick for another one of our plates kaupapa Kenya but smoke peppers and onions basically they need some right now so we're trying to get it down real quick so our menus based off Texas barbecue and then the influence of the Mexican culture those types of things that we've never represented in the home cooking coming through where you have barbecue fresh tortillas avocado roasted corn roasted peppers and different styles of using fire and smoke right behind y'all coming in hot hey keep three people on the line keep running recycle stick us down let's go were you out on sausage so we do like about 24 pounds of pork and about 12 pounds of beef the fat ratio if you kind of let it just happen naturally we try and keep chunks in here so we get about 25-30 percent of fat when he has everything all mixed up and then we'll case them here we've been working together for years before this as well so we've had this brotherly relationship but we could tell each other you know we're we're doing something wrong and you know accepted and you know hopefully correct it so this our OG sausage that we're about to mix right here we've got onion powder salt pepper garlic our red rub Mexican oregano here we have some diced poblanos right here we have a garlic and cilantro that's been blended up the thing that is like that concerns us the most brisket because you want it to be perfect that we find but sausage size is pretty like the whole process - it's a long process takes a while my brother and I grew up a little bit different because of our age differences you know I'm seven years older than him I grew up on the south side of San Antonio I always played sports but also kind of like like the neighborhood and feel and grew up around the lowriders and stuff and I kind of liked that a lot and we moved to like north central San Antonio so he didn't really grow up on the south side like I did he once told me how did I come out so gangster and you came out so hipster [Music] I'm just looking at for your kind of to fill in the casing without pushing the casing too much or a super-tight right now because I want to have some room so I can link up the sausage barbeque is being able to take a piece of meat that typically wouldn't taste good or something that's not preferable and being able to transform it into something very delicious and delicate and decadent and juicy and tender and tasteful right barbecue use low and slow just like that truck back over there this is a 1961 Apache I've always been into lowriders some older trucks if this truck was perfect perfect I probably wouldn't drive it too much you know I like having a little bit of imperfections with it just like food there's little imperfections in all the food too you know [Music] check this boy out that's been going for a while now whenever we rap we don't never gauge the temperature we go mostly for the way it looks the color so this one's got a nice spark on it it's been going about nine ten hours this is what we would like the brisket to look right before it's about to get rapped we try to have them all come off around the same time because we have a pretty strict schedule especially when the weekend comes and the pit space that we have ones got wrapped about 10 hours in and then it's is another three hours on rats this is what we use vermicelli fideo noodles okay just box it's like 13 cents or something like that right this is what my mom would feed our family on you know all of us fideos you know it's a traditional Spanish and Mexican dish we use the vermicelli noodles cooked with butter and they're brown and you create a broth of tomato base broth that has spices a little bit of chili powder cayenne may be heavy on garlic maybe some oregano maybe not sometimes with broth soups you start with like aromatics for the onions boat it doesn't really need that it's gonna be so much packed with flavor we shouldn't cookies I understand kind of swim to the ball it was a favorite dish of mine growing up I ain't it too much and got sick of it when I got older it's all I could think about was that kind of food the plate that I grew up eating had fideo served up they take these noodles gonna stay brown a little bit and you drop them into the hot broth and he serve the noodles with the broth and you have refried beans which we've already made and we have ground beef or beef picadillo and this is some of the meat here this is that same brisket that's been ground up and it's been smoked on the pit to create our smoked beef it's kind of like a version like Mexican goulash or something so they were serving their failed local taco so it's a version of this dish packed into a big-ass taco I remember early age by 4 or 5 years old helping my grandmother make tortillas flour tortillas in particular we're in San Antonio so you're coming from like the northern Mexico and South Texas region and you have more of like the Sonoran influence and that's where the flour tortilla comes from that fresh flour tortilla and the process it takes to hand mix and to fill that dough and to push them out and have something that's like a replacement for fresh white bread or something that's super important for me to have as a component here this is a very good size to work with to where we come in and we're pinching and we're doing 50 to 60 grams so then these will sit for about 20 minutes or so and then they'll be ready to press flour tortillas has to stand up to the effort and time that's put into the brisket and it's that catalyst to go along with it that's important to me because it's just part of who we are so this is a b NS co mini wedge you have to tap on plates that are heated right here you're just about 400 degrees inside it here and you need that to press the flour it says something we don't use for corn corn is a cold press that's gonna be a hot press looking at those dough balls have been made earlier now they're ready to roll roll them up in the flour a little bit chop them into the press and then we're looking for this size and the tortillas have to cook in roughly about 5 seconds or so to get the nice color a little bit of the char marks on them nice soft fluffy tortillas if I was gonna cerpac egde tortillas or buy them from the store I would get my head cut off and my hands cut off on my parents you know there's like no way I could I could I could live with myself and they would just kind of put their head now [Music] yeah so we made the real deal Holyfield earlier it's pretty funny man because that kind of like exploded unexpectedly when we first opened up my dad's hanging out and it says hey make me some levels French Edel's so I start frying up some potatoes make some bacon I'm also listening to like rap at the same time to him listen flake snoop at the same time right instead of giving him as wills friend chose plate I used a roller and rolled out a bigger tortilla for him put it on the plate as the base put the refried beans potatoes fried a strip of bacon and added a fat slice of brisket to it and when I took it out to him I put it in front of him and he was like what's this I was like that's the real deal Holyfield so it's kind of like a joke at first and my dad loved he came back like that was awesome man sorry running in on the weekends people loved it kept asking for it and we put it on the menu for good you we always wanted to create a culture you know what I mean I Valentina's it's about family it's about making stuff with love it's about cooking from the heart or from the soul and being able to have some sort of like nostalgic feeling and connect with people because that's what food is about it's about sharing it's about the time that you have with friends and family and like the conversations that you can have around food and that's super important [Music] if you can't be smiling and happy here then you have no business cooking at Valentino's you can throw away all the aspects and techniques of like proper cooking or or whatever it is experience you can throw out all the door bottom - is coming in here with the right attitude and the right reasons to cook that's nothing to do with skill you know I'm saying it has everything to do with drive and the will to want to do it [Music] being able to have that attitude allows us to be able to be like barbecue for the people kind of thing you know what I mean [Music] you [Music]

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Id: 5URfsrtXSMk

Length: 14min 50sec (890 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 26 2020