Good morning, everyone. My name is Berj Ghazarian. I'm from Bark BBQ. It's Father's Day, and I'm here with my
parents at their beautiful house, and we're gonna be cooking some barbecue for you all. I've actually got my wonderful father
filming, being a great father. Today— Most of you know, we cook
very classic Central Texas-style barbecue. We're gonna change things up this morning. We want to show you guys a
little bit about our past, our background. I'm Armenian. Obviously my name is very
far from being Texan, Berj Ghazarian. So what we're gonna do today is do a
beautiful smoked lamb shoulder, and in order to do that first we have
to make our spice blend. To do that we're gonna use some ingredients
that are typical in our cuisine, and keep in mind Armenia has
beautiful food, great ingredients, but what's even more interesting is
because of our past, because of our history, and more recently because of what happened to the Armenian diaspora after the Armenian genocide, we've spread all across the Middle East, so we've got
Armenians in Syria and Lebanon, in Egypt. We've got Armenians all around the world, and what that does is enriches
our cuisine and our lifestyle, and so we have some influence from
that entire region today to share with you. So, what I've got in here in my spice grinder— And you can just use a blender or an electric
spice grinder if that's easier for you. We've got toasted whole black peppercorns,
toasted whole red peppercorns or pink peppercorns, toasted coriander seeds, and we're gonna combine
some kosher salt with some Aleppo pepper. And this is just some ground spices.
This includes some nutmeg, it includes some ground cloves. We've got some beautiful paprika in here
and white pepper as well, and we just picked some rosemary from the garden. Chop that kind of coarsely. And we're gonna just blend these all together and muddle them or break them apart in the spice grinder So I'm gonna go ahead and add my
Aleppo pepper, the kosher salt. You know salt and pepper is very
important for the type of barbecue that we do, and obviously it's going to be
important for this one as well. And then obviously our rosemary, and then we're just gonna give this a nice grind—
I mean, this is gonna take a while. Like I said, if you want to make it easier,
I would use some sort of a spice grinder. Alright guys, we have our lamb shoulder here. We were lucky enough to get a really beautiful cut. Again, you can find lamb shoulder
at almost any grocery store, but typically you're probably gonna find it boneless. I like having our lamb shoulders bone-in. I do think it does two things: one, it adds a lot of flavor. It also helps keep the the lamb intact when you're when you're cooking it. Typically when you're trying to take these bones out,
it often exposes a lot of the meat, but also a lot of the fiber and tissue, and it's hard keeping it compacted together. So to keep it beautiful, I like a bone-in lamb shoulder, ideally with all the rib bones attached as well. These rib bones actually also protect
the lamb shoulder because we are going to be cooking this
probably close to seven or eight hours, and therefore it can cook for a
long time with the bones in. Now, as opposed to brisket, lamb shoulder
doesn't really need much trimming. The fat is already fairly thin. There's a— it's probably an eighth of an inch,
maybe a quarter of an inch of fat around. The only thing I'm going to trim is any kind
of fat that's loose, that's dangling, because that will typically burn and and you don't want that. But again, I might take a thin layer of fat off, especially in areas where I don't want it to burn. We're gonna be cooking this at
a low temperature, but ideally we want to make it look pretty
and presentable. Now what we have here is what we use
in almost all of our barbecue cooking. It is garlic puree with some olive oil, and we blend this. We have this in the fridge
all the time. It's great for cooking. I mean, you almost use garlic in
every single dish that you do, whether it's Armenian or Italian, and so it's easy to just grab a spoon,
get some fresh garlic onto your pan. So again this is about 75% garlic, 25% olive oil, and what I'm gonna do is generously,
liberally rub this on both sides. And like I said, we're gonna start with the skin side, or the meat side, up. Alright, now all that's left is to liberally coat both sides with this spice rub that we created. And again we want a lot of rub on this so it creates a beautiful bark on the outside. So as you can see, we don't shy away from putting on the rub. There's not— You don't need to massage it. It's gonna have plenty of time
to set in, but just make sure all sides of the shoulder have this rub. Make sure you use whatever's on the
counter now that it's got a binding agent. So what we're gonna do, we're gonna
place this on the smoker. We're gonna cook it at about 275 degrees. As you guys can see, we're cooking on whole logs. These are oak logs. Actually, we were lucky. We got these from Central Texas, right around Dripping Springs, so this is post oak. Texas is really famous for their oak. It burns extremely well. It's very well seasoned. So again, keeping a clean and steady fire is the
most important part of barbecue, so we want to make sure that we have a clean smoke and we're completely combusting the wood efficiently. So having embers constantly on the bottom and just putting on some fresh wood right on top. So, gonna leave this on, and let's get
these lamb shoulders on the cooker. So we're gonna grab the lamb. As you guys can see, the fire's on that side of the smoker. This is the cooking chamber, and then
we have our smokestack. so I'm gonna keep it as far away from
the smoker as possible, especially since we're not cooking much today. The way I'm gonna place this is I'm
gonna have the bones facing the fire, and it's gonna kind of help shield
the meat, but we're gonna leave these in here probably for about two to three hours without even looking at them, at which point we'll spritz them with some
liquid to give it some moisture. We'll cook it for several hours at which point we'll wrap it to make sure that we lock in some moisture, and keep it going until we hit an internal temperature of about 205
degrees. At that point we're gonna let it rest and
then pull it apart for dinner tonight. Okay, see you guys soon! Hey, everyone. So we're about two and a half hours into the cook. I'm gonna open up just to take a look.
We haven't looked so far. We also put on some ribs for us to enjoy later on. So as you can see we're developing
some beautiful color, some great bark. It looks like it has plenty of moisture,
but around this time I like to spritz it with some additional moisture,
and you can do anything. You can put water you can— in our case we're doing about 50% water,
50% apple juice, and we're just going to lightly spritz it, both the lamb and our ribs. And again, you just want a light spritzing and kind of— you don't want to direct the spritz in one particular spot. Everyone, it's been about seven hours
that we've been smoking this. As you can see we've developed a really
beautiful bark all around. We've got the color that we want,
and it's about time that we wrap it. At this point, the meat's not going
to take in much more smoke, and what we want to do is make sure that we're not drying it out, and so we're gonna wrap it in foil. We traditionally wrap in pink butcher
paper when we're cooking brisket, but in this case because we've got kind of an unusual shape and also a lot of bones sticking out, the butcher paper won't really keep it tight and seal in the moisture. So we're going to just use heavy-duty foil,
and you want to make sure that you're wrapping it carefully
because we have bones sticking out. We'll want to spritz it again right
before you wrap it, one last bit of moisture. So I'm going to move this here,
and you'll see we'll have to wrap it twice because we don't have big enough
foil this time around. Again, give it a nice spritz. At this point, the bark's completely locked in. This is gonna be beautiful. If you were to check temperature you're probably at about 175 degrees right now. Again we want to get to that 205-degree
Fahrenheit internal temperature before we pull this and let it rest for about an hour. So I would say we probably have about two more
hours before this is completely ready. We're gonna put this back on, keep temps steady
at around 250 to 275 degrees for probably another two hours,
or until it feels really pliable, and then we'll pull it off and let it rest
for about an hour before we eat. Alright, everyone. It's time to eat! So we've let this rest for about 45 minutes. Total cooking time was right around nine hours. You can see it's kind of developed all the rendered fat and the juices right underneath. It should really just pull apart, but I'm gonna lift this up. We can save these juices. You can cook them down, render it down a bit further, use it for potatoes anything else
that you're gonna have for dinner. And then we're gonna bring this around. As you can see, this is pliable. I can just pull this apart, and it's still got all the moisture.
