- It's April in Brooklyn. - Let's go. (rock music) - Tyson, we brought you a lamb. We're so excited to smoke this thing because not a lot of people actually have had smoked lamb before, but it's so freaking delicious. - We of course here smoke whole pigs so that's kind of our schtick, but like whole animals as a barbecue genre is underexplored. It is the oldest style of
cooking barbecue in this country and it's indigenous to
eastern North Carolina which is the style we practice. Alright, we're gonna toss
this bad boy in the smoker, but can you show me how
to cut this thing first? - Yeah, I guess so. - And that's how you butterfly a lamb. We've been using the word butterflying but just to clear it up that just means laying it flat so it'll cook
a little bit more evenly. It will also go a little bit faster just 'cause it's opened up. Gets more smoke, everybody's happier. - [Tyson] The reason
lamb is so expensive is it's only this line in the middle and this half that anyone eats. Nobody seems to want the shoulder and especially in America, no one seems to want the saddle. - Why we cutting behind the H-bone or kind of the pelvic bone here? - The first reason is we want
this to cook a little faster. In any animal the legs are always gonna cook slower than the shoulders. We wanna speed this thing up so that it's matching the cook
time with the shoulders. And plus I like having this little pocket so that our marinade can get in there. - Cool. - [Tyson] Someone's
gonna get a little sinew in their teeth today. - [Man] That's fine. - [Man] That's totally fine. - This episode sponsored by floss. - Just floss. - Now that our lamb's all butterflied, we're gonna throw the mustard on it. The reason people don't like lamb is because of that gamey
taste associated with it. That taste is not indigenous to lamb, it's coming from the
oxidation of the meat. Traditions rub mustard all over the meat because mustard is an antioxidant and that actually keeps the lamb from getting too much of that gamey flavor. And plus it helps our seasoning stick. - [Man] What's in our seasoning? - [Tyson] So this is kind
of a Indian-inspired one. There's garam masala,
Kashmiri peppers, coriander and a bunch of other random things. Let's go. (country rock music) We're just gonna hang out here
for about seven hours or so and yeah. - We're gonna hang out out here or by the bar with all the whisky? So it's been what, six hours now? - [Tyson] Six, seven hours. I don't know, time flies. I took a nap. - I swear to God it's like a week later since all the snow is gone now maybe. - It's definitely a season later. - [Man] We ready to look at this thing? - Yeah, let's open her up. - Yep, yep, yep, yep. - Is there anything in
particular that you do look for to know that it's done. - Well basically if your
finger goes right through it, it's done. - Okay. - And the temperature at
which it starts to shred is like 180, 190, right? That's when it really
started pulling apart. - [Tyson] Exactly so we're
trying to get it above 190. - This will totally fit
in the doorway right? - It should. (rock music) - [Brent] Lamb (beep) yeah! Does this ever get old? - Lamb is one of the best cuts of meat that America produces. They're all grass fed. They have to be grass fed,
they don't eat anything else. It's fortunate that it's so expensive and it's mostly due to our own consumption which is why I like
featuring the whole animal. Because once people taste the shoulder it really opens up their
minds on the fact that this is a premium cut. - So rack of lamb is $36 a pound. But a rack of lamb is a pound and half and there's two of them. And that's it. It's $36 a pound because you're
only getting two of them. You still have to sell
the rest of the shoulder and the leg and the
saddle and everything else in order to actually make money on it. - [Tyson] From a barbecue
guy's point of view, lamb shoulder's the best part. It's a dark meat, it has
the most amount of marbling and fat. - It's smoked, it's fantastic. - [Tyson] This is what we in the industry call 'barbecue spaghetti'
because only when you cook the belly from a whole animal that it pulls into nice long strings. - The fat, that's where it's at. - [Tyson] You would expect the tenderloin which is the leanest cut on the animal to be pretty dry, but... It seems pretty juicy to me. - I thought it was just
gonna be dry and leathery and kind of gross. But it's actually, you're
right, it's pretty moist. - [Tyson] The leg is
very difficult to cook. It's a different texture,
it's definitely leaner. - I prefer the fattier piece
but that's still fantastic. - Right, and so to make Carolina barbecue, everything needs to be mixed together. A little bit of the shoulder,
a little bit of the ham, and then everything else in between. So you're getting a mixture
of both fat and lean, different textures, different flavors and all in one unified bite. So the idea of it being
the whole is better than the sum of its parts. - [Man] So we're gonna tear
this whole thing apart? - [Tyson] Yeah, we're
gonna get a big ass bowl and we're gonna just
take all the meat off, dump it in the bowl and season her up. - [Man] I need to know more
about how a guy from Queens gets into a specific region's barbecue. - [Tyson] I went to go
visit North Carolina, I read up on the topic,
there was a vinegar sauce and they cook the whole hog. Alright, I'll give it a go. I didn't think I would like
it because who wants to eat a bunch of pork all drowned in vinegar. I went there, took my first
bite of whole hog barbecue and said, alright I think I
found the style I wanna do. It's hard to do Carolina
barbecue without getting deep into the history of it. One of the things we're
doing in preserving this old style of barbecue
is keeping barbecue as a celebratory action. Especially when we tie in with the fact that the original pit
masters of this country were slaves, African American slaves. Barbecues were always the end of the harvest season traditions of which they were able
to finally celebrate. To gloss over that I
think is a big disservice to American history. Which is why today we're actually gonna be cooking a kind of a celebratory dish. We're cooking a biryani which is usually used for weddings and
parties and birthdays. - [Ben] It is one of those things,
the more you start learning about the history of something, especially with barbecue in the South, the more complicated it gets. You're not gonna untie any of those knots, you're just gonna find more. So much of that narrative
is really kind of lost unless you really look for it and you really pay attention to it. - The style is kind of dying out. So for whole hog barbecue, there's only 20 restaurants in the U.S. still
doing this style of barbecue. - [Both] Really? - Yeah, only 20. We are one of 20. - Really?
- Holy (beep) - [Tyson] Which is kind of sad. Now that we've got all our meat pulled, we're gonna season her up. Carolina barbecue joint so of
course apple cider vinegar, a little lime juice. - [Man] Vinegar, vinegar, vinegar. - Of course there's vinegar and pepper. No defined thing of what peppers, so we're using some sambal today. And you can never go wrong
with Thai fish sauce. We're gonna break and mix. The vinegar pepper sauce in my opinion is kind of embedded into the human genome. It is the single best way of eating meat. When you go around the world,
you look at the cultures like Philippines and Vietnam and Thailand, the mixture of vinegar and chiles is the single best way of
highlighting fatty meat. - [Man] Yeah, we were
not the OG's of that. Every culture figured out the same thing. - I think despite the
fact that we're using a Malaysian chili, despite
the fact that we're using a Thai fish sauce, this
is Carolina barbecue. This is a continuation of the traditions that were handed down. - The way you're cooking it. - That I think is, it'll seem fascinating in a conversation that
doesn't happen enough, this can still be one thing
and be other things too. It doesn't have to just
be one way or the highway. You're still continuing on that tradition of cooking this way, but you
know what tastes (beep) good is lime juice and fish sauce. - [Tyson] I think we're done. - [Man] Cool. - What we have here is
kind of a Thai-style biryani. When I was thinking through a lamb biryani, I really wanted biryani to be
part of the American lexicon the same way that it has now become part of the Thai lexicon. This is not an Indian
dish, it's not a Thai dish. It's definitely an American dish. By cooking the entire animal
and mixing it all together, the quality's consistent. There's that impression,
that sense of occasion. - Better meat, more diversity of meat, price goes down for everybody. - We're pro-diversity here. - Everybody wins, everybody wins. (rock music) Oh man that's really good. (beeps) The cinnamon in the rice
and the saffron just works so well with that smoke and that vinegar. Oh my God. - I think the best thing is that you're used to flavor of smoked pork. You've had ribs and bacon
and you usually have lamb either as a lamb chop or a lamb stew. Combining those things,
it tastes brand new. - Tyson, you didn't tell me
it was gonna be this good. - Sorry. - Now that we've all eaten this, we should probably
invite some friends over to help us with all this? - Yeah, I mean we might need a few
extra hands on that one. - Okay.
- We can call them in. (rock music) For more episodes just like this... - Click right here. - So today we are going
to produce the Gramercy Tavern beef and pork kielbasa with cheese. It is probably the-
I don't know anything about this guy, but I can appreciate the way he speaks to the history of BBQ (slavery, basically), and then changes up the end product with Asian influences. A knowledgeable chef, for sure.