Why LeRoy & Lewis Is The Most Creative Barbecue in Austin — Smoke Point

I saw a tweet a couple months ago of somebody asking for an Austin barbecue place has specialized in smoked vegetables and nobody responded and I kind of realized that there was a big opening there and there was something that you know we should be doing our entire thing is just about being different and kind of pushing the boundaries so that's really where we have the best success is trying to find that Venn diagram of like barbecue and then like vegetarian took a couple different tries with the spice rub but we landed on a harissa style they take on almost meat like qualities cauliflower burnt ends is the dish you know there's people that come up and order that they're just like no I don't want any veggies no nothing just give me that meat I found and we love those people you know we also have people who don't want to eat something heavy who want something vegetarian and they want to participate in barbecue I think us delivering that to them is just as important as giving the meat-eaters what they want then we're gonna smoke them all off we'll season it will smoke it hole will take it off will reese's it again and we'll put it back on and char it [Music] I'm doing a Lincoln Log pattern because you want maximum surface area to get exposed to both the the fire the flames coming up and also oxygen you want oxygen in the middle you want a lot of airflow cooking whether it open fire is just way more interesting and you can just study how wood goes up into flames and the different chemicals are coming off of it and that if it smells different flavors that that produces so the white puffy smoke is the kind of lower temperature smoke it's gonna have more accurate flavors in it and the clean clear that kind of thin blue smoke is basically a hotter burning fire so this is post oak wood this is the wood that we use to fuel our entire business at Laroy and lewis it's kind of the flavor of Texas barbecue really to me is post oak wood and black pepper this is always so cool you can see the moisture coming in with a wood scrape that up put in your coffee so we have a food truck we can't prep anything on the food truck there's no cooking equipment on the food truck so we have to cook everything at our commissary kitchen the downside is that it's not on our property due the circumstances force creativity absolutely where the squeeze and where the borders come from is the sourcing we have absolute highest possible standards these are our cushy briskets it is a cross between Angus and Japanese Wagyu so angus is known to be really meaty Wagyu beef is known to be very fatty this is Bradley he does all of our butchering all of our pit building all of our events all of our everything the whole point of trimming for me basically is trying to maximize how much usable brisket we get from a finished product so it seems like a pretty aggressive trim that I'm doing but everything we cut off gets reused we try to get as much out of it as we possibly can that's really twofold the business decision and just trying to respect where the animal came from the funny part about brisket though is that even though it's the same cut like every brisket is a little differently shaped which is kind of what I enjoy about trimming briskets fatty pieces and we've got meat pieces and stuff some fat on it all this stuff is gonna become burgers we're going to grind it up form it up smoke it and then sear it we actually get more money per burger than we do for brisket because there's no loss in cooking weight so brisket as it is here is gonna lose about half of its weight and then this is gonna be just 100% burger every time meatball mountain all right it's a big pile of burgers I like to tell people I got hired for this burger before I worked here Evan came over to my house for a 4th of July party and I was searing off burgers on a on a plancha over an open fire and you're like what you put that on the night menu and then you hired me to run the night shift the only thing with that press is that it's a little too flat and wide it kind of looks like a Whataburger which I love what a burger I don't want to serve a water burger so I want them this is a diameter a little smaller I want to stick outside the bun and I want it taller and thicker it's going to be more dense who's gonna be juicier we smoked it Phil it's rare then we'll let it rest a little bit and then we'll pull out a big plancha and put it in the firebox so it goes directly over the coals it gets screaming hot and we sear it really quick it's missing we're going to just put the plancha right right in the firebox here over these hot coals so it gets nice and hot then we can sear these burgers off but it actually amazed me the first time we did this that you can cook a burger to medium-rare and hold it for a couple hours and it still comes out medium-rare and still nice and juicy it's pretty cool having to get all of our me from Texas from people who are responsible by raising it and having a beat of a high quality enough to barbecue with it is hard to find all those things so when we do we find the whole hogs we have to use the whole hog since we don't serve ribs when we do serve ribs we really like to wow them with the bacon rib we kind of presented like a lot of barbecue people present the beef rib bacon rib is gonna come from the middle from the rib section so right now I'm cutting off these two bones on the end we got the belly running through here these are the ribs on top and this is what our bacon rib will look like it kind of hits the beef rib size and wow factor and it also gets us having ribs on the menu this is a cure for the bacon rib it's a pretty standard bacon cure equal parts salt and sugar we use brown sugar and we're gonna add just a little bit of pink salt for that color I mean if you imagine eating a piece of bacon it's really salty if you need a beef rib right it's just crusty on the outside it's got that seasoning on the outside this is gonna have seasoning all the way through it's pretty much it bear yet this is our bacon rib it has been on here for seven days I mean look at it super fatty you can see the ribs this is a normal rack of spareribs and then this is normal pork belly bacon on top of the rib bacon rib I'm gonna kind of put the bone sign toward the fire just to protect it a little bit and hopefully make it cook a little bit more evenly the bacon rib rub I don't want to add any more salt to it so this is just pretty much equal parts brown sugar black pepper there's a little bit of cayenne in there too a lot of this stuff also comes from seeing other barbecue people do stuff and then want you to do something like that but different and then it's just a matter of execution after that how do we make it better how do we make it more interesting we're just gonna cook these until they really render out and they're nice and tender yeah that's it so we serve beef cheeks instead of brisket most days so these are our beef cheeks this is how they come in vaccines up if you haven't seen a beef cheek before it's a really gnarly looking cut it's just like the least appetizing looking thing you can think of just because of the way that we sourced the stuff we kind of have a split like a three day to day split between beef cheeks and brisket very similar things brisket beef cheek as far as how we want to approach him how we want to cook them we want something similar out of the end product for both of them you can tell it's got all this intramuscular fat and connective tissue in there much like a brisket now we got beef cheek mountain going beef cheek mountain all right now I'm gonna grind up this beef fat and then we'll put it in a pot render it down and we'll use that for confit or beef cheeks in so when I give people what they want as far as something that is like brisket a sliced beef option that's what people want here in Texas so we want to deliver that to them but also get them out of their comfort zone just a little bit Jesus this is where it looks its most appetizing out of all of it yummy it's gonna melt and then all the water has to evaporate and then you'll be left with a pure beef fat these are the cheeks they're gonna get seasoned very similarly to the briskets I'm just gonna get completely coated and these are gonna shrink up a little bit so I'm not afraid to have them really hugging you know so they're almost gonna cook as one so these cheeks you saw how they went on very raw looking they've now developed a crust the seasoning is nicely stuck to them they've decreased about maybe 1/3 in size so this is fat that we've used to confit before so it's already nice and smoky and beefy and peppery and so it's going to increase the beefiness it's gonna increase the smokiness of it it's just gonna basically concentrate the flavor and then they're gonna cook on this smoker by the time they all break down oh god it's so good is the OP sausage so up here by the door just don't want any of the casing touching really it's gonna be colder up here want to cook the sausage of the lower temperature our sausages pet some Citra hops in it but it's pretty standard pork sausage a lot of people think it's kind of strange that we use an entire ham for making sausage because sausage is typically one of those things that you just use the scraps but I think that's kind of what makes us unique and then we got the Citra hops it is a really good way of judging a barbecue place do they care enough to make their own sausage what kind of they're making are they just doing jalapeno cheese like literally everybody else cooking with an open fire is just way more interesting a lot of people with barbecue this is all they're doing just offset pit this is a tenderloin right here tenderloin is really good super tender obviously we can just season it really simply and cook it directly on the coals if you are cooking on the coals that's gonna be the hottest way you can possibly cook why fire cooking is just way more interesting because cooking method adds the most flavor wood fire smoking it's gonna add a ton of flavor to the food and that's really the most important part we're getting ready to make some Texas red chili it's really just ground beef and some spices and red chilies that's it beans too right and zero beans in chili I will die on that hill if there's a single bean in the pot it is then a pot of beans I learned that one the hard way when I suggest you putting beans in the chili ones Oh King beans in the chili some of what we do just comes from our mission of just wanting to order good meat and wanting to use all of that pretty much everything stems from the sourcing if you want cheese and onions on your Frito pie you really can't go wrong with anything on the menu what is barbecue to me it is a personal touchstone for me it's really the way that we try to express ourselves and try to kind of bring something a little bit more interesting to the culinary landscape we try to say something about the city about ourselves and about the people that produce the things that we use as well yeah the beef cheeks is kind of a signature item for us they're really good very similar to brisket I don't know if it's as much as my like chef approach to it but just a creative approach in general just trying to do different things I mean a lot of the times you just like it's just word association right things that like sounds like they would make sense together you know you can take a list of techniques and a list of you know meats and then you just play like criss cross match and you can come up with something crazy and then the one of those you know every now and then is gonna be something really special it's gonna hit and it's gonna like affects people in a certain way [Music] I want people who leave Leroy and Luis to say that is the best and most interesting barbecue I've ever had in my life [Music] you

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Id: jfz4_lpbjVw

Length: 13min 15sec (795 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 18 2020