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

I saw a tweet a couple of months ago from someone asking about a BBQ place in Austin specializing in

smoke

d vegetables and no one responded and I realized there was a big opening there and there was something you know we should totally do. It's just about being different and pushing the boundaries, so that's where we really have the

most

success is trying to find that Venn diagram of like

barbecue

and then like vegetarian. We made a couple different attempts with the spice blend, but landed on the harissa style. They acquire al

most

meat-like qualities. Cauliflower with burnt ends is the dish.

You know, there are people who come up and ask that they say, "No, I don't want vegetables, no, nothing, just give me that meat that 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 want to participate in a

barbecue

. I think giving them that is just as important as giving the carnivores what they want, so we'll be We'll

smoke

them all we'll season them, we'll smoke it, the hole we'll take it out, Reese's will put it back and we'll put it back in and char it.

I'm making a Lincoln log pattern because you want the maximum surface area exposed. Both for fire, the flames rising and for oxygen, you want oxygen in the middle, you want a lot of air flow to cook, whether it's open fire, it's much more interesting and you can study how the wood lights up in flames and the different chemicals. that comes out of it and that if you smell different flavors that that produces, the puffy white smoke is the lowest temperature type of smoke, it will have more precise flavors and the clean and clear that type of fine blue smoke is basically a hotter burning fire. hot.

So, this is oak wood. This is the wood we use to fuel our entire business at Laroy and Lewis. It has the taste of Texas barbecue. Really for me it's oak wood and black pepper. This is always so cool you can see the humidity. Coming in with a wooden shave that goes in your coffee, so we have a food truck. We can't prepare anything at the food truck. There is no cooking equipment in the food truck, so we have to cook everything in our commissary kitchen. The disadvantage is that. it is not on our property because circumstances force creativity absolutely where the pressure and boundaries come from is sourcing we have the highest possible standards these are our comfortable briskets it is a cross between Angus and Japanese Wagyu, as far as we know that Angus really is.

The meaty Wagyu beef is known to be very fatty, this is Bradley, he does all our cuts, all our pits, he builds all our events, all our everything, the main goal of trimming for me is basically to try to maximize the amount of usable brisket we get. a finished product, so it seems like a pretty aggressive cutout what I'm doing, but everything we cut is reused, we try to get as much out of it as possible, that's really a two-pronged business decision and just trying to respect where it's at. the animal. However, the fun part about brisket is that although it is the same cut, each brisket is shaped a little differently, which is what I enjoy when trimming the briskets into fatty pieces and we have chunks of meat and a little bit of fat in everything.

This will be made into burgers, we'll grind it, smoke it, and then brown it. We actually get more money per burger than we do for the brisket because there is no weight loss in cooking it, so the brisket as it is here will lose about half its weight and then this will just be a 100% burger every time you mountain it. of meatballs is fine, it's a big stack of burgers. I like to tell people that I was hired for this burger before I worked here. Evan came to my house for a 4th of July party and I was grilling hamburgers on a griddle over an open fire and you say you put that on the late night menu and then hired me to run the night shift, the only thing with that press It's just that it's too flat and wide, it looks like a Whataburger, which I love, what a burger.

I don't want to serve a water burger, so I want them. This one has a slightly smaller diameter. I want to stick it out of the bread and I want it higher and thicker, it will be denser, who will be juicier. We smoke it Phil, it's strange, so we'll let it rest a little and then we'll take out a large griddle and put it in the combustion chamber so that it goes directly over the coals. It gets very hot and we brown it very quickly. We're going to put the griddle right on. in the firebox here over these coals so it gets nice and hot and then we can sear these burgers, but In fact, the first time we did this I was surprised that you can cook a burger over medium heat and keep it for a couple of hours and still so it comes out medium rare and nice and juicy.

It's great to have to bring out all of our selves. from Texas of people who are responsible for raising it and having a high enough quality rate to grill with it, it's hard to find all that stuff, so when we do, we find the whole pigs, we have to use them whole since they don't When we serve ribs , when we serve ribs, we really like to surprise you with the bacon rib that we present like a lot of barbecue people present the beef rib, the bacon rib will come from the middle of the rib section, so right now I'm cutting these two bones on the end we have the belly running through here these are the ribs on the top and this is what our bacon rib will look like, it somehow achieves the size of the beef rib and the wow factor and also makes us have ribs the menu this is a cure for bacon rib this is a pretty standard bacon cure equal parts salt and sugar we use brown sugar and we're going to add just a little bit of pink salt for that color I mean if you imagine eating a piece of bacon is very salty if you need a beef rib right it's crispy on the outside it has that seasoning on the outside this will have seasoning all the way through it's practically bearable but this is our bacon rib that's been here for seven days I mean, look at it super fatty, you can see the ribs, this is a regular rack of ribs and then this is regular pork belly bacon on top of the rib, bacon rib.

I'm going to put the bone sign towards the fire. To protect it a little and hopefully make it cook a little more evenly, rub the ribs with bacon. I don't want to add any more salt, so it's pretty much equal parts brown sugar, black pepper, there's a little bit of cayenne. There too, a lot of this stuff also comes from seeing other barbecue people doing things and then they want you to do something like that but different and then it's just a matter of execution after that, how do we do it better, how do we do it better? do we do it more? interesting we'll just cook them until they're really browned and tender 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, if you have them.

I hadn't seen a beef cheek before it was a really gnarly looking cut, it's like the least appetizing thing you can imagine just because of the way we sourced things, we have a three day to day split between the meat. cheeks and brisket very similar things beef brisket cheek in terms of how we want to approach it how we want to cook them we want something similar from the final product for both you can say it has all this intramuscular fat and connective tissue in it looks a lot like a brisket, now we have a mountain of beef cheeks, come on a mountain of beef cheeks, now I'm going to grind this beef fat and then we'll put it in a pot, grind it and use it for confit or beef. cheeks in, so when I give people what they want as far as something that's like brisket, a cut beef option, that's what people want here in Texas, so we want to offer it to them but also give them a little out of your comfort zone.

Jesus, this is where it looks most appetizing of all, delicious, it's going to melt and then all the water has to evaporate and then you'll be left with pure beef fat. These are the cheeks that will be seasoned very similarly. to the breasts they will just cover me completely and these will shrink a little bit, so I'm not afraid that they will hug each other too much, you know, they will almost cook as one, so these cheeks you saw how they turned out. very raw looking, they have now developed a crust, the seasoning is well adhered to them, they have shrunk to about 1/3 their size, so this is fat we have used for candiing before, so it is already nice, smoky and meaty. spicy and therefore it will increase the meat, it will increase the smoky flavor, it will basically concentrate the flavor and then they will be cooked in this smoker when they all break down, oh my goodness, OP sausage is so good.

Up here by the door, I just don't want the casing to touch, it'll really be colder. Up here I want to cook the sausage at a lower temperature. Our sausages have a little bit of Citra hops, but a lot of people think it's a pretty standard pork sausage. It's a little strange that we use a whole ham to make sausages because sausages are usually one of those things that you just use the scraps of, but I think that's what makes us unique and then we got the Citra hops, it's a very good way. When judging a barbecue place, do they care enough to make their own sausage?

What kind of are they doing? Do they only make jalapeño cheese like literally everyone else? Cooking over an open fire is much more interesting. Lots of people with barbecue. This is all. they're making an offset bone, this is a tenderloin here, the tenderloin is really good, super tender, obviously, we can season it very simply and cook it right over the coals, if you're cooking it over the coals, that's going to be the most hot possible. cooking why cooking over a fire is much more interesting because the cooking method adds the most flavor. Wood smoking will add a ton of flavor to your 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 is, beans too, and zero chili beans. I will die on that hill if there is a single bean in the pot, then it is a pot of beans. I learned that the hard way when I suggest to you. putting beans in the chili Oh, King beans in the chili, some of what we do comes from just our mission of just wanting to order good meat and wanting to use all of that, almost all of it comes from sourcing if you want cheese and onion. your Frito pie you really can't go wrong with anything on the menu what barbecue is to me it's a personal touchstone for me it's really the way we try to express ourselves and we try to bring something a little more interesting to the culinary landscape we try to say something about the city, about ourselves and about the people who produce the things we use too.

Yeah, beef cheeks are kind of a signature element for us, they're really good, very similar to brisket. I do not do it. I don't know if it's as much as my chef approach, but it's just a

creative

approach in general, just trying to do different things. I mean, a lot of times you just like, it's just the association of words, right things that sound like they make sense. together you know you can take a list of techniques and a list of meats that you know and then you just play like a criss-cross game and you come up with something crazy and then one of those that you know every once in a while it's going to be something really special it's going to hit and it's going to happen. to affect people in a certain way.

I want people who leave Leroy and Luis to say that it is the best and most interesting barbecue I have ever had in my life.