Steak, Jerky and Grilling with Direct Heat | BBQ with Franklin | Full Episode

Viewers like you make this program possible. Support your local PBS station. Welcome to BBQ with Franklin. You know, at the restaurant, we only use post oak. So on this episode, we're going to head around the great state of Texas and see what some other people are doing with different woods. First stop is Buffalo Gap at Tom Perrini's place. Welcome to Buffalo Gap, Texas. Home of Perrini Ranch Steakhouse. Tom Perrini is a super old school guy. He's been cooking on direct heat mesquite for years. Started with chuck wagons. And I can't think of a better guy to teach me how to cook steak than Tom. So we're going to do it. Hey Tom. Hi. How you doing? Welcome to the ranch. Thanks for having me. I'm glad you're here. It's a pleasure. It is a pleasure. Yeah, it's a pleasure for me. What are you working on? These are roasting pits. And when I say a roasting pit, this method is like if you had a hole in the ground. In the old days where they'd dig a hole and they'd build a big fire in it and then stretch wire across it. We get mesquite wood, cook it down, and make our own coals. And then we shovel them in. All your heat goes straight up. So it's not like a traditional smoker that has a fire, a live fire in the end and pulls it through. Behind you, I'm going to show you some mesquite wood. As you can see, look at the color of that. And that's just as hard as it can be. Yeah, unmistakable. And this is really lightweight. I mean, this has been around for a long, long time. It has. When we burn it down and make coal, it makes a good hot coal. And you know, people laugh and say, why do you use mesquite? Because there's oak and hickory. Look around. We're right in the middle of mesquite country. You know, the cool thing about cooking like this is everything drips on the coals, and it comes back up, and it's such a distinctive smell. The nice thing about these kind of pits, and this is empty right now, but Aaron, you can look. Those are pretty good-sized pits. Oh, yeah. Your air control on the top and the bottom. That's a good one. You're cheating. We're going to go over. I want to show you. We have a chuck wagon and kind of give you a little story about how that was used. The chuck wagon was created in about 1866 by Charles Goodnight. After the war between the states, it was a civil war. The guys came back. They didn't have any money. Their ranches had gone to pot, and some very creative guys said, if we can get cattle up to the north and northeast, we can make money. But what came up was they've got 12 or 15 cowboys. How do they feed them? Two meals a day. So this is a rolling kitchen. You know what you've got to remember on a chuck wagon, this was a home away from home. These guys, you know, if you were going to shave or if you got cut or if you needed some salve or if you needed whatever, this is where you came. It's an era that lasted 20-some-odd years. They started the Texas beef industry as we know it, and then when the trains came in closer and trucking developed, it all... See you later, chuck wagon. But then the big ranches used to use them on cattle drives and then go out and gather all the cattle and then move them around. And then at one point they dropped out of favor, and in the 70s, we were very instrumental in bringing them back. You're going to kind of school me up on grilling some steaks, right? Oh, I'd love to. You know, with a good steak, if you're using good beef and you're cooking it over wood, you have three layers of flavor that you can't achieve in an oven. I take that back. You know, I know some big steakhouses do that, so I'm not knocking them. You can't get this flavor out of an oven. This is what I like. What's going on in your head when you're looking at this fire and you're like, I need to wait a few minutes? I need to kick that one over. Yeah, well, let's talk about that, because we're doing this in this number three wash tub because of the wind. We've got a good bed of mesquite coals. We also have some flame, which I think is very important. You know, people ask me all the time how you check your temperatures and everything. In this case, you don't have a temp gauge. You've got to do it by your hand. And if I were to hold my hand at your grate level, you can't hold it there a long time. It'd be one second. Yeah. And I think that would be considered hot. Okay. But if you're cooking a steak and you can hold it there for three seconds, that's cold. All right, hopefully I can drag this and we'll see how this works. Well, you've done this before. I want to get this as hot as I can, because first of all, it'll make good char marks, but also a cold grill will stick, the meat will stick. And so let's get this as hot as we can, and then if you want to, let's go talk about steaks. Hey, let's talk about steaks. I mean, I guess that's kind of why we're here. That's right, that's why we're here. We have three steaks on the plate. My favorite is the rib eye, and it's got more marbling in it. Now, this is a dry rub. It is sea salt and garlic and onion. It has a little beef stock in it. And, you know, it's important that you don't season it to the point that you lose the identity of your product. You're not trying to cover up the beef flavor. If you were in a perfect situation, I'd take it out and let it sit for an hour or two. Anything that you can do to raise the temperature will make your cooking time shorter. Now, see, I'm moving in at two. Yeah, I could go with three, but I may have burned off most of my nerve endings at this point. I'm going to put it right over the flame. Looks good to me, looks like a steak cooking. Heck, yeah. When cooking steak, you're going to want to know how you'd like your steak done. Warning, consuming raw or undercooked foods such as meat, poultry, fish, shellfish, and eggs may increase your risk of foodborne illness, especially if you have a medical condition. Black and blue or Pittsburgh style. This is rarer than rare. Seared on the outside, still red and cool in the middle. Hmm, rare. You're looking at about 75% red in the center, and if you've got a good steak, this is definitely the way to go. Medium rare. When you're here, you're down to 50% redness. You're starting to lose a little bit of juice and just starting to dry out the steak. Medium. This is it. Your steak is mostly pink in the middle. If you pull it off now, you might have a little juice left. So medium well. If you get it to this point, you've cooked out most of the juiciness. It's not pink, it's not red. It's getting leathery. You've gone too far. Well done. I don't even know what to say about this. I, I, ugh. You're just wasting steak at this point. I bet we've got to flip this thing. I think, you know, one thing you just can't get if you're cooking on propane or cooking in a skillet is the way the fat on the sides of these ribeyes and other cuts gets all crunchy, and, you know, that's the great thing about flame. With a steak, you'll let it rest just a minute, but just because it's a thinner piece of meat, you don't have to wait 5 or 10 minutes. But what you're really looking for is that you kind of, I think of it as like a locomotive, like it's got all this momentum. You're cooking it, cooking it, cooking it. So just because you pull it off doesn't mean it stops cooking. It keeps going, so you need to kind of think about it. It keeps going. If you've got a big knife and you went in and cut it in half, it would completely evaporate. And everyone's like, oh, look at that steak. Oh, man, it was kind of dry. Well, that's because you didn't let it rest. All right, how tough are you? I think it's ready. But I'm not the pro. I know, here it comes. My reputation is truly at stake. And I will say this, though. That's what you're looking for. That is pushing it out. Yeah, good grill marks. Let's let that rest for a minute. Thank you, sir. That's the way a steak is supposed to taste. Well, thank you, Tom. I sure appreciate it. Well, you're welcome any time. It's been fun, and I've really enjoyed this, and I hope you have. Well, thanks, Remy. This is one of the best steaks I've ever had. Well, good, good. It's really good. Back in the chuck wagon days, a great way to preserve meat was to smoke it and make beef jerky. Oh, beef jerky. I like it. Everyone likes it. Great. And it's not very hard to make. Got a couple flank steaks here. You can get mostly anything you want. Pretty much what you're looking for is not a lot of fat. You don't want a real marbled piece of meat. So you want something pretty lean, maybe skirt, maybe flank, somewhere around there. It's pretty common to do a marinade, maybe, with soy sauce or liquid smoke or teriyaki or any of that stuff. But back in the old days, I don't think they had teriyaki seasoning. So we're not doing it that way. This is going to be straight salt and pepper and smoke. Now, you want to get this meat as cold as you can without freezing it. We're going to slice this stuff really, really thin, so we want to get it really firm. I am going to kind of go down at an angle a little bit. We're going to cut it about quarter-inch slices against the grain. A lot of beef jerky you would slice with the grain. I prefer it against just so it's a little more tender so it's kind of moist on the inside. It's not real leathery. Some of this, if you do get a piece that has some of that fat on there, just go ahead and trim it off. It's not a big deal if you don't, but if you've got a knife handy, you might as well just trim a little bit. It might be a little chewy on those fattier parts, but, eh, you know, that's okay. A piece of beef jerky that's got a little chew to it certainly isn't the worst thing in the world. I'm going to use two cooling racks. I'm going to lay the meat out on one of them to go onto the smoker. Then we'll make our rub. I'm going to use about half salt and half pepper, but then a little bit more salt. I'll shake it up. There's not going to be a lot of flavor inside the meat, so we're going to have to overcompensate with some extra rub. We'll sprinkle the rub on pretty liberally. Then we're going to use the second cooling rack to flip the meat around and season the other side. In the meantime, I'm going to let the meat sit out, warm up to room temperature, while we start the fire. We're cold smoking, so we're going to keep everything under 150 degrees. And I'm going to go wash up. Perfect! 125 degrees. So I'm just going to pick up this tray of meat, stick it in here. If you want to be pretty heavy on the smoke, you might be looking at about five hours. If you want to be a little more delicate, maybe closer to three. But either way, it's your call. Put it in. Shut the lid. Walk away and maintain. Oh yeah! Okay, so these things have been on for about three hours. Definitely on the lighter side of smokiness, which is totally great for me. Good and pliable. Good color. So let's get these things inside and get them in the dehydrator. Alrighty, so I'm going to put this beef jerky in the food dehydrator. If you don't have a food dehydrator, you can totally use your oven. Just put it on the warm setting. You don't want it to get any hotter. About 145, 150. So anyway, I'm going to transfer this stuff over. Looks nice. Smells good too. You don't want to smush it in there too much. You want to leave sort of some gaps. It's going to slide this thing in. Put the front back on. Turn it to 145. And check back in the morning for softness. Well, 15 hours in, it's time to check the jerky. It's pretty good. It's pliable. Not too leathery. Not too hard. So it's about right. So, this stuff is ready 15 hours in. Your stuff may take 12 hours. It may take 20 hours. You don't really know. Take it to the tenderness that you want it to. I'm calling this jerky done. Here in Dallas, we're outside of central Texas and we're outside of barbecue tradition. At Pecan Lodge, my friend Justin is always changing things and making some new interesting smells. I can't quite tell what Justin's cooking with. So we better go back by the cookers and figure this thing out. Hey, hey. What's up? How you doing? I can't tell what kind of wood you're cooking. I'm smelling a lot of stuff. It's a blend. It's definitely changed over time for us. When we first started cooking, we were cooking exclusively with mesquite. That's what I grew up cooking with when I was out in West Texas. That's the only wood you can get. And that's just what I started with. We ran like that for about a year. I was spending the night at the restaurant, getting up every couple hours to put wood. I remember some late night phone conversations. Like, hey, what are you doing? And the problem with the mesquite is it burns really hot and it burns really fast. So I was like, what can I use? It'll burn not quite as hot. It'll burn longer. I can get some bigger pieces because the mesquite comes really small. Really narrow branches and stuff like that. So we started blending in oak to get more of a burn time. And we ran like that for another six months with the mesquite and the oak. And then I went to the brisket camp at Texas A&M. And I learned that my favorite smoke was hickory. Because they do the blind taste test or whatever like that. All the different ones. Unseasoned meat and stuff like that. I never would have picked hickory. But if that's my favorite, then I should probably use it. Because that's what I like. So now it's the blend of all three. And I think your brisket, although it has evolved over the years, just kind of those mesquite tones make me think more of West Texas. Yeah. And my personal preference is to have more smoke than less. And some people like it a little bit milder. When I think of barbecue, I think of smoke. I think of the crust. And so those are the two things we really focus on. Developing a really good bark on the outside of the brisket. And for that to be deeply smoky. When we opened, we didn't open as a barbecue restaurant. It was really kind of Texas food. So fried chicken, Tex-Mex. The barbecue was a small portion. But we felt like, hey, it's Texas. Let's use barbecue. And the barbecue happened to be the thing that kind of caught people's attention. And so it grew from that. Since you didn't really start off as a barbecue place, where are you pulling influences for your barbecue? My family was kind of divided. So I had part of my family that was West Texas in Abilene and another part of it that was kind of deep East Texas near Toledo Bend. So the barbecue stylistically is kind of a blend of both of those. And you learned how to do barbecue with your grandpa, right? Yeah. But we use a traditional cooking method that you'd find in Central Texas and stuff like that. But our rubs are a little bit more complex on the brisket. It's not just salt and pepper. The sausage is more Central Texas-style. Right, like German-Czech. Yeah, exactly. We baste our ribs with sauce, and those are definitely things that you see in East Texas. But I think it's cool that you actually experimented while you had a restaurant going and you being in the middle of Dallas, you can do whatever the heck you want. You've got no tradition that you have to stick to. You can be like, I like hickory, and we're going to use it. Which is great, because you're right. Nobody looks at me funny because we've got more than salt and pepper in our rub, or we're not using post oak, or whatever. It's just kind of like, I came from East Texas and I do what I like. So we sauce our ribs, and it's cool because we get East Texas people that come in here, and West Texas guys come in, and they're like, hey, mesquite. And I'm like, alright. And all the Central Texas guys are like, ah, they've got pecan in the name. We use all the woods in Texas. So, you know, it's strategic. No complaints. It's hot. You got the iced tea in there? I do. Let's go. There he is. When I'm cooking dinner at home, it's usually grilling steaks. So, I'm going to show you how I like to grill. I always start off with a charcoal chimney. I like to use butcher paper to start it with. I use oil. It's pretty cool. You can use vegetable oil, whatever you've got. You want to crumple it up pretty loose. That way a lot of air can still get in there. I only use lump charcoal. Burns hot and fast. Doesn't have chemicals in it. Ooh, big pieces. Big, big pieces. We've got the oily butcher paper down here. Maybe light it from a couple different sides. I normally kind of lift up the charcoal chimney a little bit just to get some air going, even though it's on the grate. So right now we're going to season the steaks while the coals are getting ready. I've got two pretty nice-sized rib-eyes here. So I'm just going to put a little bit of oil on them just to let the salt and pepper stick. Rub it in just a little bit. You can use any kind of oil you want, really. I like walnut oil for my steaks. So, start off with some pepper. Let it fall like rain. You could use your favorite steak seasoning or anything else. You could use garlic, whatever. Don't want to miss the edges. So we're going to let these things warm up to room temperature while we're getting our coals. And in the meantime, I'm just going to enjoy a tasty beverage. So I'm just going to dump these coals right in the middle. And then, I really like to use a piece of wood. So I'm just going to smush that kind of up against the coals right there. And what that does is it kind of creates a hot spot and a cool spot. And it also smokes a little bit. You get a little bit of flavor and you get kind of a hot zone and a cold zone. It's a great time for that. This is definitely too hot. So we're going to let these kind of cool down a little bit. Not quite ready. Then we're going to look at our steaks. Seasoning's been on them for about 30 minutes now. But the meat's starting to sweat. So you can really tell that the salt's kind of starting to blend into the surface of the meat and stuff. These things look great. Coals are perfect. They've gotten hot. They've kind of peaked out. Now, they're starting to go down. So, I can hold my hand there for about a second before it hurts really badly. That's perfect. I'm going to use this little towel. I'm going to squirt some oil on there. I'm going to rub down the grates. And this kind of... So, oil in the grates is going to help clean. That also helps the steaks not stick to the grates when we put them on. Time to go on. Ooh. Ah. We got the steaks down. We're going to get some good grill marks on there. Let them cook for about three minutes. Then flip them. At that point, we'll leave them on the other side for about three minutes. Then I'm going to start flipping even quicker back and forth until I get to the right cook. And if your flames get really out of control, that's kind of why you've got this little safe zone right there. You can just pull the meat off. Give it a second. Come back. You know, keep it safe. Keep it very safe. I'm just going to melt a little bit of butter on the surface. Just kind of keep it moist. It's got a lot of fat in there, but I'm a huge fan of butter. Alright. So, these have been on. They're feeling pretty good. Color's looking good. What I'm feeling for, the outside feels firm, but the inside still feels pretty soft. So, I think that's just about a perfect medium rare. And what it's doing, the muscle's kind of tightening up. You're cooking out moisture. Fat's cooking out of it. And it's getting tighter and tighter and tighter. So, we're going to let this one rest a little bit. But what you're really going to do is let it reabsorb some of those juices. It's pushing, it's pushing all this moisture out, all this fat out. And then it's going to relax. And then it's going to rest. And it's going to reabsorb some of that stuff. So, that's what we're looking for. Most likely, we're going to eat a room temperature steak that's cooked, hopefully, pretty close to perfect. So, kind of what I'm going for. This steak feels great. Good looking fatty McPhattersons. Oh, just for fun, let's melt some butter on there. Mmm. So, we let the steaks rest for about five minutes. They've reabsorbed a lot of moisture. They look beautiful. Let's see what they look like on the inside. I'm shooting for medium. Let's see. Right about like that. So, I've got a good crust on the outside. Nice cook. Nice and pink in the middle. It's a good looking slice. Mmm. It tastes good, too. And that's how I make my steaks. Move out the way, way, way, way. Mmm. I could swim through this smoke in here. This is a national show. It's not just local. Hello, Americans. Hello. Reframe. I like the way a flame kind of licks the steak. Yeah. Or kisses it. I don't know which is the proper way to say that. Well, either way, I'm into it.