What to do with leftovers?
One ingenious answer: Turn them into soup
It’s a question that has bedeviled pitmasters since the earliest days of Texas barbecue: What do you do with any unsold meat left over after a day’s service?
Deciding how much barbecue to cook on any given day is not an exact science. Ideally, you sell out of barbecue as soon as the last order is in. But it usually doesn’t work that way.
If you don’t cook enough, the dreaded “Sold out!” sign goes up, and angry customers ask why you didn’t cook more. If you cook too much, you’re left with a pile of expensive, cooked meat.
Some pitmasters unwisely decide to put the leftover meat in the refrigerator and reheat it for the next day. If you ever show up at a barbecue joint right when it opens and the barbecue tastes slightly off, that’s probably what happened.
A better solution is to repurpose the meat. The classic technique is to chop up any leftover brisket, mix it with sauce and use it for chopped beef sandwiches the next day.
Now, the team at Tejas Chocolate & Barbecue in Tomball has taken the repurposing idea one step further. This winter, co-owner and chef Greg Moore is featuring the barbecue joint’s celebrated smoked meats in a new menu of soups.
Depending on how much of a particular meat is left over, Moore has created a variety of soups, including cream of brisket and blue cheese, brisket French onion, chicken tinga tortilla, pork belly and smoked poblano and a pork rib chowder.
Moore, who co-owns Tejas with his brother Scott and partner Michelle Holland, is particularly skilled at turning barbecue into soup.
In 2003, after years working in the oil industry, Moore decided it was time for a change. He liked to cook, but culinary school was too expensive. Then his dad gave him the type of advice dads are known for: “Just go get a job!”
Moore looked around his native Tomball for a wellregarded restaurant and decided on La Tavola, a white-tablecloth Italian joint. He knocked on the back door and explained to the man who answered that he wanted a job. Chef John Boehm needed a dishwasher, and Moore had his entry into the restaurant business. Boehm was a veteran of the Vallone family’s early Italian restaurants in Houston, and one of his specialties was cooking soups. Within a year, Moore was promoted to sous chef, and his soup-making education began. Moore would eventually work in various restaurants, ending up at Mancuso’s Italian Table on South Voss in 2008. He struck up a friendship with pitmaster Russell Roegels, who owned the Baker’s Ribs franchise next door (now Roegels Barbecue Co).
“I remember closing up the restaurant late at night and smelling the smoke from the pits next door,” Moore says.
When Scott and Michelle decided they needed to supplement the income from their bean-to-bar chocolate-making business, they got together with Greg and decided to try their hand at barbecue.
Tejas Chocolate opened in 2015 and has since become known as one of the top barbecue joints in Texas. Michelle handles the chocolate-making, Scott the pitmaster duties, and Greg leverages his experience as a chef to bring creative items to the menu, including the new soups.
One favorite is the pork rib chowder. Moore will occasionally have a couple of racks of pork ribs left over at the end of the day, along with a few baked potatoes. He starts by sautéing aromatics such as garlic and parsley. He adds mirepoix (carrots, celery, onion) along with flour and chicken stock to make a blond roux. He continues to add chicken stock and cream to build up the flavors, then adds the shredded pork rib meat and diced baked potato. The soup is refrigerated overnight to let the flavors combine and reheated and served the next day.
In an unusually harsh winter in which Houston has seen two bouts of snow and sleet, Moore’s soulful soups are a comforting solution to the age-old question of how to repurpose the previous day’s unsold barbecue. J.C. REID