The unsung heroes of Texas barbecue keep things running in the background
Behind every high-profile pitmaster is a supporting cast of characters who keep the fires burning and the briskets cooking.
Here are a few of the backof-house jobs that don’t always see the light of day when food writers and barbecue aficionados wax poetic about the smoked meats that end up in the glossy pictures of Instagram and magazine pages. Brisket trimming is the first step in the process of cooking world-class brisket. Meat distributors will often deliver raw briskets that are different shapes and sizes. The job of the brisket trimmer is to make them all as uniform in size and shape as possible.
Why? Due to the low-andslow cooking process, different size briskets make it hard to know when they are done. For instance, if you cook a 10pound brisket and a 6-pound brisket at the same time, the 6 pounder will finish cooking earlier than the 10 pounder and will need to be pulled from the smoker sooner.
Now, extrapolate that to cooking 50 briskets of different sizes. Trying to determine which briskets should be pulled at the right time becomes unmanageable. If the trimmer does a good job, all the briskets will be the same size and the pitmaster can be confident that pulling them all at the same time will result in consistently cooked briskets.
One of the most difficult and important jobs in barbecue is the pit cleaner. Again, the uniqueness of the low-and-slow cooking method makes this a critical job. The purpose of this cooking method is to properly render the fat from cuts of meat like brisket. This results in a lot of the fat and grease ending up in the bottom and on the sides of the pit/ smoker.
If this grease is not periodically cleaned out, it can ignite and cause a fire that spreads from the smoker to the rest of the restaurant with devastating consequences. Pit cleaners will don hazmat-like suits and climb inside the smoker to scrape the grease from its surfaces. Many pit rooms are not air-conditioned, so this job is one of the hottest and dirtiest in a barbecue joint, especially in the summer.
Inventory management may seem like a straight-forward numbers job, but again, due to the nature of barbecue, it becomes a skill of probability and prediction. Because barbecue is cooked up to 24 hours in advance, the inventory manager needs to predict how much to cook for the next day’s service.
Cook too much, and you’ve got briskets left over and potentially a lot of wasted food. Cook too little, and the dreaded “Sold out” sign goes up too early and potential customers and income are turned away.
The best managers take into account things like the day of the week (Saturdays are often busier) as well as the weather (a prediction of rain may dampen the number of guests) to be able to properly deploy the material resources of a barbecue joint.
And perhaps the most unsung position in a barbecue joint is the meat cutter. Once the rest of the team delivers that pristinely cooked brisket to the chopping block, it is up to the cutter to efficiently and skillfully parcel it into slices or chopped beef so as to maximize the amount of sellable meat served to customers.
The reality is that there are relatively few larger barbecue joints that fill these positions with individual employees. For a small, neighborhood joint, the owner/pitmaster often does all these jobs at the same time.