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Speaker 1
Your resume is good in numbers given to give more people. You're listening to the Barbecue Nerds podcast, where smoked meat science and flavor is our favorite experiment. Hey, barbecue lovers, I'm David, your resident pitmaster and science geek, along with my co-host Frank. We're diving deep into the world of barbecue where tradition meets innovation. Now let's get to today's episode.

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Speaker 1
Oh, Daniel Perez asking about injections because we haven't touched upon injections. We're good with the exterior, with rubs and with sauces. We never did get into an injection.

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Speaker 1
So I want to thank him for bringing that up. And,

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Speaker 1
I'm, I'm expecting that we get some type of content from him moving forward now that he's got a smoke slinger on the way.

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Speaker 2
Absolutely. Yeah.

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Speaker 1
I expect nothing but content from everyone.

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Speaker 2
So so on the injection scene, there's probably somebody in the comments here or listening to the show that have been has been doing it longer than me. So I yield. Before I say anything, I yield to,

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Speaker 2
to their experience. And I'm perfectly okay with being corrected. However,

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Speaker 2
from my experience, fab was the OG injection,

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Speaker 2
fab powder and

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Speaker 2
Lee and weapon.

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Speaker 2
It was, I believe her dad, I think was fab. And,

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Speaker 2
the fab powder injection came around on the competition circuit. You mixed it up and had phosphates in it. It had,

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Speaker 2
the other seasonings and things like that. And that hyper injected moisture into the fibers of the meat before that. I don't really know if there was legit injections around, but the, the grandfather to all the injections is brining and curing.

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Speaker 2
So it accomplishes a similar feat. But injection is like for the guys that are in a hurry that want to just like they wanted to brine in the fridge overnight without making a bunch of brine. So they're just going to inject all these,

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Speaker 2
ingredients down inside. So while coarse grains like salt, pepper, you know, things like that won't, they'll get stuck in the needle.

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Speaker 2
So you have to almost emulsify that stuff and get it down into the water. Then you can inject all that stuff down in there and get some action going. After that. Other people came on the scene, not really sure who was the first one to say I got one too, but I do know that there's butchers, you know, Cosmo's got his,

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Speaker 2
there's a lot of different powdered injections, but then we can't forget the Cajun,

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Speaker 2
butter garlic guy.

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Speaker 2
What was that guy.

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Speaker 1
Tony? Scene agent.

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Speaker 2
Injector guy.

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Speaker 1
Yeah, yeah. You got Hojo right here. He brought it up. Tony sees Cajun butter is a good injection for pulled pork. Is that what you're talking about? Where? I don't get stuff. I know all about this. This is Tony. Cajun butter.

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Speaker 1
Oh, yeah. Stuff.

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Speaker 2
So that's different.

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Speaker 1
Okay.

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Speaker 2
Before that was fab, I'm pretty sure. But fab came in a powder. It was a either a jar,

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Speaker 2
plastic,

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Speaker 2
jar or a,

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Speaker 2
bag, a Ziploc bag. I actually have some up upstairs right now, but butchers,

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Speaker 2
those are like. Those are like competition barbecue kind of injections, which you'll see guys using these chops, injectors.

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Speaker 2
Dan.

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Speaker 2
Dan, we call him Dan U-Haul.

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Speaker 2
Dan Udall up in Kansas City is chops barbecue. And he's the guy that made the bug sprayer with the machined head that got FDA approved that you could do for needles at once, and you can inject your hog all the way down the hams and all up and down. Then he made battery powered ones with,

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Speaker 2
pumps and stuff.

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Speaker 2
Crazy. That's a whole nother crazy end of barbecue right there.

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Speaker 1
Oh, well, we have this battery injector available for Saturday in you that they just know. Well, I don't know if there's a whole hog there Saturday, which I'm not going to say whether or not there is or isn't.

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Speaker 1
Have, you know, let's just say there is one

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Speaker 1
who's injecting this hog. If we decide to go on one half.

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Speaker 1
No, no, no, it's.

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Speaker 2
For the guys listening on the audio version. Frank just took. Set his beer down, took his finger and put it on his nose to say, not it. And it was his right index finger is the one that you got to use for that, not it. Anyway. Go ahead.

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Speaker 1
Well,

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Speaker 1
I'm just, you know, as we go back two episodes ago and,

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Speaker 1
we had mentioned just how excited David is and so does things over the top. One of the talks that came up was with this whole hog. Do we split it in half symmetrically or are we cutting it to four portions? If we split it in half, we could do half where we're where, you know, we do an injection and a mopping and then half where we're doing a a rub with just salt.

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Speaker 1
There's all these ideas, but I only bring this up because when I wanted to get one of these injectors, I was told to just go to to a veterinary store to get this, this,

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Speaker 1
injector for a horse, rather than spending money on an injector that someone says is for the barbecue industry.

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Speaker 2
It's battery powered.

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Speaker 1
I need this, I just hook it up to a core battery. We're going to need all night power.

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Speaker 2
Yeah. So if you go to most barbecue stores,

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Speaker 2
like specialty stores, you'll see them in there. It's called shops. Power injector.

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Speaker 2
They're usually the half gallon or the full gallon,

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Speaker 2
pump up sprayer. And he's got a little acrylic, some kind of food grade acrylic machined head that accepts,

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Speaker 2
the screw in needles and,

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Speaker 2
yeah, you just, you get to inject four places at once that way,

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Speaker 2
so.

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Speaker 2
But you can't there cannot be any granules in it. It would be a bad deal because you'd plug up in needles and it ain't gonna work.

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Speaker 1
It's true.

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Speaker 2
You know? So.

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Speaker 2
But, yeah, the injection thing. I'm not really sure where it started, except competition, barbecue that, like needles in the in the meat. There's a lot of things that started in competition. Barbecue that nobody knew anything about. Competition barbecue. But guys like the,

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Speaker 2
the. What was that guy we talked about? Cajun injector guy.

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Speaker 1
Oh, Tony, you made him.

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Speaker 2
He made him that special little cooker thing. And remember, he went on the TV on QVC and infomercials, and he was selling that thing. Yeah.

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Speaker 1
I've used that Tony ce Cajun butter on on turkeys that we deep fried. Yeah, I've used it on pork butts. I've used that on. Oh my God, so many. Though. They have different flavors too. I remember we injected an entire,

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Speaker 1
bone in ribeye. I don't know why we did this. It's just one of the things that we decided to do one day.

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Speaker 1
We injected the entire bone in ribeye with the blues hog.

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Speaker 1
Bold and beefy, big and big and beefy. Yeah. That one,

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Speaker 1
along with

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Speaker 1
what? We really got crazy with this. We also used better than bouillon beef that you just add hot water to that, setting it down, and then somehow one of the other Cajun Tony Cajun items that he has was in that, too, in

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Speaker 1
it was about as close to a competition bite as you're going to get because of how much we injected it, and then all the seasoning on the outside.

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Speaker 1
So you get that good crust on that prime rib as well.

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Speaker 2
Yeah.

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Speaker 2
You know, cool stuff.

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Speaker 2
Yeah. I'm not really sure where that comes from regionally though, other than competition barbecue.

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Speaker 1
So I agree with you, I think I don't think that there's a region necessarily.

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Speaker 1
It's just another way of being able to get as much flavor into the meat as possible. So as it's cooking over a long period of time, not only does it not dry out

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Speaker 1
which it shouldn't do anyway, but it continues to retain that flavor.

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Speaker 1
You hear people do this all the time that they use apple juice on their pork. Yeah. So there's there's those that make their own spice blend with apple juice or apple cider vinegar.

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Speaker 1
And then they inject the, the, the pork. Usually it's a pork loin because it doesn't have the same content of fat. So they try to load it up with as much humidity as possible.

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Speaker 1
But I have to think that if you're using apple cider vinegar, that item is going to retain a good amount of tang to it.

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Speaker 2
Yeah.

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Speaker 2
Yep. For sure. For sure. So now we gotta pivot and we gotta get over to the fusion evolution of barbecue.

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Speaker 1
This is my favorite topic. I love this.

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Speaker 2
The the first thing I think about and I don't know who's first that ever did it. But the the one thing I think about very quickly that comes to mind is,

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Speaker 2
a restaurant up in Kansas City called Buck Toohey. Shout out to those guys.

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Speaker 2
I wouldn't be able to like off the top of my head. Tell you much about it.

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Speaker 2
I haven't eaten there yet, but I know a lot of people that have, and they're pulling together those Asian Korean kind of flavors and mixing that in with barbecue. It's like their claim to fame. I don't know if you know of any like that. Any fusion places.

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Speaker 1
There's there's so many places that combine ethnic seasonings and foods from around the world into one plate.

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Speaker 1
And it's not just limited to barbecue.

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Speaker 1
So we'll see. Like a lot of the different masala curries that come in from India that are combined with coconut milk that's native to, say, Thailand,

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Speaker 1
and then that'll be infused with like a Kona coffee rub that you'll find coming out of Kona.

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Speaker 1
Hawaii. Yeah. So there's there's so many flavors that are combined together. So, for example, you know, you could take your Kansas City burn ends and then toss them in that gold chain Korean barbecue sauce,

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Speaker 1
and then mix in a little bit of the red chili paste. So that way you get a nice sweet, spicy, smoky flavor.

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Speaker 1
And it takes that, that, that meat to a whole nother level when you bite into that tender, delicious, juicy, burnt end.

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Speaker 2
Oh yeah. Well burnt ends. The whole purpose of burn ends is to get that char, to get that,

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Speaker 2
the, the bark and the char and the flavor and then you're actually setting that glaze and not burning it, really. But caramelizing that, that, that glaze on there, that's the whole point of burnt ends. And then you get into the same thing with pork belly burn ends.

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Speaker 2
I was actually going to do something with gel the other day just because I had a chunk of it. I didn't have time. But but yeah, you're you're starting to get into,

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Speaker 2
some cool stuff there. So as far as fusion, though, it's not just limited to bringing like oriental flavors and stuff like that. We're talking about Mexican flavors coming in or,

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Speaker 2
you know, some of the other flavors like that.

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Speaker 2
Argentina,

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Speaker 2
like an Argentinian. Well, l for going

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Speaker 2
he was he told me a little bit about it is that, you know, most of the people that are that migrated to Argentina around the end of the war, you were given two choices. You're going to New York or you're going to Buenos Aires. And so most of the people from Europe that migrated out there, it was a 5050 shot.

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Speaker 2
They're probably going to pick Argentina or New York. And so you wind up with all these cultures that went to Argentina. And then all of that in turn impacted the the cuisines and stuff like that, like chimichurri was actually like curry. It was give me curry is what,

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Speaker 2
the story is that I heard about that. So what they want to call it a chimichurri and it's all their little blend of herbs that they use down there in Argentina.

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Speaker 2
So you get some a lot of Italian down there, some German. You got a lot of crazy stuff that's all kind of blended together. And here we are doing that in our barbecue sausage. There's a million different kinds of sausage being made.

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Speaker 1
Don't forget about the tacos ban barbecue from park.

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Speaker 2
I knew tacos was coming.

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Speaker 1
Brisket, barbacoa, Koa with salsa verde or pulled pork with a Malay drizzle. It's like that pit and that taco. Yeah. Had a baby. Yeah.

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Speaker 1
There's so many different items in tacos now you know on these trips that I've taken with you and we're down there in Texas and elsewhere, we tend to find our way to taco joints quite often for breakfast.

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Speaker 2
Well there is down there dinner. There ain't no Texas barbecue in Texas, I swear. I bet Mexican restaurants has got that outnumbered like probably 30 or 40 to one.

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Speaker 2
They're everywhere. Like they're even in places you don't expect them little houses that are Mexican restaurants. But I like tacos. So

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Speaker 2
you're right I'm wrong. I, we, there are a lot of barbecue places in Texas, but it does seem like the little Mexican places pop out everywhere. And you got to try them. Oh, yeah. Tacos is correct.

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Speaker 2
Tell me I'm wrong tomorrow.

00:13:03:03 - 00:13:06:23
Speaker 1
No, it's the what's nice about an taco or,

00:13:06:23 - 00:13:13:09
Speaker 1
whereas other things that I, that I love. Oh my God, I can't. It had slipped my mind in the,

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Speaker 1
It's not an empanada. Well, even empanadas now empanadas have so many, so many varieties of ingredients on the inside.

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Speaker 2
Yeah. You could you it's just stuffed with everything.

00:13:24:08 - 00:13:26:21
Speaker 1
Anything. That's right. Yeah.

00:13:26:23 - 00:13:28:19
Speaker 2
Yeah. Really cool. Another,

00:13:28:19 - 00:13:32:12
Speaker 2
fusion element is shotgun shells. Have you heard of those? That's the.

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Speaker 1
Big.

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Speaker 2
Manicotti that are filled with,

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Speaker 2
all kinds of barbecue related things and then wrapped in bacon and smoked,

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Speaker 2
you know, fat, the fatty. You know, the OG fatty is where we would make, like, breakfast and roll it up inside of a fatty wrap, which is just sausage that's rolled out flat. And then we would roll it up in a and look just like the chub sausage that you get in the little casing.

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Speaker 2
Wrap that in bacon and smoke it. Well, see, we don't apple pie. We done inside of those. We've done so many things inside of Italian pizza. You know.

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Speaker 1
Inside.

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Speaker 2
Of these fatties. That's another fusion,

00:14:14:03 - 00:14:15:12
Speaker 2
dish that you see around.

00:14:15:12 - 00:14:40:00
Speaker 1
That's a wrap for today's episode of the Barbecue Nerds podcast, where smoked meats, science, and flavor always comes first. This episode is brought to you by Smoke Slinger, the craftsman behind some of the best barbecue pits and offset smokers in the game. Whether you're a backyard warrior or a pro, Pitmaster smoke slinger builds custom pits designed to help you cook your best barbecue ever.

00:14:40:02 - 00:14:59:23
Speaker 1
Visit Smoke slinger.com to see their lineup and bring competition quality smoke to your own backyard. A big shout out to smoke slinger fueling our passion and keeping the smoke rolling strong. And as always, keep those pits hot, the smoke rolling and stay nerdy about barbecue.