Ten Minute Brisket: How Family and Film Got Me Started In Barbecue.

Three years before Aaron Franklin opened the doors of his now legendary restaurant, there were only a handful of joints around Austin serving world class Texas Barbecue. The Dark Prince of BBQ, John Mueller, had closed the doors of his first location the previous year. This left the title of the best Austin-adjacent smoked meats to his grandfather's famous Louie Mueller's, in Taylor.

At the ripe young age of eleven, I was woefully unaware of any of this. Though we lived a short fifteen minutes from the famous Taylor joint, I had never even heard the name Louie Mueller. You see, my family didn't make a habit of eating out, doubly so for barbecue; and with good reason. The women in my family knew how to cook (I mean really cook), and my Great Grandpa, George, held a monthly barbecue for all his family and their friends.

We knew that no matter what was happening in our lives, on the first Saturday of the month we would get a full day of family, delicious ribs, baked beans, and all manner of sides. There was only one rule. Never ask Grandpa how he made his sauce or ribs. Ever. We all knew this and accepted his food for the blessing it was. As far as I was concerned, sharing a meal with family at those gatherings was what life was all about. That, and the films of John Wayne, Quentin Tarantino, and Robert Rodriguez.

The three "F's" (family, food, and film) went hand in hand. Like clockwork, we would fill my grandparents home, visit in the back yard in anticipation while Grandpa George manned the smoker, and eventually said grace. As soon as everyone was served, adults would visit in the dining room and the kids cleaned bones and licked sauce from their fingers while watching John Wayne and Dean Martin fight bandits.

One movie of particular interest to my friends and I was Robert Rodriguez's Once Upon a Time in Mexico: An action romp with more violence, sexuality, and roasted pork than any of us had ever seen packed into ninety minutes. It's a thing to behold. On the DVD bonus features, Rodriguez included a rather odd supplement. Ten-Minute Cooking School: Puerco Pibil - A brief video filmed on a noisy digital cam corder of the Austin-based director in his home, showing how he makes the signature dish featured in his movie. If Grandpa wasn't going to spill the beans on how he made his BBQ, I was going to have to learn somewhere else. This presented as good a place as any to start.

It's important to mention that if good barbecue was hard to find in 2006, videos on how it was done were damn near non-existent. For the most part, my education was trial and a whole heck of a lot of error. My first brisket was cooked to 165 degrees on a propane grill, and my friends mercifully chipped in their allowance to order pizza after the first rubbery bite. The mystery of it all was reinforced with my next obsession, Tarantino and Rodriguez's 2007 double feature, Grindhouse, filmed right down the street in Austin. Rodriguez's half of the bill, a military experiment gone-wrong zombie flick called Planet Terror, includes a Mueller-esque pit master repeatedly refusing to share his secrets with the local sheriff.

To my delight, a few years later the DVD of Grindhouse hit the shelves of my local Blockbuster (no straight to streaming in those days). I didn't even watch the movie. I went straight to the bonus features, and sure as day, there was another Ten-Minute Cooking School. Again, the director demonstrates his method for making the film's featured dish: The coveted beef brisket and ribs. Finally! Someone willing to shed light on how the heck to make this mysterious meat. The only problem: I didn't have a smoker, and Grandpa George was not about to let a kid mess around on his 500-gallon cast iron beast. Considering the aforementioned propane fiasco, I resigned myself to practicing my puerco pibil at home.

There were a few old-timers at church who shared my enthusiasm for food and movies, so when they found out I was trying to learn the dark arts of BBQ, they started inviting me over anytime they sparked up a fire. I would always arrive very early with a notebook and pen in hand. They wouldn't say much about their process. We would mostly watch movies and go check on the smoker now and then. But I watched, and took very careful notes. At some point, I was allowed to actually add wood to the fire and wrap the meat. And that's about where my relationship with Texas BBQ stayed for the next few years, watching movies and tending to fire boxes with men I looked up to, while quietly working on my puerco pibil in the oven at home.

Years later, in 2012, nine days before his ninetieth birthday, Grandpa George passed away. I was a senior in high school, focused on girls, making short films, and saving money to take a gap year of humanitarian work. Our family gatherings had decreased in frequency as Grandpa got older, and the last one was a couple of years behind us. BBQ was not exactly on my radar at this point.

That is, until I returned from my gap year to learn that Grandpa George had apparently taken notice of my enthusiasm for his craft, and left me his 500 gallon reverse-flow smoker. After landing my first bartending gig at Alamo Drafthouse Cinema at nineteen, I started spending all of my expendable income on brisket, rekindling his tradition of gathering loved ones to share food, film, and fellowship. He never passed on his sauce recipe, and knowing how far BBQ has come in the last decade, that's probably a good thing. I'm sure it would seem antiquated by modern standards. Some things are better left as inspiration in sweet and tangy memory.

There is no shortcut to ten minute brisket (and thank God). But there are now so many ten minute videos explaining in excruciating detail how to make world class brisket, that the entire process has become somewhat homogenized. But that's a topic for another day. The only thing stopping you from becoming the best backyard pit master you know, is the time it takes to go through hundreds of hours of trial and error. I'm not going to continue Grandpa George's tight-lipped legacy in regards to sharing the personal touches that make Ollie's Barbecue my own. Because some things belong in memory. And if anyone out there reads one of our recipes or posts and it gets them cooking outside with loved ones, well that's worth losing some trade secrets.

Welcome to Food, Family, and Film. I sincerely hope you're having the time of your life today. Feel free to stay awhile. I'm going to use this space to share recipes developed from a rich and storied heritage, post videos of cooking with friends, and maybe even review some of those John Wayne flicks I used to clean ribs to as a child. Now get outside and cook something with someone you care about.

Till next time,

-Ollie