Carolina barbecue legend Sam Jones comes from a long legacy of cooking a whole hog, with his grandfather, father, and uncle all coming before him. At his no-frills restaurant, Sam Jones BBQ, he and his team preserve their tradition of cooking whole hog, chicken, turkey, and more.
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00:00 (upbeat music)
00:02 These are fresh pigs we get twice a week delivered.
00:08 We'll more than likely go through all of these by Sunday.
00:12 We're starting with the pig down here
00:13 because this is the oldest pig, a couple days old,
00:16 but these are all newer, they were brought today.
00:19 So now we're just gonna take this pig, get up on the table.
00:24 - There are several parts of the country
00:25 that lay claim to being the birthplace
00:28 of whole hog barbecue.
00:30 Eastern North Carolina historically
00:32 has been whole hog, wood fired.
00:34 - So now the only thing that'll happen,
00:37 we'll put a little water on the skin.
00:39 That's just to help the salt adhere to it.
00:42 And then once that happens, that is the only thing
00:44 that'll be applied to this animal
00:46 until it's finished and carried inside.
00:49 Tomorrow, roughly 18 hours from now.
00:53 The way I look at it, I'm the fourth generation
00:55 of my family that's been doing this right here.
00:57 Our evolution has come this far out of the ground.
01:01 Because once upon a time, they were cooking in the ground.
01:04 But there again, it's not broke, don't fix it.
01:07 That's whole hog in its purest form.
01:09 (upbeat music)
01:11 (upbeat music)
01:14 - So this is basically the engine.
01:31 All the meats that are served at our restaurant
01:34 come out of here.
01:35 Everything we do is fresh, everything is cooked over wood.
01:38 And in my opinion, barbecue,
01:41 in its truest form, is that.
01:43 There's six whole hog cookers,
01:46 and we can actually cook two at a time.
01:48 So each grill has the potential
01:51 of cooking two hogs at a time.
01:53 And so, you know, that's 12 pigs at one time
01:56 we could cook if we had to.
01:57 (upbeat music)
02:02 First staff's gonna be in anywhere between 5.30 and 6.30
02:05 to forest the ribs, chicken, turkey, wings.
02:09 Those type of things are gonna go on
02:11 just as soon as we can get a heat source going.
02:13 - This is three cases of chicken,
02:16 and we've got it sitting in a brine,
02:18 which is just salt and sugar.
02:20 We're gonna take this out of the brine,
02:22 which only sits in here 24 hours at the most.
02:25 So Adonais is seasoning the chicken.
02:28 This is Sam Jones Rub potion.
02:30 Same one we sell up front in the smaller containers.
02:34 This rub goes on the chicken, the turkey, and the ribs.
02:37 Only this.
02:38 (upbeat music)
02:40 - So here we have our turkey breasts.
02:42 They usually come two to three in a bag.
02:46 These will also be ready for tomorrow's service.
02:48 We try to have new, fresh meat seasoned every evening
02:52 to start fresh the next morning.
02:54 These are pork ribs, pork spare ribs.
03:00 He's cutting the silver skin and the fat cap off of the back
03:03 so that it'll cook evenly.
03:06 And then again, he's gonna start to season.
03:09 Same Sam Jones Rub potion.
03:11 Gonna load some chickens, two pieces.
03:19 Make a whole chicken.
03:20 So one, two, three.
03:23 I try to keep all the raw food together
03:24 where it's not dripping on anything finished.
03:27 In about 45 minutes, I'll come back out
03:30 and I'll check the color of the turkeys,
03:33 and more than likely just wrap 'em up.
03:34 We don't want this color to get too dark,
03:37 again, for presentation.
03:39 And we also don't want the outside to cook
03:41 faster than the inside.
03:43 - What we're about to do now is check this hog.
03:47 And so at this point, the meat's done.
03:49 And I mean, I know that from looking at it
03:51 because I've been doing it my whole life.
03:53 The fact that the ribs and the backbone
03:55 are starting to separate from each other
03:57 is a telltale sign.
03:59 See how much shrinkage there is on that shank?
04:01 So when you started cooking,
04:03 that meat was actually hanging over that shank a little bit.
04:07 It's just those visuals that the longer you do something,
04:09 it's like anything else.
04:11 You stop reading the instructions.
04:13 And so what'll happen now
04:15 is always the very last thing we do,
04:17 we'll take our heat shield out,
04:19 and at that point, we'll apply direct heat to this animal.
04:24 It'll allow us to blister the skin on it.
04:26 That grill's kind of plateaued based on stirring,
04:30 and it's needing about another 75 degrees.
04:32 I'm gonna start firing it in increments
04:35 and bringing it up slow
04:36 because you don't want it to spike on you.
04:39 The crisping of the skin, there's a talent to that.
04:43 You can cook a whole hog,
04:44 and your hog be fine and your skin be crap.
04:48 It being a leathery, rubbery,
04:51 where it did not get direct heat applied to it,
04:54 or where you tried to blister it
04:56 and overdid it or underdone it,
04:59 that's the difference between it being
05:02 something you could patch a car tire with
05:04 and something as tasty as that natural chip.
05:07 This is the part where you can really mess it up,
05:11 getting that skin parched, crispy, but not scorched.
05:16 At this point, the meat is done.
05:18 All we're doing now is blistering the skin.
05:21 We blister the skin and chop it in the pork.
05:24 It's probably one of the things
05:25 that sets my family style apart
05:28 from a lot of the other barbecue places.
05:30 So my grandfather opened Skylight Inn in the summer of 1947.
05:35 The front dining room is the original building.
05:39 It was an octagonally shaped building,
05:42 made absolutely no sense at all.
05:43 I have no idea why you would do that,
05:45 but literally, what started in a hole in the ground,
05:48 because that pit that my granddaddy learned
05:50 how to cook hogs on,
05:51 to now has blossomed to what we've been able to do,
05:55 and I say we, because even though it bears my name,
05:59 there's so many names that stand behind them letters
06:03 right there that say Sam Jones.
06:05 When we designed these, we did these grates
06:12 with these half-inch bars on six-inch centers,
06:16 and what it does is, most of the time when you see a grill,
06:19 you see expanded metal,
06:21 and you can get the skin to crisp on it,
06:23 but it's not gonna be as thick.
06:25 It's almost like the skin needs somewhere to expand to
06:28 and do its natural thing,
06:30 and so what'll happen is you'll actually see that skin
06:33 start to parch and blossom almost,
06:37 and blow, if it's your blowing glass or something.
06:40 Those grills that I was able to help design,
06:45 and they're made right here in North Carolina,
06:47 and I see 'em go all over the country,
06:50 and people are buying 'em to cook whole hogs on.
06:53 They could probably find a different idea
06:55 to go about cooking a whole hog,
06:57 but they're buying that particular grill
06:59 to duplicate what we do.
07:00 Like, the skin's doing right.
07:04 I'll add a little bit to it,
07:06 and then she and I,
07:08 after literally like three or four minutes,
07:12 put that shield back in, let it stay hot,
07:15 and then it'll finish doing its thing.
07:18 So, Lindsey is, she's a boss.
07:21 She can cook a hog just as good as I can.
07:23 I guarantee you she will outwork me and you three guys
07:27 in that pit house this afternoon
07:29 to the point that you'd have your tongue hanging out.
07:32 - I'm the first female pit master for Sam Jones.
07:35 I hold that title pretty proudly,
07:37 trying to keep up, and I love it out here.
07:39 When I started here, I started in prep.
07:41 The line cook in me started hearing
07:44 the ticket machine go off,
07:46 and seeing that they would get backed up,
07:47 and they would get busy,
07:48 and they would need an extra set of hands.
07:50 The line cook mentality said,
07:51 "Hey, train me on the line, too.
07:53 I can come help whenever."
07:55 I asked if I could come outside.
07:57 They took a chance on me,
07:58 and as of Sunday, two days ago,
08:00 I've been out here a year now.
08:02 - So, she's about to quarter this up
08:05 and pan it up, skin up,
08:10 and what that'll do is just help preserve the skin
08:12 as it sits on the pit,
08:14 where right now it's actually sitting, acting as a bowl,
08:19 you know, so all the renderings of the fat in the animal
08:22 are sitting in that skin.
08:23 By placing it in the pan,
08:25 turning the skin upright,
08:26 just leaving it on the pit,
08:28 it allows that skin to continue to crisp a little bit,
08:31 as long as that grill stays hot.
08:33 As soon as we finish the process,
08:38 it will begin to get broken down.
08:41 What she's doing now is removing the inedibles,
08:44 and then this skin will get chopped very fine.
08:47 You get a little crunch in the bite.
08:48 Everything's blended in together.
08:51 I have no idea the origin
08:54 of why my family's always done that,
08:56 because I don't know of any other barbecue place
08:59 that I've ever been to
09:00 that chops the skin in a meat like that.
09:02 You know, it changes the dynamic of the bite,
09:05 the texture, you know,
09:06 and it being that perfect balanced bite.
09:09 - It's been several times, you know, people ask,
09:11 but I remember one time in particular,
09:13 this guy comes in, he was like,
09:14 Mr. Jones, he was like, you know,
09:17 when that board started,
09:18 was it already concaved or was it flat?
09:21 He was like, no, it's flat.
09:23 You know, he said, normally it will use one a year.
09:26 And he goes, well,
09:27 somebody's eaten a lot of wood, hasn't they?
09:30 And he goes, well,
09:32 and you got to figure my dad now,
09:33 he's not ever at a loss for words,
09:36 has a little flair for the dramatic.
09:39 And he said, well,
09:40 our wood chips are better than a lot of people's barbecue.
09:45 Probably more to a dressing than I would a sauce
09:49 because, you know, so many times people think sauce,
09:51 they're thinking thick, masking.
09:54 And I think it enhances the actual
09:58 natural flavor of the pork.
10:00 I heard my dad say so many times, you know,
10:03 you can put enough sauce on a napkin to get it down
10:06 if you had to,
10:06 but you don't spend 18 hours cooking hogs to mask it
10:12 or, you know, to hide it in a particular sauce.
10:16 You know, you want to taste all that time and energy
10:19 and wood and fire and smoke
10:22 that went into making that animal
10:24 taste what barbecue's supposed to taste like.
10:27 - Aside from the time and the color,
10:33 you almost start to,
10:34 you almost start to connect to your food.
10:36 You almost start to feel your food,
10:38 feel as in time-wise when it could be done.
10:42 I feel like the more I've learned
10:44 the process of how this works,
10:46 I feel like I'm feeding my own family
10:49 and that's the care I take in it.
10:50 That's the pride that I take in it.
10:52 I want the same reaction.
10:53 I want these people to have a good experience here.
10:56 And when they compliment it,
10:58 I know that it's because the knowledge that I have of food,
11:01 the knowledge that I have of these people's taste buds,
11:06 I know what tastes good.
11:06 I know what they want.
11:08 I know what they want to see.
11:09 We eat with our eyes first.
11:11 The ribs have been on for about 45 minutes.
11:15 So now we'll take them out when they're around this color
11:18 because now as we wrap them,
11:20 we're trying to achieve, in a sense,
11:23 staying this color underneath the barbecue sauce.
11:26 We wrap up the turkey for the same reason.
11:29 We don't need any more color on it,
11:31 but we want it to stay juicy
11:34 and almost based in its own juices.
11:37 Now at the same time, the chickens are probably done.
11:41 So I'm going to temp these.
11:42 These will now come off
11:45 and go in the restaurant for service.
11:47 - So this is what we refer to as the window.
11:51 Some would call it a pass,
11:52 but basically this is where the kitchen line comes to a T.
11:57 We consider this the last line of defense
12:00 as far as I always say,
12:02 when human hands are involved, mistakes will get made.
12:06 And so hopefully this is the last line of defense
12:08 to make sure the orders are correct.
12:10 Everything looks good.
12:12 There's nothing out of place to the table.
12:15 As you can see, we're in full swing here.
12:18 It's about 20 minutes to one on a Tuesday.
12:23 And it's actually a good lunch crowd
12:26 to be early in a week like this.
12:28 Can we get y'all anything?
12:30 - Oh, I think we're good.
12:31 - Good deal.
12:32 Well, thank y'all for stopping by.
12:33 - Absolutely.
12:34 - You know, one,
12:35 I never thought there'd be a Sam Jones barbecue.
12:38 Dagon sure never thought there'd be one
12:40 here in the capital city.
12:42 I think anybody in the restaurant business
12:44 wants their customers to leave with a pleasant experience.
12:47 We try to stay as plain Jane, I guess, as possible.
12:51 You know, that smokehouse screams tradition.
12:54 And it's not just a yarn we spend.
12:59 You know, we spend a pile of money on firewood.
13:02 You know, it's not out there in the yard
13:04 just for a picture's sake.
13:06 It would probably blow people's minds
13:08 to know what we spend on firewood
13:10 for the three restaurants.
13:12 Because we are preserving what, in my opinion,
13:15 is a heritage, a legacy that's been passed down
13:18 through my family, but it's a tradition
13:21 of our entire region.
13:23 And as time goes on, there's fewer and fewer places
13:27 that are bearing a torch.
13:29 You know, there again, that's another thing
13:31 I'm humbled by is that we're still able
13:34 to bring a traditional Eastern North Carolina
13:37 barbecue meal to a table, a nicer table
13:40 than it used to be.
13:41 There will never be a white tablecloth
13:42 in my establishment, but I want people
13:45 to take away tradition, hospitality,
13:49 and so I hope that that's what the takeaway is.
13:51 Is, you know, man, that was great,
13:54 and the next time I have somebody in town
13:57 that's not from town, this is where I wanna bring 'em.
14:00 (upbeat music)
14:02 [BLANK_AUDIO]