Podcast

Transcript

Joshua Miller  0:14  

Welcome, everyone. Thank you for tuning in for another episode of the 5 in 20 podcast by Remarkable Academic Foods. I'm your host, Joshua Miller. And today we have a very cool subject. At least it is for me, I hope it is for you. And that is barbecue in school food service. I mean, what else could you ask for? And who else to have on other than an award winning barbecue competitor, the founder of Smoke'n Dudes Barbecue Company, Tom Christine, welcome. Thank you for coming in and taking the time while you're in Key West Florida. I'm super jealous. But thank you for taking the time nonetheless, to help educate our school food service people on barbecue. So I usually start the episode off with what is your guilty pleasure food or snack? And if I had to guess it's gonna have something to do with barbecue. But is it? Are you like sick of it? Do you have other options that you go for?

Tom Christine  1:09  

You never gonna pick a barbecue. Never. So I gotta say, ribs are probably my best thing for, you know, for one of my favorites. Because you could do so much with them, you know, beef, ribs, pork ribs, it doesn't matter. They're all just awesome.

Joshua Miller  1:26  

And I have to say, you know, coming in and with the name Smoke'n Dudes Barbecue Company. I I can't keep my guests in for this episode. I don't know what will, I love the name. But why don't you tell us? What's the story behind the company and how it got started?

Tom Christine  1:41  

Sure. So I'm actually a believe it or not, I'm a mechanic by trade auto mechanic. And my kids bought me a smoker about 30 years ago. And he bought it for me for Father's Day. And I started playing in the backyard. And of course that was before the the internet like we know it today. I'm out there playing and back in 30 years ago. I hate to say this, and I really don't want to say it out loud too much. But we were actually boiling the ribs back then. Because we didn't know any better. Yeah. So like I said, the the internet was just getting started. So I'm playing and checking every night when I go home. I'm checking for different recipes and stuff. And I find out that hey, you know what, you really don't know what you're doing. So I kind of caught myself watching stuff on the internet on how to how to cook barbecue, how to do ribs, how to do pork, and it just took off from there just every year at my house. 

Tom Christine  2:35  

We had a big party where we'd have all the friends over and we call it the luau. We did it in August every year. And yeah, we were we would have up to you know, 60-70 guests. And I cooked for two days before. And my wife had seen on the, in a newspaper that they were having a barbecue cook off and in Ocean City, New Jersey. So we decided we'd take a run down and see what that was like. And as we pull up and get out of the car, we see all these big setups, big trailers and signage. And these guys are cooking and selling food to the public. She looks to me, she's going you can't cook with these guys. I said, Well, let's take a look. Let's walk through see what we got. So as we're walking through, as we went through pass where the guys were selling the food and got to the back, that's where all the competitors were. They had 25 teams there. And they were all small guys like me. So they had their small setups and they had their smoker setup and little 10 by 10 tents and you know tables and stuff. And everybody stop, stop and talk to stop what they were doing. They'll talk to you it was it was awesome. It was just when he just got a great feeling like you were at home talking to your family with these people was great. So the following following year, I cooked in that cook off. It was awesome. And that was it man. From there. We were hooked. 

Tom Christine  3:55  

So we started. We started traveling around doing a cook off. So I did that for about three or four years. And my son went to culinary school. So he comes home from culinary school. When he comes out with us. He says, you know, Dad, we could probably sell food at these things if you'd build a trailer. So I said I'll build the trailer. So I bought us a log cabin trailer put a smoker in it. And we started and we for 11 years, we traveled up and down the East Coast to a big barbecue show. And we were it was awesome. So we would start out on Monday we start you know get get everything ready. We we cooked the food and stuff off that we were going to be selling at the shows. We get everything chilled, and in the truck. We had a refrigerated truck, and we take it out we set up the tents. And we'd also work competing at the same time. So I'd be doing a compete and he'd be doing cooking and my wife and and my relatives and stuff would be there. They'd be selling the food. And it was it was just a fun fun time. We did amazing we did great. So so we we competed for Oh heck I guess close to 15 years total. My son still competes. He only does 2 a year now because he's so busy with his business. 

Tom Christine  5:05  

But yeah, we've won all kinds of awards. We were the Pennsylvania State Champion for a couple years. Like I said, we we have all kinds of trophies and stuff that we've won over the years. And we ended up opening up a restaurant, we did a restaurant, barbecue restaurant. My son ran that I was I still have my auto repair business. So I will be over and helping him at nighttime and on the weekends and stuff. And we had the first restaurant we built that one was an old building that had been closed off for 10 years. We went into renovated it. I made it look like a log cabin. And we are growing a year. And we found the second place that we we built that was a that was a an abandoned gas station that we had taken and I redid that when that was that was even bigger. And we were there. Well, we just sold, well we just we actually opened it as a restaurant. We did a restaurant in there for almost 10 years. And then we started producing barbecue for stores and restaurants. We opened the barbecue plant. meat processing plant, we had a USDA kitchen. And we were doing with cheese. We were doing 25,000 pounds of pork a week for other people. Yeah, it was pretty awesome. 

Joshua Miller  6:19  

That is something you don't do unless you're passionate about for sure.

Tom Christine  6:23  

Once you get it and it gets into your skin, man, it's It's crazy to think that yeah, I started selling barbecue equipment. About 20 years ago, I started off working with the Amish up in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. I took on meadowcreek. And, and we're finally I mean, like I said, we've been with them for 20 years. And I became the the distributor for Southern Pride about 10 years ago, a friend of mine was the distributor. He was over in New Jersey. And we became friends. I was doing all his service work on the smokers because that's what I do. I'm a mechanic. So fixing stuff was easy for me. So I was fixing all his stuff. And he called me up one day say listen, he says, you know he was getting sick, see he was older. He says, Listen, he said I need you to give those folks a call at Southern Pride. He said because I'm not going to be able to do this much longer. So I called I went down and met with them down in Tennessee. And two weeks later, they called me up said, Hey, we want you to come on board. 

Tom Christine  7:24  

So he started me off with New Jersey and Pennsylvania. And within six months, they gave me Maryland and Delaware. And now I have I go from Maine to Virginia had the whole east coast. So yeah, so I do a lot of traveling. We have we have a barbecue supply store. Now we don't have a restaurant anymore. We sold the restaurant off we sold the the meat processing and the the business I sold last year. And now we have just a store. My son took the catering end of the business and him and his wife. They're running that and I'm getting ready to retire. I even I'm going to retire probably in another six, eight months. And I still do I still do just the Southern Pride. I'm going to help the guy that's buying the place from me, he's a real real good friend. So I'll help him out by doing a sales and service work. So yeah.

Joshua Miller  8:17  

And I visited your website. By the way, I'm definitely going to be buying some stuff from there. I felt like a kid in a candy store. customer for life. 

Tom Christine  8:27  

Yeah, once we opened the store, we decided we know everybody in the competition circuit. They all know me. I've been doing it for a long time. We're all friends. So we decided that when we opened the store that we would start doing meats. So we brought in all specialty meats I sell the wagyu briskets and, and the Durac Pork for all the competition guys. And then we brought in wild game we have all kinds of wild game meats. We have alligator, ostrich, kangaroo, a bunch of different meats and stuff that you can't get anywhere else. 

Joshua Miller  8:59  

And I saw spices and sauces. 

Tom Christine  9:02  

Yeah, and of course all kinds of grills and smokers. Yeah, it's fun. It's just a fun thing.

Joshua Miller  9:08  

Love it. It's so yeah, Southern pride smokers you know, they definitely have a long history of being you know, top level smokers. So what sets southern price smokers apart from other commercial smokers?

Tom Christine  9:21  

Well once again, that's a family. It was a father and son who started the business back in the 70s. They've been around the barrel a pretty long time. They make they make the Cadillac end of commercial smokers. They're all stainless steel inside and out. Really easy to clean. Which is really really important. If you want your your quality of food to stay good now, you'll see a lot of these guys and you go in and they're smokers are dirty and they tell you to the smoker is seasoned and it's like I tell them all the time. My seasoning comes in a shaker bottle. It's not inside my smoker. I said you're putting the meat in there and you're seasoning supposedly. The wood that you're smoking with, not, not the dirt and stuff that you left in here? Come on? Yeah, it's crazy. It's crazy. 

Tom Christine  10:07  

So we take pride in the fact that, you know I can, I can take a smoker and sell it to you today. And you can use it every day of the week. I have smokers in my meat processing business. So I have Southern Pride Smokers that are over 30 years old, that looked like the day they came out of the showroom. So yeah, it's that easy to take care of them. It really is. Maintenance wise, the smokers that they make today, they're just so easy to work on this, there's not a whole lot to them as far as mechanical stuff to break down. And as far as the the easy to use smokers, they came out with the SRG stationery rack smoker, 400 pounder. That means it holds 400 pounds of raw pork at one time. So that is the most popular smoker that we sell. Now. It's real, real easy to work on. It's easy to keep clean, it's easy to maintain, and anybody can run it, it's programmable. 

Tom Christine  11:04  

So if you put it into an environment, let's say a restaurant environment, there's a real busy, real busy place, the chef take his time and program all his menus into it. So you can walk over you can load a smoker, let's say you're doing you're doing briskets tonight's smoker with briskets, you walk over to this smoker, you put a piece of wood in, you hit auto, whatever you have, it has 30 programs. So auto, let's say number one is brisket. So it's auto one start and walk away. It's already set for detecting the time. Coming in the morning, it will automatically so let's say brisket, for example, take 10 to 12 hours okay of time. So what you do is just set your time for the smoker and the temperature and you set the whole time. So what happens is after it gets done cooking in 12 hours, it'll go into the hold mode and it will cut the smoker back to 140 degrees which is usually the temp to you set it at and hold that to you come in and get into more and so so you could cook overnight not have to worry about being there at three o'clock in the morning, maintain anything you come in at seven, eight o'clock in the morning. It's been the hold mode, you pull the meat you wrap them, you get your meats home for lunch.

Joshua Miller  12:18  

Everyone would appreciate that it's easy to take care of and it's easy to operate. Yes. Now there's there's a world of of different models out there. So that's the easiest one operating what smoker what type of smoker would be the hardest.

Tom Christine  12:33  

Well it's not that it's hard to operate, it's just you have to have somebody dedicated because once you roll once you go up past the 300 the SC 300 and the SRG 400 are stationary rack smokers okay, that means you open the door, you slide the rack out you put the food on you slide it back in again, you close the door and you go you put the wood in the firebox and you set the controls and go. From that point on are our rotisserie okay so you have to have somebody dedicated is going to load the smoker properly because it has to be think of think of loading a Ferris wheel okay me remember going on a Ferris wheel when you're a kid. So you would somebody would get on and then they skip a car or two and they put you on then they skip to get so what they're doing is they're balancing the load out on the Ferris wheel is the same exact thing and the smoker it has to be balanced properly so it doesn't balance itself out and drop the meat on inside the smoke or anything like that. So with that being said, Yeah, that's the hard part of the smoker. But if you ask somebody dedicated it's not hard at all we have we have guys out there that are running 1600 pounds smokers that's what we had in our we have an Yeah, so in my meat processing plant I had three of those dude I could do. I could do 8000 pounds of pork in one burn.

Joshua Miller  13:53  

I can't even wrap my head around that.

Joshua Miller  13:58  

Lot of meat. Yeah. Are there options out there for schools with let's say limited space in terms of you know, getting a smoker or maybe limited ability to get the smoke out of the building? What do they have?

Tom Christine  14:12  

Okay, so all the smokers that we have everyone either goes to under a hood, let's say where you're where your line of cooking equipment would be. It would go in next to it. That would be the SC 300 or the SRG 400. Once you get into the rotisserie smokers, they really have to have their own hood or you can direct vent so they put a they put a what they call a smoke extractor up on the top and they pipe that out through your roof or back through back through a wall and that gets piped out of the building so that when you have the food cooking and smoking inside if you want to go into smoker and open the doors, you just push the button for the smoke extractor that opens the fan comes on at the other end and pulls all the smoke out of smoker before we open the doors and that keeps the smoke out of your building.

Joshua Miller  14:59  

Gotcha, gotcha. You can put a smoker almost anywhere?

Tom Christine  15:03  

Oh, yeah, I'm putting them on a food truck. I'm putting them on trailers on the back of trailers on the porches. So yeah, I can I can put a just about anywhere. All of our smokers are rated for being outside. So you don't have to worry about that. We put them on trailers, you can buy a mobile smoker from us on a trailer. Oh, yeah. They're really versatile. They really are.

Joshua Miller  15:22  

Yeah, and that's a good point. Because, you know, food trucks are a big thing with schools, K 12, and colleges and universities. But I think one thing that people are missing opportunity on that's a lower cost investment would be smokers. And I know that they make them mounted on trailers already. So that's a good option for schools, no doubt about that versatility and the easy portability of bringing the food to a different location, that fresh show effect. Right. Plus, can you say you've worked with K 12 schools? 

Tom Christine  15:54  

Sure. I have. I have a lot of, well, all kinds of schools. I have universities oh gheez I have. I have technical schools that are buying and putting in a smoker in their food programs. So when you're teaching because you got to, you know, barbecue was another thing. I got Italian you got Chinese? Yeah, barbecue. That's just another venue, you know? So yeah, why wouldn't you put that in the school? Think about that, you know, when a cooking program, we're showing you how to cook barbecue. So how many barbecue restaurants do you know that are out there? That I mean, just think about? Yeah, there's a lot. Yeah. And then of course, everybody now barbecue on the East Coast anyway, is is? It's still in its infancy. Really, if you think about it. So you have a lot of guys that are doing add ons. You know, you got a pizza guy that's putting a smoker in so he can put smoked meats on top of the pizza. So he'll buy the small smoker and put that in place. And the next thing you know he's doing kabobs and he's, you gotta remember, man, smoked meats. You see all the smoked meats out there. That's what you do with a smoker. You know, smoked cheeses. I have a lady that has the SRG 400 right now. She does pies in it.

Joshua Miller  17:03  

I never would have guessed it. 

Tom Christine  17:06  

You don't have to put wood in it. You really don't. And it's nothing but a big convection oven. If you think about it.

Joshua Miller  17:12  

Okay. Sure. Fair enough. Pretty cool. Yes. Yeah. So I feel like the mark that a lot of people miss when they're trying to do barbecue and school food service settings. Is the flavor of the sauce, the seasonings are you selling that? I know you sell on your website? Are there commercial people buying those seasonings from you?

Tom Christine  17:36  

Yep, we thought it was. So we have three different seasonings by Southern Pride and we have sauces for plus in my store. I have you tell me what you're looking for what flavor profile? I can hook you up with that. And I can show you how to make it. I mean, I I've been doing it for years so I can show you how to make rubs. I can show you how to make sauces. I love going into a school and working with the culinary chefs because it's fun. There. You know, gotta remember, they're new at it. So so for me to walk in here and start showing and stuff and going. Boy, I had no idea we could do that. You know, I did do that. Yeah, it's a lot of fun.

Joshua Miller  17:55  

I love it. What's some of the craziest things besides the meats that you've seen smoke I've seen like I think it was few years ago there was this big thing about smoking watermelons and that like caught wind for a while on social media. 

Tom Christine  18:25  

Okay, so you get into you know, there's a lot of those a lot of high end chefs out there now. Okay. Yeah. And, you know, they're on TV are doing all different things. Well, they're looking for all kinds of stuff to do with a smoker just to make it different. Yeah, let's go. Yeah, just go on the internet and put in smoked meat and see what pops up. It's crazy. What's out there. Cheese. I have an Amish guy that bought a smoker from me. And he has never turned the burner on. Okay. And he does. He has the big smoker. This is a 700 pound meat smoker. So think about how many blocks of cheese, you can get done. And that's what he does. He's a big cheese producer. And he uses he uses what they call smoke sticks. So it's a big long metal tube that you fill with wood pellets. And you light it was a torch, and he puts them in the firebox. Okay, so he doesn't need the burner because he's doing cold smoke. So it's cold. It's pretty awesome. It's pretty. Yeah. 

Joshua Miller  19:26  

And versatility. I know some people might be saying yeah, but we have you know, I'm sure you're well aware of vegetarians and vegans are becoming more and more prominent. I've seen vegetables. I've seen tofu smoked in there. So don't don't count that out. You can still have fun with it. You might have barbecue ribs on the menu on Monday, but maybe on Wednesday you do some vegetarian options.

Tom Christine  19:49  

Well, you know when it comes to the vegetarian stuff, okay. Like you said, now you're putting a whole different spin on the vegetables because who's smoking vegetables. You know what I mean? There's not a whole lot of guys doing that. Now. Now you have something you have an other avenue, you know. And so you also you have a lot of vegetarians, they don't want meat anywhere near their food. Well, that's what's nice about cooking and that kind of a smoker, you can divide all the you don't have to put meat in there. You don't have to, you don't have to worry about like in a in an oven or something like that in a restaurant. These folks are, they're smokers are cleaned daily. So they're back to brand new stainless steel, they're using stainless steel racks don't have to worry about cross contamination or anything like that. So it's pretty awesome.

Joshua Miller  20:36  

Yes. All right. Awesome. So one closing question I have for you is what advice would you give for any chefs, or any school leaders that are out there thinking about investing in a commercial smoker? What advice do you have for them?

Tom Christine  20:51  

Do your homework, you know, do your homework, you know what the budget is? It's about allowing you to work with go on the internet. Get as much information as you can. Don't be afraid to ask, you know, any of us barbecue guys. Any of us will give you straight answers. Nobody's going to go yeah you want to buy this. No, it's not going to be like that. We're going to tell you the pros and the cons. You know, you call me tomorrow say hey, look, I'm thinking about buying a Cook Shack. What do you think about that? Well, tell me what you want to do with it. You know, if you're talking about if you're talking about cooking food at home, or you're cooking food for a small restaurant, nothing wrong with it. We'll check it all. Okay, it's just that you know, it's not convection like ours, you don't have convection fans and stuff in it is just different, you know? Yeah. So. And what's nice is when you go to a place, you can deal with a guy like me and so on different things, different items. You can see. You can come and we can show you different items. Oh, yeah, well, I'm looking thinking about this. Can you show me the difference between this and this? I could do that. You know, I can send you somewhere. Like I said, being in this business. You get to know everybody I can call somebody that has the smoker you're thinking about you can go over and talk with them. They can show you how it's working in a restaurant. 

Joshua Miller  22:00  

I love it. So where can people go to find out more about Smoke'n Dudes Barbecue Company or connect with you or your family in this awesome barbecue store?

Tom Christine  22:11  

If you just pop onto our website, which is www.smokendudesbbqsupply.com/. And you can get a hold of us. 

Joshua Miller  22:24  

Perfect. And, you know, I call everyone that is involved in the school food service landscape, whether they're internal or external. you've contributed to a lot of school food service programs. So thank you for what you've done. For helping to nourish our kids. I call all of you all of us. We're all Remarkable Academic Food ambassadors. So thank you for everything you've done and are continuing to do and spread your word including coming on this podcast and audience if you did not love this episode, I don't know what's wrong with you. I'm a little bit of a barbecue nerd myself.

Tom Christine  22:56  

The only thing we're missing buddy's cooking food right now. 

Joshua Miller  23:00  

Yeah, exactly. Everyone, thank you for tuning in for another episode of the 5 in 20 podcast by Remarkable Academic Foods. I'm your host, Joshua Miller and our guest here, Tom. Until next time for me, signing off.