People who really know LeRoy and Lewis Barbecue shouldn't be surprised that pitmaster Evan LeRoy's new cookbook is as well-rounded as they come. Called New School Barbecue, it takes home cooks through the process of smoking various meats from tip to tail, plus a very healthy portion of smoked veggies, sides, desserts, and barbecue know-how that can send readers off on their own journey beyond the recipes.
New School Barbecue, which takes its name from the Austin restaurant's longtime tagline, came out May 12. It's co-authored by Paula Forbes, one of Austin's most experienced cookbook authors and a senior writer and restaurant critic at Texas Monthly.
Both Forbes and LeRoy will be a release event at BookPeople at 7 pm on May 13, where they will speak and sign copies. The event is free, but guests can also purchase a ticket that includes a copy of the book and access to the signing line. Either way, attendees should register via Eventbrite.
"I knew that I needed a lot of help of somebody who I could really trust, who knew about barbecue, but more importantly, knew about cookbooks," says LeRoy, who was the one to reach out to Forbes initially. "I would have been completely lost without her. She really did all of the organizational work. While I wrote, I think, almost every word in the book, she asked the questions to clarify and was like the original editor for me."
Folks who own The Austin Cookbook, another collaboration between Forbes and local chefs, will notice a family resemblance between the books, including a similar layout that makes the recipes easy to look at. Like The Austin Cookbook, New School Barbecue also includes real recipes from a local restaurant. However, they are accessible in different ways.
While The Austin Cookbook covers a large breadth of ingredients, techniques, and sometimes equipment, New School Barbecue is specialized and deeply focused. If a reader owns a kettle grill, a pellet smoker, or even an offset smoker, they know what they'll use throughout the book. And although LeRoy and Lewis is adventurous as far as barbecue goes, the ingredients in this cookbook are much more standard from cover to cover. Some avid home cooks might only need to shop for some meat or vegetables to get started.
One of the most unique assets for LeRoy and Lewis — both before the book and within it — has been a detailed library of YouTube videos detailing how different dishes are made. Viewers can learn how to trim fat from a brisket, make the restaurant's famous smoked cheeseburgers, and even understand the intricacies of food pricing. The book uses the YouTube channel as a companion, reminding readers attempting more complicated processes that they can watch someone else do it in real time.
Since Texas barbecue, for better or worse, is often based on an obsession with tradition, some pitmasters protect their few signature secrets with the same zeal. LeRoy says teaching barbecue techniques has long been a way to differentiate the business, and it later became a way to "get people on our side because we were different."
"Since our point of view is to break out of the tradition, part of that was sharing secrets," says LeRoy. "But also in order to get people to accept what we were doing as a different style of barbecue, new school barbecue, we really needed to open up ourselves and show people that it is classic methods, just interpreted in a different way."
The book makes that philosophy clear with a detailed history of the business, technical blurbs to explain the utility of each recipe, and the occasional profile of suppliers that align with LeRoy and Lewis' ethos: respecting animals and dramatically reducing waste.
It also adds more explicit steps for easier-to-follow recipes. The videos served as "a peek behind the scenes," LeRoy explains, whereas in the book, recipes have been adapted to be more useful to people at home.
"In the restaurant, I'm pretty obsessed with perfection... All the plates have to look perfect, all the seasoning has to be right, all the cooks have to be perfect on the meats, all the slices have to be really, really good looking," he says. "And at home, I don't care that much. It's really just like, does it taste good?"
The pressure is off: "There's no Michelin star on the on the front door of my house."
New School Barbecue is available in hardcover in bookstores everywhere ($35).
Photo by Jessica Attie
Evan LeRoy has taken his teaching operation from YouTube to ink and paper.
