Out here at Treaty Oak Distilling and Alice’s Restaurant in Dripping Springs, Texas, we really try to take traditional Texas barbecue to a whole other level. We want to stay within the roots of Texas barbecue, but at the same time we like to elevate our sides and accompaniments.
Everyone loves King’s Hawaiian bread. It’s an iconic brand, so we decided to take it and see how it would elevate six of our dishes. We use a prime brisket and we like to trim it down to about a quarter of an inch of a fat cap.
We also like to shape it, we want to save that trim for stuff like the ground burger. We then take it out to our barbecue pit.
We let it go for about seven to nine hours, somewhere in there, until we get a nice good bark, and then we wrap it and it takes about another four to five hours before it’s actually done. Once we’ve smoked our brisket, we then sliced a few pieces of the lane, we breaded and fried it. For this banh mi, went with the King’s Hawaiian sliced dinner rolls.
I took four of them together and basically used them as a hoagie roll. Then we toasted our bread with a soy compound butter. We laid down a bed of fresh cucumbers, topped it with the fried brisket, then fresh jalapenos, pickled daikon carrot slaw. I used Yellow Bird sriracha and made a soy butter honey sriracha sauce, and then we topped it with fresh cilantro. The King’s Hawaiian roll adds a really nice balance to this sandwich, considering how soft it is and it adds a layer of sweetness that kind of combats the spiciness of the banh mi.
We try to source the best ingredients that we possibly can. We grow what we can on property. We do everything from scratch here. We even do our own burgers, ground 100% on site. We first trim it, cube it, then we season it.
Then we run it through the grinders so the burger is literally seasoned from the inside out. This allows us to get more creative with the blend of burger mix we use. For example out here we use about a 50/50 burger and brisket blend with beef jeep. The end result is we get a very rich burger that is quite different than anything you’ve ever had. We do our pickled onions a little bit different here.
We roast them over open fire barbecue pit to get the smoke and fire flavor, then we bring them in and start the pickling process. For this burger we did it on a King’s Hawaiian round slider bun and it’s dipped in a house made hot sauce and then garnished with the charred pickled onions, blue cheese sauce, and tender belly bacon. We took our fried chicken sandwich a little bit south of the border. First we brined it for 24 hours in our dill pickle brine. We pulled it out, lightly seasoned it, and then threw it on the pit for a little while.
We want to leave them a little bit under and then we finish it off in the fryer. I do a simple double breading and then I fry it until it’s done. We opted to go with the King’s Hawaiian 4-inch bun. We garnish this sandwich with an in-house escabeche slaw, cotija cheese, along with an avocado lime crema. The King’s Hawaiian 4-inch bun works perfect with the sandwich because it’s so soft and it contrasts with the crunchiness of the fried chicken so perfectly.
For our Cubano, we used our smoked pulled pork butt which we smoked for about seven to ten hours. We decided to go shareable and family style and use the King’s Hawaiian eight-inch round bread, then added our in-house cured ham, topped it with melted swiss cheese, topped with our house-made dill pickles, and our spicy barbecue sauce. It’s like Texas meets Cuba. This is a really good example of how versatile King’s Hawaiian bread really is. You have everything down from a slider, to a four inch regular hamburger bun, to an eight inch bun that you can use for get togethers and families.
For our pork belly burnt ends, we season our pork belly, we put it on the pit for about five to six hours, we cut it into small squares, we sauté it with a big red Polynesian sauce. We went with the King’s Hawaiian unsliced dinner roll because they’re square just like our pork belly burnt ends. We then garnished the burnt ends with a jalapeno infused pink pickled pineapple. This is another dish that has a lot of layers of complexity. It really works with the bread, the sweetness, the spiciness, and the crispiness of the burnt end pork belly.
For the bourbon bread pudding we opted for the King’s Hawaiian unsliced rolls. We broke them apart. We toasted them in the oven. Then we tossed them in the bread pudding base, which we spiked with our Ghost Hill Bourbon, let it soak for a little bit, then we added the candy pecans and chocolate chips and baked it off. Once it was done, we drizzled it with the Ghost Hill Bourbon orange honey sauce, powdered sugar, and orange zest.
This is actually the first time I’ve used King’s Hawaiian in this application, and I was blown away. The natural sweetness and softness of the bread bring it up to another notch that we haven’t experienced before. Considering the amount of volume of food we do here it really is nice to have a product like this that you can always rely on to take it to another level and be a little bit out of the norm.
