Talking Great Barbeque and Vegan Too With Brad From BBQ4Life in Boise

February 27, 2018

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BBQ4Life in Boise is the product of owner Brad Taylor’s dream to bring honest food to Boise. Brad has a fascinating menu of items at BBQ4Life, covering two very different types of food. Brad spent many years cooking competition barbeque, so the menu leans towards that as one of the types. The other type, however, is vegan food. At first glance, it seems like these two types of food are at the far ends of the spectrum from each other. Barbeque is one of the most meat-centric styles of cooking, while vegan food eschews any meat at all. How could they possibly have anything in common?

Brad said to me, “When you’re doing competition you have one bite. So because you have one bite to be judged on basically, you have to control every single detail of the process, from the time you get ahold of it til the time you let go of it. Because of that, never in my life would I let chicken touch pork, or vice versa, or brisket touch ribs—never! I would not do that. So it was already ingrained in my cooking style that things do not intermix. Because of that, when we went to set this up, my sister was vegan for a long time, so why not? I asked her to come up with some recipes for things so we could run with them; and then it’s just normal for us, because we don’t intermingle stuff anyways at any level. So it’s just vegetables is really what it boils down to”.

He continued, “I know it seems really weird when people see it for the first time; and I think that has a lot to do with the conscientious vegan who is doing it because of their love for animals. And that’s fine. That’s not the crowd we get and I don’t expect to. I can respect that and I totally understand. We get the people who are doing it for health reasons or allergies or things like that. They’re happy to have a place where they can get vegan food that doesn’t smell like patchouli oil and isn’t loaded with sprouts. What they say is, it’s like we’re not even eating vegan. It’s just a different segment of the vegan market that we’re actually concerned with”.

Brad showed me his smoker out back, behind BBQ4Life in Boise. Having attended a lot of BBQ competitions myself and cooked my own ‘que, as well as interviewed greats in the barbeque world like Myron Mixon and Big Moe Cason and tasted their smoked offerings, I do know a bit about barbeque. BBQ4Life does not have one of those fancy electric, sealed cookers that are found at chain BBQ places inside the restaurant so guests think they’re getting “real” barbeque. Instead, BBQ4Life in Boise has a nice, seasoned smoker outside that is fired up with real wood every day. Separate sections can accommodate different types of meats and also the smoked vegan offerings that BBQ4Life creates. As Brad opened one of the lids, the aroma of real smoldering wood, intermingled with the gently smoking sausages he was preparing, showed me that this was the real thing.

As Brad and I talked, he explained, “Eight years ago I was not a food person at all. I ate microwave burritos and bologna sandwiches and was perfectly content. Then a friend of mine got me into competition BBQ. I did about four hard years of competition barbeque. At least two weekends out of every month we were on the road competing somewhere. Probably one of the biggest influences as I learned barbeque, outside of the guys I cooked with, was Johnny Trigg, who I got to spend a lot of time with at competitions and such. I got to meet a lot of great, really, really good cooks across the country. That really helped to form how I feel about barbeque and how I think it should be done. As I started to learn competition BBQ, I started paying attention more to food in general. I very quickly became completely bummed out with most food available, everywhere”.

That is part of why he wanted to do a restaurant, not like everyone else, but on his own terms. Brad wanted to do honest food at BBQ4Life in Boise. He said, “My take on a restaurant is what our grandparents or great-grandparents might have experienced traveling on a family vacation and stopping at a restaurant in an area they had not been to. At that time, you didn’t have Sysco and all the other companies supplying them with the same products all over the country, so your flavors are almost the same everywhere you go. What I set out to do was to have a restaurant where we have our own flavor profiles. We have a wheelhouse of ingredients that we work out of and we don’t really change that. We can add things to the menu, but we need to work out of our wheelhouse, to just narrow everything down, so that we have our own vibe with the food. That’s my thing with food, if you can make it in-house, well why not? If you’re going to have a hamburger on the menu, why not grind the meat yourself so you know exactly what’s in it.Then, since we’re grinding nothing but tri tip, you want a medium-rare burger—done! Let’s do it! I can do it with confidence because I know what’s in the meat. And that goes for sausage and everything else that we make. Why not make it yourself?”.

One of the things Brad makes in-house at BBQ4Life in Boise is his pastrami. There is a twist however—-which Brad explained about, saying “We do our own pastrami from the ground up, but we use only ingredients that are available to us out of our own inventory. I don’t necessarily want our pastrami to taste like everybody else’s pastrami, or our bacon for that matter. It goes back to our wheelhouse of ingredients. We don’t do brisket. For one, it’s not as cheap as it used to be, so to do it right and make money from it here is really hard to do; and the be able to give people what you want to give them. Not only that, but if we were in Texas, I would absolutely be serving brisket. Because everybody in Texas grew up eating brisket, they know what it is—there’s no misconceptions about it. They also understand the pricing. It’s not the same here, there’s not that deep ingrained barbeque culture. I can give somebody a tri tip and they’re blown away, they’re in love with it; and I can make a little bit of money on it and it goes well. So because of that, I set up to do tri tip”.

Brad brought out his pastrami to sample and then a sandwich to try. I love pastrami and have had it at many places known for it such as Langer’s Deli, Canter’s, Johnie’s Pastrami, The Hat and Brent’s Deli. This would be my first time to try Brad’s version of pastrami and I was looking forward to seeing how they did it at BBQ4Life in Boise. Brad explained why he used tri tip instead of brisket, saying “When I set up to do pastrami, I had tri tip available as is. So I’m going to try it there first. What ended up happening is that with pastrami, you cure, then season and smoke it. And then you’re almost done! Brisket is a really tough cut of meat and you’ve done nothing to tenderize it up to this point. So now you have to boil it, steam it or cook it again to get it to tenderize. Starting with tri tip, that whole last step I completely skip. I get to retain more flavor and it’s a different experience of a pastrami than you get from a standard one”.

He added, “Tri tip is so versatile and I can use it in so many different ways that I wouldn’t necessarily efficiency-wise use brisket. While I respect the places like Franklin’s Barbeque who run out of meat and they’re done, I want all of you customers. That’s not my style, that’s not what I’m about to do. I can turn around a tri tip in an hour and a half if I’m running out of it. I can get out there and cook it right now and we can get caught back up, whereas with brisket we can’t do that. Also, I can use all the trimmings to make our burgers and our meatballs. It just works really well for us”.

I could see some nice thin slices of the pastrami as I reached for a taste. The pastrami was tender and a nice pink. The taste was delicious, the curing and the smoke subtle. Unlike brisket pastrami which is usually steamed and loses some of the nice texture on the outside, this had a nice thin layer of bark on the outside, just enough to add a little texture and flavor. The smoke was subtle and the flavor of the meat superb. The texture was definitely different from brisket pastrami but very nice. Could it be confused with brisket pastrami on a deli sandwich? No, the texture is different—-brisket is actually chewier. Each one has it’s upsides and BBQ4Life in Boise has presented a really unique version.

I next dug into the sandwich, which had grilled onions, Swiss cheese and brown deli mustard topping the tender pastrami. A hoagie roll served as the base for this delicious sandwich. The combination was really good and the pastrami tender and flavorful. For this kind of sandwich I actually preferred the tenderness of the tri tip pastrami.

Brad believes strongly in barbeque, even down to tattooing the phrase and later the restaurant name onto his fingers. He explained how the expression and the name came about, saying “It goes back to competition barbeque. When you do a lot of competition barbeque it’s tiresome—you put forth an immense amount of effort and know you’ve turned something good in and it can land on a bad [judge’s] table, or you know you’ve turned something bad in and you know you’ve wasted your time. Or you get a bad table and you feel like you’ve wasted your time. You’ve still got to tear down, clean, get ready for Awards; then Awards are done and you’ve got to get ready and drive home”.

“It’s a lot of hard time and effort that you’re putting into it for nothing, really, even if you win. You didn’t recoup your costs and that sort of stuff, so the other guys and I would sarcastically say Barbeque For Life, come on man we’ve got to get this done! Barbeque for life, come on, let’s do it! We were in the Rodeway Inn on Curtis Road—this was some time in 2014, way before summer—it had popped into my head, Wow! This would fit on my knuckles!, and the meaning had again changed and our whole lives were wrapped up in building this restaurant and that’s all we did and all we thought about”.

He added, “The first year we worked seven days a week, open to close. We didn’t have employees. Than we got our first employee who is still with us now, James. So my wife Bree, James and myself, that’s all our lives were was getting the restaurant going. So it made a little sense to me anyways, not to mention I couldn’t wait to get it done and send it to the guys I used to cook with so that they could get a good chuckle out of it. Then, when it came time to change our name, it was there and made sense.That’s where the name comes from”.

Brad next had some of his pork ribs brought for me to taste. Having been a member of the Kansas City Barbeque Society (KCBS), I take my ribs seriously. One look at them and I could see the competition connection at BBQ4Life in Boise. They were served “dry”, seasoned by Brad’s own BBQ rub. The color was perfect, with a nice smoke ring that tinted the meat a lovely pink. The meat was tender, easy to bite but not pulling away from the bone by itself. This is really what you want in a rib and these ones were just like they should be. No sauce was necessary on the flavorful ribs.

Brad explained his sauce philosophy which is that “I would just encourage people to be more willing to go out; and when you go to a small guy and you get the food on the table, try it as it comes. This goes for me, or Fiesta Chicken or Tango’s or any of the little guys. Try it as it comes out; don’t be so quick to put your normal list of condiments on stuff. We’ve thought out what we’re putting in front of you and we’ve planned it out. Try it before you put stuff on it”. There are times, of course when BBQ sauce works, so BBQ4Life in Boise uses locally made MFT and Chivers BBQ sauces on some of the dishes such as the Pulled Pork Sandwich, the Tri Tip Sandwich and the unique BigFoot and McDaddy Sandwiches.

On the the tables at BBQ4Life in Boise you usually don’t see several containers of barbeque sauce. Brad said, “I see a lot of that, where people immediately—that’s why we don’t have barbeque sauce on the tables most of the time. Try it first—you should be able to enjoy it without the sauce. It it’s not enjoyable, then we didn’t do it right. If you have to lead it up with sauce, we didn’t do it right. I think we’re so used to food that’s subpar that we load it with sauce, with pepper and ketchup and everything else and never even give food a shot. People are missing out on some subtle, amazing flavors by doing that”.

Finally, Brad and I discussed the vegan menu and why it works so well at BBQ4Life in Boise. One of the highlights is the Smoked Tempeh Sandwich. Tempeh, a vegan staple, is in a lot of the vegan offerings on the menu. When asked about the sandwich, Brad explained, “It’s really good. A lot of people come in and they have their preconceived notions about vegan food and some of them are adventurous. So we say, try it and if you don’t like it, we’ll buy it back, no worries and get you what you want. Almost every time they’ll order a second one, because they’ve tried it and it’s so good and they say I want that again”.

He added, “We do the same thing with the tempeh that we do with everything else. If we sat down and said that we’ll take some things off the menu because its getting too big, those ingredients would still be there, being used in other things. So there’s almost no point in pulling it off the menu—since we have all the stuff, why not make it? We do the same thing with the tempeh, it’s in the vegan chili, we have smoked tempeh tacos, so we treat it basically the same as we do our beef. How else can we utilize it and make it interesting…….We’ll take tempeh on special and treat it the same way we do competition ribs. It’s a much shorter process of course. You get the same sort of flavors going, get a little bit of bark on it—and when we do them on special they’re gone like that!”.

BBQ4Life in Boise is certainly a place to take your vegan friends. There are very few places where you can get vegan foods AND regular foods in the same place. BBQ4Life has certainly given an interesting option for those who are embracing a vegan lifestyle but who want something different to enjoy. Meanwhile, those who love all things barbeque can rest assured that BBQ4Life makes real ‘que the right way. And with the emphasis on tri tip, there is a whole new world open for those who love the flavor of a good tri tip. Brad is proud of his flavor profiles and his handcrafted delicious foods. BBQ4Life in Boise is certainly a place to try out if you’re looking for hand-crafted dishes that are unique and with a nice, comfort food sensibility.