N.W. Gabbey| For Savannah Morning News
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When Terren Williams was 10, he saw his uncle cook a pork butt in a homemade smoker tricked out of an old fridge.
“I guess that’s where it all began,” said the Wilmington Island native who moved back to Savannah with wife Kelly four years ago.
On New Year’s Day 2023, the Williamses held Slow Fire BBQ’s kick-off event, christening their barbecue bus and heading down another road in Terren’s culinary journey. Though Williams quickly said that his brisket is “not the best around,” he may well be underselling both its bark and its bite.
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Having lived in Texas for 10 years, he wanted Slow Fire to focus on brisket simply because he missed the Lone Star State’s signature smoked meat.
“We’re known for our brisket,” Williams said. “You need to get it.”
Texas Technique
“Growing up, I loved barbecue,” Williams said, “but I never knew what barbecue was until I moved out to Texas and was blown away by how different it was.”
He said his ‘a-ha BBQ moment’ was the first time he went to Smitty’s Market in Lockhart, what he called the “hub for all the OGs of Texas barbecue.”
“They’re doing it with these really old pits. The walls are steamed black, the pits are literally open fires on the floor. You walk by and it singes your leg hair,” he reminisced. “It changed my life seeing it. That’s when I got it, and from then on, I’ve been completely obsessed."
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In culinary school and for the first phase of his career, Williams’s focus was pastry, but a decade in Texas was when he “learned and honed his barbecue skills.” Working at Hyatt Regency Dallas during his last two years there, he talked his superiors into purchasing a smoker and spearheaded the hotel’s inhouse “large-scale” barbecue program that served two main restaurants, a coffee stand, and bar.
The position with Hyatt allowed the Williamses to return to Terren’s hometown, where he soon became chef de cuisine at The Grey Market, a job he relished until COVID-19 changed the local landscape. That was when he “took a step back and reevaluated” his career as a chef.
“If I’m going to put this many hours into something, why not let it be my own thing?” he asked himself, and it was “out of necessity” that the smoked-meat scheme came about.
Williams credited Mashama Bailey with teaching him how to take the farm-to-table tack even further, and the name of his barbecue business is a play on ‘slow-food movement’.
Low and Slow
Unlike other regions and their respective meat secrets, Williams asserted, “Texas barbecue pitmasters will tell you exactly what they do say, ‘Okay, see if you can do it.’”
Slow Fire BBQ’s brisket sounds simple, seasoned with only salt and pepper. No elaborate multi-spice dry rub or 12-ingredient mop sauce. “That’s it, man,” Williams said candidly of the 50-50 Dalmatian rub.
“The trick, if there is one,” he added, “is trimming the brisket correctly. You can’t just season it and throw it on. You have to get the fat cap consistent all the way across and then season it.”
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In addition, Slow Fire smokes on all wood throughout the entire process, with no gas-assisted flames or electric-smoker heat.
“That causes for a whole different bark formation, color, taste, fat render, everything,” Williams explained. Between 250° F and 275° F, the briskets are smoked anywhere from 14 to 16 hours, depending on their size. Occasionally, maybe two or three times, the meat is spritzed but not often.
Pieces too small for sandwiches and platters go in the Burnt End Baked Beans, which also features Slow Fire’s pork bacon and has already been a customer favorite. Williams’s twist on the classic Texas accompaniment is “on the thicker side” and is heavy on the sorghum syrup, used instead of molasses “just to make it a little different.”
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All the prep work is done on the bus itself, and the Williamses take the smoker to the pop-ups so that customers can see and smell that “we’re serious.”
Their Bacon Brisket is another specialty: a pork belly seasoned and smoked and sliced à la its beef brother. “It’s just intense,” Williams said proudly.
Offered only on weekends is Slow Fire’s Dino Beef Rib that is, you guessed it, just like the cut delivered to Fred Flintstone in the opening credits, usually a pound-plus of meat smoked the same way.
Williams explained that the briskets and ribs benefit greatly from as much as an eight-hour rest after the smoke cycles are done, a significant step in the entire process.
“That is one of the big secrets that a lot of people don’t take into consideration with barbecue,” he divulged. “They think it’s all about the smoke, but a lot of it is about the rest. I think that’s just as important as the smoke itself, an absolute minimum of four hours.”
No longer missing links
Williams is also bursting about his homemade sausage made from brisket trimmings, and Slow Fire’s two takes purposefully blend Lone Star and Lowcountry.
“Out there, they experiment. They make different kinds of sausage. It’s not just Texas hot gut,” he said. “Our answer to that was a no-brainer. I do a pimento cheese because we’re in Savannah. It just made sense.”
Calling it his “baby, [his] pride and joy,” he is equally excited about his Lowcountry Boil Sausage that he worked hard to develop. This unique creation grinds and combines all the ingredients of a boil - Georgia, shrimp, corn, potatoes, and lemon along with trimmings - to produce a texturally different sausage.
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Slow Fire’s sausages are served as links, but the former also goes on top of the Stockyard Sandwich: sliced brisket, pimento cheese sausage, coleslaw, and hot honey.
Williams was used to cooking up “fancy food” but acknowledged that what they serve from the Slow Fire BBQ bus has to be more “approachable” without being “boring.” He again thanked Bailey and cited his time at The Grey Market for redirecting his vision.
“Who doesn’t love Southern staples like mac-and-cheese?” he asked but immediately affirmed that he had to make Slow Fire’s sides special. “If I’m just cooking ‘normal’ food, that’s boring for me.”
Like many of us, Williams had eaten fried mac-and-cheese before but never with brisket mixed into it, and the Mac-and-Cheese Brisket Bites he has created need to be served in a Home Depot bucket.
A blend of smoked gouda, American, yellow sharp cheddar, and oaxaca for meltiness coats pasta and brisket bits before being fried in a breading that Williams is keeping close to his chest. It ain’t panko. It’s better. The crisp bites are finished with hot honey dipping sauce.
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“Being a chef, trying to be inventive, I just threw it together one time,” he said of this side’s origin.
Coleslaw that is dang good on its own is garnished with chili crisp oil and tossed in honey fermented garlic aioli, both adding “extra dimensions.” Smoked collards are dusted with nutritional yeast. Fried Brussels sprouts are tossed in an Asian barbecue sauce, essentially a vinaigrette with Hoisin and benne seeds to give sweetness to the bitter Brussels with cubed house-made bacon to make it salty.
“I wanted to make a cool sauce that was balanced,” Williams said.
BBQ reborn
After a tent event at The Clyde last Mother’s Day, which Williams called a “quintessential learning experience,” the couple decided to do pop-ups with the initial intent to buy a trailer not an actual food truck.
Hosted in Starland Yard’s onsite Loki Food Bus, Slow Fire BBQ set up pop-up shop four times. “We luckily found that opportunity,” Williams laughed, looking back. “It was kind of do-or-die. It was perfect timing.”
“We did four pop-ups and absolutely smashed,” he added about the Starland Yard services. “Everyone loved it, loved the food, and we loved doing it.”
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The offer was then made to the Williamses to buy the bus, and “we literally laughed,” Terren Williams admitted, concerning the cost of such an investment, but Starland Yard’s John Benhase, Guy Davidson, Niko Ormond and Pila Sunderland believed in them so much that they made it happen.
Williams said that the circ*mstance was “so outside of [his] comfort zone that it just forced [him] to go to the next step,” and they purchased the bus in October and spent the next few months developing their brand.
“It’s been an exciting ride,” he said.
And this barbecue bus has only just begun its delicious adventure.
Slow Fire BBQ offers fully catered menus and appears regularly at Starland Yard. Follow its social media for dates and times: https://www.facebook.com/slowfiresavannah/ and https://www.instagram.com/slowfiresavannah/.
