Darrell Byers
When barbecue pitmaster Patrick “Jube” Joubert was running his self-named barbecue joint on Fort Worth’s east side, he and his wife came up with the ‘cue catchphrase to end all catchphrases: “Making you smile with smoke.”
“I was cooking my first cornbread on the pit, just giving it a little bit of smoke to see how it would taste,” he says. “I was cooking for a big Sunday crowd and my wife said, ‘I hope this smoke makes them smile’, and that was it, boom. I put that on T-shirts, pictures, Facebook, it was too good not to use.”
Darrell Byers
Joubert’s Cajun-inspired barbecue did, indeed, make people smile, from locals in the Stop 6 neighborhood, where Jube’s Smokehouse resided for four years, to barbecue chasers from around the state who heard about Jube’s via word of mouth and a Texas Monthly rave.
A landlord dispute, Joubert says, led to the closing of his restaurant last year, but his catchphrase lives on in another form: It’s the title of his first book, “Making You Smile With Smoke.”
Independently published by Joubert and available on Amazon, “Making You Smile” isn’t necessarily a cookbook. Rather, it’s a guide to barbecuing - for both novices and those who want to graduate from beginners to professionals.
“I wrote this for people who want to get into the game,” says Joubert, now a pitmaster at the Fort Worth location of Hurtado Barbecue. “I’m not trying to teach a seasoned pitmaster anything new. I’m trying to turn beginners into those seasoned pitmasters.”
In a writing style that is both conversational and informative, Joubert shares his advice and opinion on getting started in the ‘cue biz, from choosing the appropriate equipment to selecting seasonings to figuring out which woods to use for a smoker.
Refreshingly, the book dismisses many misconceptions about barbecuing, such as you need to spend big bucks on a high-end smoker in order to make good ‘cue.
“You can start with a small pit that can be found at Kroger or Wal-Mart,” Joubert writes. “They cook very well - steaks, ribs, pork chops, chicken. It’s a direct heat setup and it works quite well.”
The book is based on his own personal experiences and culinary journey. The pastor-slash-pitmaster, whom we profiled in 2019, has spent a great deal of his 54 years cooking, grilling and smoking meats, fine-tuning a style that can be best described as a mix of the Creole food he grew up with in his hometown of Plaisance, Louisiana, with traditional Texas barbecue.
Joubert’s aware that some of the things he wrote won’t fly with other pitmasters. For instance, he swears by a certain type of wood, hickory, while many other pitmasters prefer oak. In his book, he calls hickory the “Rolls-Royce of woods.”
Darrell Byers
“I know this is not everybody’s style,” he says. “My style is different. My seasonings are different. I like to cook low and slow but at the same time, my temperature’s a little higher and my cooking time is a little shorter. If I have to cook with oak, I want red oak or post oak. But hickory is my wood of choice, and it has been for a long time. It’s all just a matter of preference.”
Writing a book wasn’t always a part of his life plan. A few years ago, he began jotting down notes - random thoughts on barbecue that might make good words of wisdom for aspiring barbecuers.
What brought everything together, he says, is the photo that accompanies this story, taken by local photographer Darrell Byers, a former Star-Telegram photographer, fellow barbecue aficionado and friend of Joubert’s.
“Darrell called one day and said hey I’m going to come by and say hi and take a couple photos of you,” Joubert says. “He was showing me the photos on his camera and my brother saw one and said, ‘Man, that would make a great book cover,’ and, well, here we are.”
