S3 EP 122: Chef Ray Sheehan, Author of Big Green Egg Basics From a Master Barbecuer

Hello Happy People,

Dianne is thrilled to share with you her conversation with Chef Ray Sheehan. With the weather warming up and summer officially just around the corner, many people like Dianne and her husband are looking forward to the opportunity to firing up their backyard cookers. While many people stick to the more traditional gas or charcoal grills, there is one Master Barbecuer who has dedicated a cookbook to the merits of cooking with a Big Green Egg. 

While some may find the odd looking green, egg shaped cooker intimidating, Chef Ray Sheehan understands their trepidation and is determined to take the mystery out of making amazing dishes that will impress your friends and family at your next backyard barbecue.

The Big Green Egg’s design uses ceramic technology to create a cooker that allows cooks to precisely control temperatures and crate an amazing abundance of delicious recipes for any menu. Chef Sheehan walks cooks through getting to know and use this cooker in his cookbook, Big Green Egg Basics From a Master Barbecuer. This cookbook starts out with a simple straightforward introduction to the components of the cooker, essential accessories he recommends, set up, safety, and more. 

The cookbook is also loaded with incredible recipes from mouth watering barbecue, to various sides dishes, and decadent desserts. Ever tried baking Salted Chocolate Chunk Cookies on a outdoor cooker? With a Big Green Egg and Chef Ray Sheehan’s cookbook, you can do just that. So don't wait, go listen now to find out more from the Master Barbecuer himself. 

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Transcript

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SPEAKER_02 0:02

Welcome to BookBanter with me, your host, Diane Burkhart. I hope you will join me every Wednesday as we explore all things to do with, well, books. Let's get on with our show today. Hello, my happy people. Today is June 12th, 2024, and have I got a fantastic show for you? With wonderful summer weather coming up, everybody is going to start thinking about having their backyard barbecues. And today's guest is a perfect person to help you make sure that you have the best barbecue event ever. So let's not waste any time. Let's bring out our guest. Please welcome to Bookbander with Diane Burkhart, Master Barbecue Chef Ray Sheehan. I have honestly been looking forward to this interview for a couple of weeks now because my husband and I have been looking at a big green egg cooker for quite a while now. And we can never make up our mind. And I am hoping the guest today can help me with that. Would you mind telling our audience who you are and what you do?

SPEAKER_00 1:10

Hi, uh, I'm Ray Sheehan. I'm an award-winning chef, cookbook author, and the founder of Chef Ray's LLC, which is an all-natural line of sauces and seasonings. I'm also a featured contributor to Barbecue News magazine and the baseball and barbecue podcast.

SPEAKER_02 1:26

Now, I'm really fascinated. How did you get into? I mean, I understand you're a chef, but how did you get so focused on barbecue?

SPEAKER_00 1:35

Well, where I'm from in the Northeast United States, Italian food is very popular. And I worked in a lot of different Italian restaurants, and I saw chef friends of mine that just couldn't break out because the the market was just so saturated with that type of food. Great food, but just hard to make their mark. And my off time I spent working with uh charcoal grills, and it just I just fell in love with the smell of the smoke and the food that was coming off it. And like your husband, I was a little intimidated by all these different smokers and and and really big grills. And one year for my birthday, my wife got me an electric smoker, and I started fooling around with that. And the thing about that was I didn't have to worry about the time, I mean the controlling the fire. I could just set it and forget it, and I could work on my sauces and seasonings. And little by little I started growing in that field, and then I started writing for Barbecue News Magazine because my background was always um in food. I've been in the restaurant business for 25 plus years, and I just really fell in love with barbecue. I started helping out a competition barbecue team, and then you know that was it once we started doing the competitions.

SPEAKER_02 2:51

So, now what was it that actually drew you to the big green egg?

SPEAKER_00 2:56

We were at a pool store, and I was like, what is this big green looking thing? And they said, Oh, that's a grill. I said, Oh, well, how do you use it? And nobody at the store could tell me how to use this, so I didn't so I didn't buy it. And then uh fast forward years later, I finally learned how to cook on these Komodo style cookers, but I never had a big green egg. One of my sauces, it won the Sauce King NYC Grand Championship. It's an international sauce contest, and the grand prize was a big green egg. Oh, nice! Oh my gosh, it was wonderful. I mean, this thing showed up on a trailer at my house, they wheel it into my over to my deck, and it's one of the most amazing cookers. It's probably my favorite cooker that, and I'm calling it a cooker because it's so versatile, because you can really do everything on it from grilling, smoking, roasting, baking, uh, you know, you can do all these things on it. So that was when I really fell in love with the big green egg when I when I actually got one. Because, like I said, I've worked with other Komodo style grills, but they weren't to this quality, they weren't to this level. And they're all good, but big green egg has a lifetime warranty, and they have this massive ceramic interior that you can be out there in 30-degree weather, and it's gonna keep the temperature rock steady.

SPEAKER_02 4:18

Well, you know, and one of the things that I think my husband has always been kind of hesitant about is he worries about it not being big enough to really cook a lot at once if you're going to be having a party. I mean, how do you think that this really works for more than just like the family cookout for the weekend?

SPEAKER_00 4:35

So there's like seven different sizes of these. You can go from mini to double XL. And they also have these risers that you can put inside called an egg spander, and that'll give you different levels. That'll give you different levels inside the egg. So, you know, you can cook the brisket on the bottom and then a pork butt over top of it, or you know, it it really doubles your cooking space. So depending on how many people you're cooking for, um, you can definitely egg spand the levels of cooking in it. Nice.

SPEAKER_02 5:12

Now, you have two cookbooks out right now. You have the award-winning barbecue sauces and how to use them. And then you also have big green egg basics from a master barbecuer. And that's the one that we're kind of focusing on right now. But I really am interested. The sauce that you won with that you were just talking about, is that one in your barbecue sauce cookbook?

SPEAKER_00 5:34

Yes, that's the star of the show. That's the recipe that really helped me get noticed and get that first book deal was uh for my Memphis mop sauce. And a lot of great chefs out there, they give out all their recipes because everyone brings something different to the same recipe. So that was really what hinged on me getting the deal or not was are you going to give out your award-winning sauce recipes? Because that's what people want to read about. And I said, Yes, absolutely. And that book was an amazing project to work on. I got to feature 10 different sauces that have won us awards in different cooking competitions, sauce competitions, my main one, the Memphis mop barbecue sauce, the Kansas City barbecue sauce. So it featured 10 sauces and then 50 ways to use them. So not only did I show you, you know, how to make this great sauce, but you know what? Here's five different ways to use each one, whether it's barbecue, grilling, for tailgating, for a picnic, a cookout. Consequently, it was very well received and won Barbecue Book of the Year for the National Barbecue Association. Oh, wow.

SPEAKER_02 6:38

You know, one of the things that we like to talk about with authors is what your process is when you decide to do a new book. Whenever you get the idea, like to do the big green egg basics, from start to finish, it's like, how do you put a cookbook together?

SPEAKER_00 6:52

Well, the process of choosing which book to do, I think that's different for every author. In my case, my publisher had some distinct ideas of what they thought they wanted to see in the marketplace. And it just so happened that I had this story of just winning this big green egg, and I had been cooking on it, and I loved it, and I had the knowledge to be able to explain to people how to use it. Like for me and like your husband, uh, who sees the green egg and is kind of a little intimidated or unsure if that's the right cooking vessel for them. This book solves that problem because I teach you how to do everything from start to finish, how to set it up. I give an overview, the tools that you'll need, common setups, choosing the right fuel, lighting the fire, controlling the temperature. Controlling the temperature is one of the biggest things that I think people are intimidated about with the big green egg. But if you follow the guide in the book, it's very easy. It's very easy to do. And I even go over ash management and maintenance, and it really simplifies things for people, and you really can see that there's so many ways that you can use it. So I not only do I go over all that in the beginning, but then I set up and organize the chapters by technique. So hot and fast, low and slow, roasting, and there's two baking chapters, one sweet and one savory. In case you wanted to make pizza or garlic nuts or something like that, or even uh barbecue empanadas, we want to use up leftover barbecue. So if you make that big brisket or that big pork butt, you want ways to use them. And then the uh the sweet baking chapter, it's like an over-the-top bourbon cream cheese, frosted, giant cinnamon roll in a cast iron pan, a mixed berry cobbler. So it shows you the versatility of this vessel that you can cook not only a big pork butter or a brisket, but you can also do something like a key lime pie or something more delicate.

SPEAKER_02 8:53

That was the one thing that I was really surprised about is a lot of these recipes that you had in your book that I never would have even thought about being made on a big green egg. I mean, it was really fascinating looking through there and seeing the diversity of recipes that you have in here.

SPEAKER_00 9:08

Well, you notice people that are diehard big green egg users, they call them eggheads. And basically they love to cook outdoors. And I think that's, you know, it's been trending of everything that you can cook, just being outside from pizza to you know, your Thanksgiving turkey. I have a recipe in the book for a roasted turkey breast on the big green egg with the cranberry apple relish, you know. So it that also helps save some space in your oven when you're having a ton of people over to be able to cook some of these things outdoors.

SPEAKER_02 9:42

Whenever you're creating a new recipe, do you ever get to the point where you're like, I cannot taste this one more time?

SPEAKER_00 9:49

Yeah. Um particularly when I'm doing like sauces, because you almost get like palate fatigue. So I have to take a break. Sometimes I'll have to come back to it. It's so important when you're writing recipes. And I have a library of recipes that I do, and I do product development for companies at times where I write recipes for them, like content creation. You know, I write for Barbecue News magazine. I think I already said that, and for the cookbook. So you're constantly tasting, and so you have to really just taste and not consume everything. And sometimes you just have to take a break and you have to say, you know what, I'm gonna come back to this tomorrow, or cleanse your palate in between. You can definitely get palate fatigue.

SPEAKER_02 10:33

What is the biggest mistake that you think that people make whenever they are just barbecuing in general or using a big green egg?

SPEAKER_00 10:41

I think for barbecuing in general, one of the mistakes when you're barbecuing, I'm thinking of uh smoking, like smoking foods or like particularly big meats, like when you smoke a brisket or you smoke a pork butt, or one of the mistakes that I see a lot of times, people say to me, Oh, you know, because brisket is one of the things that I get questioned about most frequently. And people say, you know, I made this brisket and I took it off and I cut into it, and it just was so tough. So the first thing I say is, Well, what temperature did you cook it to? What was the internal temperature that you cooked it to? Because it can be underdone, it'll be too tight, and overdone and it'll be kind of falling apart. So instead of sliced brisket, now you have chopped brisket. Uh but the main thing is really resting. When you cook a brisket to the temperature according to how you want to serve it, it's really important to rest the meat. And I'd let it rest for at least an hour and preferably an hour and a half to two hours. Then when you slice into it, it gives it a chance for the meat to relax, and then it's more tender when you go to slice it.

SPEAKER_02 11:40

So, what exactly does resting your meat do for the dish?

SPEAKER_00 11:44

The muscle is a little tight when it's so hot on the fire, and it just relaxes it. So it kind of loosens up, it reabsorbs some of that moisture in the wrap. And when I say wrap, I mean it's going to be wrapped in foil or butcher paper or wrapped in a towel and in a dry cooler resting for that period of time. And one of the mistakes that people make on the big green egg is I think when they're first starting out, and it's not realizing that the interior is ceramic. So when you fire it up, it's much easier to go up in temperature than to bring it down because that ceramic is going to hold on to that heat for a much longer period of time. So if you are shooting for like 275 or 250, and all of a sudden you shoot up to 450, it's going to take you quite a bit of time to get it down. The other mistake that I see people making with the big green egg is opening it too fast. The big green egg is really controlled by the airflow, by the bottom vent and the top vent. If you open it too fast, you can have a backdraft and you might lose your eyebrows. So you want to do what's called as burning it. You just raise the lid gently, about maybe an inch, one, two, three seconds, and then you can slowly raise it. And that kind of helps get some air into there slowly rather than too fast, and then uh and you end up in the burn unit. I don't know.

SPEAKER_02 13:02

I have a story about that, but don't we all? It was one of those things we just had a charcoal grill, and everybody always says, Oh, you put too much lighter fluid. I did not put a single drop of lighter fluid in the thing, but I had bought charcoal that had lighter fluid in it. Oh, okay. And it was so new, there were so much fumes coming off this. And I clicked the lighter again, and the fumes ignited, and yeah, I dinner was after the emergency room.

SPEAKER_00 13:37

And you know, that's the thing with the big green egg, you never want to use lighter fluid in it because it will absorb into the pores of the ceramic. And it's real if somebody does that, it's very, very difficult to get those fumes out of there.

SPEAKER_02 13:49

Oh, god, yeah, that would be horrible. Because ceramic just absorbs everything.

SPEAKER_00 13:54

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 13:54

Now, how important is flavor layering for barbecue?

SPEAKER_00 13:59

Oh, that's that's everything. I mean, that that is the difference between good and bad barbecue. For instance, when you use a mop, or one layer is the rub, one layer is your mopping sauce, another layer could be smoke. We like to use smoke like a seasoning, like a salt and pepper. There is such a thing as too much smoke. When you burn your charcoal and you add wood chunks to it, or whatever wood you add to it, you definitely don't want to put your meat on when you have white smoke billowing out of it because that's the bad smoke. You want the light blue hue, kind of like where you can barely see it. That's gonna really help flavor your food. The white smoke is more like the creosote that's gonna stick to the food and then really just take over your whole palate. So, you know, you want to just build the layers as you go. And I don't really add the barbecue sauce until the end. I might use a mopping sauce, something with some sort of vinegar and some spices, but not really the sauce, not until the last few minutes of cooking, the last, you know, 10-15 minutes, just to set the sauce.

SPEAKER_02 15:04

So if somebody is new to barbecuing, is the big green egg something that's good for them to start with, or should they start with something else first?

SPEAKER_00 15:13

You know, the journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step. The main thing is that you just get barbecuing, whatever you do. I don't think that starting with a different cooking vessel would be better or worse. I think the big green egg, there's a learning curve for every cooker that you use. And I think over time this big green egg would be a much better cooking vessel for someone new because you can do everything on it. A lot of times people start with like a say a Weber kettle and then go to a Weber Smoky Mountain, and then next thing you know, they're a collector and they have all these different grills in the backyard. I mean, I have a lot, but they're all for different uses, like for recipe writing and whatever, it's important. But if you don't do that kind of stuff and it's just kind of like they're collecting and you know, getting rusted out and just going to waste, the big green egg would definitely be something that you could always use. And they say they last a lifetime and they do have this really good warranty. But really, like I said, this book solves that. It shows you just how easy they are to use.

SPEAKER_02 16:17

Now, in our summer issue for June and July, you are sharing your pulled pork with Carolina mustard barbecue sauce recipe. What tips can you give somebody to make sure that this comes out perfect?

SPEAKER_00 16:30

I like to season the pork butt and give it plenty of time to kind of like dry a brine with the seasoning. So if you wanted to do it three, four hours ahead of time, that's not an issue. Another thing you can do is you can inject the pork butt. They have commercial injections available, but I typically just do simple, like some apple juice and a little spice. And the apple juice really helps keep the interior of the pork moist throughout the cook because you're cooking it for a really long time and you want to cook it at a low temp. I mean, I tend to cook a little bit hotter, but 250, 275. And really the most important thing is to make sure that that temperature is steady throughout the course of the cook. And depending on what you're going to do with your food, whether you're going to pull the pork or slice the pork, the internal temperature that you cook it, it that will dictate. If you want to do pulled pork, I cook it to about and every pork butt's different, about 200, 203, and then I pull it off and I vent it and let it rest. But if you want to just slice it, you know, 195, you know, that would be a good temperature. But I like to do the injections. Like I said, it does keep it nice and moist as it cooks.

SPEAKER_02 17:40

I have to tell you, the photos in this cookbook, I have been a vegetarian for 15 years. I have not had like steak or pork or chicken in 15 years, and I'm looking through your cookbook going, you know, maybe one weekend would not be bad. Seriously, everything in here looks amazing.

SPEAKER_00 18:02

I was very lucky to have such a great photographer on the shoot, Ken Goodman from Ken Goodman Photography. He's done so many people's cookbooks, everyone from the Food Network to all the big barbecue people, Tuffy Stone. He's done the book Pitmaster, he's done Amy Mills' cookbook, Praise the Lord. I mean, he's just such a wonderful photographer. And he does rock photography too, with Jane's Addiction, Red Hot Chili Peppers, I mean REM, you know, you name it. And he was a chef and he was a world champion barbecue guy as well. So he knew what we were going for. And we cooked every recipe in the book. There's no, you know, we didn't use like motor oil on anything or any kind of like fake stuff. Everything is the actual food. So the timing of the dishes for the photo shoot was really important because not only food, but barbecue specifically, doesn't look as great as it should, as long as you hope it will. It just doesn't, once you cut a rack of ribs, I mean they just start going and drying out, or once you process any of these types of meats. So he did a really great job helping us with the timing. And we took about, I would say about seven or eight days, and we cooked every recipe in the book.

SPEAKER_02 19:17

These are just so amazing. I mean, there's plenty of things in here that are suited for vegetarians, too. I want to make that very clear. Even if somebody is a vegetarian, there are many recipes in here that you could have as well with the pizzas and the garlic knots, the maple mustard, glazed carrots. There are plenty of things in here.

SPEAKER_00 19:38

Roasted roasted eggplant.

SPEAKER_02 19:40

Even if they want to do something like the bacon-wrapped jalapeno chicken balms, you can do that with vegan versions of it.

SPEAKER_00 19:48

Yeah, you can use the unchicken or any one of those substitutes. Ironically, before I got into barbecue, I was the food service director for a natural food store. And my job was coming up with all these vegan and vegetarian recipes for the grab and go and the juice bar and all that. And I often thought that would be a really cool book to do, would be like a vegetarian, vegan barbecue book.

SPEAKER_02 20:12

Oh, that would be very good. I mean, but there's so many in here that you have that are suitable for pretty much any diet. People can find something in here that will work for them.

SPEAKER_00 20:22

You know, I wanted to show the versatility of the big green egg and of people's diets that you can do pretty much anything that you really want to do on the big green egg.

SPEAKER_02 20:32

Mm-hmm. I I think you definitely brought that forward in this cookbook. And I have to ask, was this also a family affair? Because it seems like there's somebody's picture in the cookbook with the state pair turkey legs.

SPEAKER_00 20:44

Oh, yeah, that's my son. He's uh I dedicated my first book to him. And one of the things that I love, I always told him, I mean, he loves to cook, but I told him, I said, you don't have to do it for a vocation, but you have to know how to sustain yourself. And some of the fondest memories I have are of spending time at my grandfather's farm and cooking with him. And I wanted to give those memories to my son, and it's just been wonderful. He's really taken to it. And I've had companies give me grills to do product content development with. And I'm I'm like, here, that's your grill now. Go for it. And he takes good care of them, and he's out there, he's cooking his steaks, and he's he would go to competitions with us and spend time, you know, rib cook-offs. And I just think it's important to promote cooking and barbecue to our youth because they're the ones that are going to carry on that legacy for years to come. And and he's very busy now with school and his music. But he was starting to write for a magazine called The Future of Q, the future of barbecue, that's through Barbecue News magazine. And he was developing recipes, and I'm like, wow, like when did you do that? So when you think they're not listening, I mean, always promote the youth, uh, whether it's cooking or barbecue or writing or anything that's Going to help them with life skills because even when you don't think they're listening, they're listening, believe me.

SPEAKER_02 22:05

Well, and that's perfect because all of these shows are for the summer reads program where we're trying to reach out and get kids and young adults interested in reading and reading your cookbook, learning how this equipment works and creating these skills in the youth is a perfect summer activity for the family.

SPEAKER_00 22:24

Oh, yeah. And he got to be the hand model for a lot of these, whether it was like actually tasting the food in the picture, but being a part of something like that, I think that's a terrific memory for him to have.

SPEAKER_02 22:37

Oh, yeah, definitely. This is amazing. Now, this is the point of the show that we like to do five quick questions that never turn out to be quick, but we're just too stubborn to give it up. Are you ready?

SPEAKER_00 22:49

I'm ready.

SPEAKER_02 22:50

So, question one have you ever had any funny barbecue mishaps?

SPEAKER_00 22:55

Oh, yes. I have one in particular. Many years ago, I was a caterer and a personal chef, and I would go to people's homes and cook. And the people were having a christening for their child, and they left me notes of what to cook. I was supposed to grill up some steaks. So there's no one home. I come and I get everything ready in the kitchen. I go out, I light up the grill, and I'm just preheating it. There's nothing on the grill, and I just turn it on. I go back inside and I get some dishes and put the dishes out and the plates, and I come back out, and there's like flames shooting out of the handle, the knobs, the grill is like on fire. It's right up against the house. And I'm like, oh my God, what am I gonna do? And I can't even turn the knobs off because the flames are shooting out of it. So I grabbed a pair of tongs and I turned them off, and I'm like, my heart's going 100 miles an hour. You know, I'm like, oh my God, how did this even happen? And I go inside and I I ended up preparing food, not as much as I had hoped, because I couldn't use the grill. But finally, one of the guests who stayed over the night before said, Oh, you know what? I cooked all these burgers on the grill last night and I didn't clean it, and and it was already loaded with grease, so I'm really sorry about that. And I was like, Oh my god, like so. That was like the worst thing that like ever happened. But luckily, the house did not catch on fire. I don't know what they did with the grill, it was pretty shot out at that point.

SPEAKER_02 24:17

But and that's a very good example for people of why you should clean your barbecue grill after you're done.

SPEAKER_00 24:24

Absolutely. I that's one of the things that I preach is like you clean the grill, you know, it gets cleaned before you use it and after you use it. Like that grease, sometimes you don't even realize how much grease is really in there. And the other thing I learned is um when you're doing these events, bring your own grill. So there's that. I just make sure.

SPEAKER_02 24:46

Wow, that's amazing.

SPEAKER_00 24:48

Yeah, that was really crazy there.

SPEAKER_02 24:51

The question two: what is your favorite thing about summer besides barbecue?

SPEAKER_00 24:57

My favorite thing about summer besides barbecue would be sitting on the deck. Where we live, there's a lot of animals. There's farms behind us, so there's like horses and all different animals, and it's really just sitting out there with my wife having uh sangria and just enjoying life and just relaxing and hearing nature and and listening to the and listening to the animals, and most of the time, really just kind of like reading. We'll like sit together and read together, but separate, yeah, if that makes sense. Yeah. So that's pretty much my favorite thing.

SPEAKER_02 25:32

So question three What is your favorite barbecue event that you have been to?

SPEAKER_00 25:37

Oh, that's a tough one. They don't have it anymore, but we used to love this event called the Boobicue, which was in Delaware around Halloween time. So it was like boo bikue. And um it's in the oh, it's Delaware Seashore State Park. And you're between the ocean and the bay, so it can be cold at night, but then in the evening, all the barbecuers set up their cook stations to look like scary haunted houses, and all the kids from town come and do the trick-or-treating, and people that are cooking, their kids are trick-or-treating, just that camaraderie, like a family atmosphere and good food and smoke in the air, and and that that was that's been my favorite event for a long time, and unfortunately, they they don't have that one anymore. That's too bad. That sounds fun. Oh, it was great. COVID really knocked out a lot of events. So now we're back to events, but it's the new normal. We're there's a lot of different events now, and they're kind of done in a different way. But that was really a cool one. And you see that at a lot of barbecue events that, like for a Kansas City Barbecue Society event, which that one was, they're really two days. So you get there on a Friday, you set up Friday night is like social hour after the cook's meeting, and you're seeing old friends and you're hanging out, and maybe you have a beverage and you have something good to eat, and everyone's friends. And the next morning, now you're competing against them, and then you're going head to head with some of the best pitmasters, and then after that, you're friends again. So it's really a lot of fun. It's cool.

SPEAKER_02 27:15

Speaking of your other barbecue friends, question four Besides your own two cookbooks, what cookbooks do you typically recommend to people when they're trying to learn to barbecue?

SPEAKER_00 27:28

Wow, that is tough. I I have a massive cookbook collection, and probably one of my favorites is uh by Meathead Goldwyn, The Science of Barbecue. He's just an amazing person. He's a barbecue hall of famer, and he debunks a lot of the myths that people think about when you think about cooking in general, but also about barbecue. I love the Kansas City Barbecue Society 25th anniversary book because then that brings it back to the old school barbecue traditions. I recently got Bloodsoe's Barbecue Cookbook, which is uh gentleman from Compton, California. He just won a James Beard Award for that book. It's called Bloodsoe's Barbecue Cookbook. There's so many. I mean, Tuffy Stone, legendary Pitmaster, he wrote an endorsement for my first book. I love his cookbook. I could go on. There's just so many. I love educating people. I would teach barbecue classes from time to time. And I definitely love when people say, Oh, I have this cookbook or that cookbook, because it tells me that they care and they're going to take the time to actually learn it. I've seen people in in barbecue forums on social media who are like, Oh, I just went out and bought a $150 brisket. How do I cook it? Like, you know, you wouldn't you wouldn't go out and buy a Ferrari and be like, oh, I got a Ferrari. How do I drive it? You know, you take the time to learn about it and then try it. You should definitely try it. And yeah, you should definitely ask questions. You know, you want to be a resource for other people, but you want to know that they're putting in the work too.

SPEAKER_02 29:01

So now, question five. Since you are a reader, what is your favorite genre to read when you're sitting out on your back porch just trying to relax?

SPEAKER_00 29:13

I can't get away from cookbooks. I cannot. I love a good cookbook. I love books. A hot date Friday night from my wife and myself is at Barnes and Noble. I mean, or like an independent bookstore or like a used bookstore, any kind of a bookstore, and a cup of coffee. That's what we love to do together or independently. I really do love murder mysteries too. Uh, that would be my besides a cookbook, but I just can't get away from cookbooks because I'm just like fascinated. I love reading the story. I love people's stories. How did they come up with this book and where did they come from and how did they develop their brand or what they're doing? And I'm so excited for what they have to show me because you can learn so much just by picking up one of these books.

SPEAKER_02 29:56

So, who is one of the last authors that you read for fiction?

SPEAKER_00 29:59

Uh uh Parnell Hall. I like Parnell Hall. I love his Stanley Hastings mystery series. It's it's kind of an older one, but that's one that really got me hooked.

SPEAKER_02 30:10

So now let's remind everybody who you are and what you do.

SPEAKER_00 30:15

My name is Ray Sheehan. I'm an award-winning chef, cookbook author, and the founder of Chef Ray's LLC, an all-natural line of sauces and seasonings, and also a featured contributor to the Barbecue News magazine and the baseball and barbecue podcast.

SPEAKER_02 30:31

And the two cookbooks that you have for sale right now are the award-winning barbecue sauces and how to use them, the secret ingredients to next level grilling, and the big green egg basics from a master barbecuer. And both are available on Amazon in Kindle form and paperback. Where else can people find your work?

SPEAKER_00 30:53

My website is about to launch, raisheein.com. On social media, I'm Chef Ray Sheehan, and you can get my books anywhere find books are sold.

SPEAKER_02 31:04

And all of your information is in the summer issue of BookBanter magazine, and there are live links to your social media and places where they can buy your book, as well as in the description of today's podcast. I have had so much fun talking to you about this. I think my husband's going to, after listening to this, he actually was like, Can I sit in on your interview? Because he wanted to hear it firsthand, but he had a meeting at work. But I think pretty much after going through this and seeing your cookbook, he's going to end up buying a big green egg this summer.

SPEAKER_00 31:39

Yes, that's what I like to hear.

SPEAKER_02 31:42

We've been looking at these for a couple of years and just keep going back and forth. Should we, shouldn't we? And I think with the clear, simple instructions that you have on how to use a big green egg in this cookbook, it's just taken all the mystery out of it. And we're like, okay, we're gonna try it.

SPEAKER_00 31:58

That's awesome. I can't wait to see pictures and video of you guys cooking on your big green egg and give me a shout out.

SPEAKER_02 32:05

Definitely. Thank you so much for joining me today.

SPEAKER_00 32:08

Thank you so much for having me. I had a great time.

SPEAKER_02 32:12

So there you have it, folks. My interview with the incredible chef and master barbecuer Ray Sheehan. Be sure to go to his website and check out both of his cookbooks, as well as check out all of his social media. Don't forget, you can also check out our latest issue of BookBanter magazine, which you can buy directly from our website, Burkhartbooks.com. You can find a link to our website in the description of today's podcast, along with the links for Ray Sheehan's information. Now, next week we have got SB Gon Korova coming up. She is a children's book author, and she writes the Adventures with Abba series, but that's not all. She also has a fantastic YouTube channel called Read Aloud with Abba, hilarious adventures in reading that includes books, read alouds, audiobooks, and animations. Her collection is really amazing, and you will not want to miss out. But now you know what time it is, folks. It's time for you all to go forth and be really happy that we have so many fantastic authors for you this summer.