Speaker 1: I'm Daniel Vaughn, barbecue editor, a Texas monthly. This is
Fire and Smoke, the Texas Monthly Barbecue podcast, brought to
you by YETI. You know, like most people, the first
time I had a Greenberg smoke turkey, it came out
of a white cardboard box. It had no idea where
it came from or how it was made. Really, I
knew it was delicious, peppery and salty, incredibly smoky. It's
really dark skin looks like no other smoke turkey had
had before. I never realized what went into making one
of these turkeys until I met Sam Greenberg at Greenberg
Smoke Turkeys and Tyler Texas. The smokehouse at this facility
is just something so immense. It's incredible to behold. This
is not your humidity controlled gas fired you know, wood
chips and sawdust, electric rotisserie barbecue. I mean, this is
real wood fired barbecue everywhere. It was really an amazing
thing to see, and it made me appreciate Greenberg Smoke
turkeys even more. I gotta have one every Christmas. It's
part of my family tradition now, and I hope you'll
try one to so here it is the story of
Greenberg Smoke Turkeys. Rose Diamond once ruled the world of
smoke turkey. In nineteen thirty eight, customers in New York, Miami,
and Hollywood enjoyed her smoke birds, all shipped out from
her home in Fort Worth. According to The Claude News,
they brined for at least ten days, then smoked all
day in a brick pit in Diamond's backyard. Properly smoked
turkey is a rare delicacy, the paper reminded its readers.
By the next year, the Fort Worth Star Telegram declared,
smoke turkey is the rage of the moment. Missus Diamond
was sold out in nineteen thirty nine, but a hungry
soul in Dallas changed the tide of history. He requested
a special delivery of smoke turkeys from Tyler instead of
Fort Worth.
Speaker 2: My father's story was that he was always doing these
turkeys for family and friends here in the Tyler area.
Sometime in the early forties.
Speaker 1: That's Sam Greenberg, third generation owner of Greenberg Smoke Turkeys
in Tyler. His father, Zellech Greenberg, got.
Speaker 2: A telephone call from a gentleman in Dallas, and he
he asked him if he would send him six turkeys.
And my father went down to a candy store here
in Tyler Downtown, got some candy boxes with straw, packed
the turkeys in the candy boxes, put the six turkeys
on the train and shipped them to Dallas. And that
was when he started the mail order business.
Speaker 1: Greenberg was sounding as if this wasn't the first time
he'd told this story. The family owned smoke turkey business
was started by Greenberg's grandfather, also named Sam. He came
to Tyler in nineteen oh three from Poland. He brought
with him a recipe for smoke bird from his mother
and the skills of a shop shay that's a jew
certified to slaughter animals according to Kosher requirements. Sam built
a smokehouse at his dairy operation outside of town, and
word got around. Soon members of the Jewish community who
brought him animals to slaughter started asking him to smoke
them too. Greenberg told me the original smokehouse was a
small metal building with wagon wheels mounted on the ceiling. Ducks, chickens,
and turkeys would dangle on hooks connected to the wheels.
Like many early barbecue joints. The smoke meat was the
side business of the farm. The elder Sam also ran
a blacksmith's shop on the square in Tyler, but once
the shipping began in nineteen thirty nine, Sam and Zelick
built five more smokehouses to keep up with the growing demand.
Just a few years later, sometime in the early nineteen forties,
it was all taken by a Christmas Eve fire.
Speaker 2: On Christmas Eve, they took the ashes out of the
smokehouses and there were three free standing smokehouses inside of
this dairy barn. And about two in the morning, my
father got a call at the places on fire, and,
of course, having straw and other farm stuff in the barn,
the place went up. My dad rebuilt the smokehouses and
parts of the plant that we still use today, and
he rebuilt it in such a way that nothing around
the smokehouses is flammable or could ever combust like that. Again,
he had had enough of that situation.
Speaker 1: The flames from real hickory logs mixed with the dripping
fat of smoking birds can have that effect. It's why
commercial smokehouses use highly advanced ovens with temperature and humidity control.
Racks of meat are wheeled in and buttons are pushed
sought ust to sprinkle it onto electric hot plates to
create wisps of smoke. And that's the process I expected
to find at the Greenberg plant. I followed Greenberg in
his Lexus, complete with a Giblet license plate, to the
front gate. When we pulled inside, I was surprised to
see neat stacks of hickory wood. Smoke billowed out from
under a partially open garage door. Inside. The air was
so thick with smoke I thought for a second we
were within some sort of large horizontal chimney. It was
the pit room. Pitmaster Ray Wallace is overseeing the operations
here for thirty five years. We spoke briefly because his
every utterance unleashed a series of coughs. He wore knee
high boots, leather gloves, and safety glasses for protection. I
noted to myself that he would be well served by
a respirator. A hairnet over his baseball cap seemed like
comical overkill in this room full of nothing but wood, smoke, fire,
and sparks. There's no access to the turkeys from this room.
They filled the twenty separate smoking chambers flanking the pit
room on the other side of the wall, Wallace can
only tend to the fires that fuel each chamber. He
slides metal plates up to their open position as counterweights.
Lower on the other side of the pulley system. Behind
the doors are metal drawers full of fire. He slides
them out with a long metal rod. They ride along
a track built into the floor and look like iron
milk crates. Wallace sprays each one with the water hose,
turning the red coals to a dull gray, rendering fire
into thick smoke. They want these birds to cook long
and slow, up to twenty four hours. You can't do
that with a raging fire. The goal is to maximize
the smoke. Wallace jams a fresh cut fog on top
of the mound of coals and slides the fire drawer
back into place. Each smoking chamber has three drawers. After
he gets through all sixty, it's time to start back
at the beginning. It's not easy to find this kind
of skilled labor, especially for seasonal work. Sam the Elder
relied on Elva coal.
Speaker 2: Elva Cole started working for my grandfather at his blacksmith
shop when he was fourteen or fifteen years old in
near downtown Tyler, and after my grandfather passed away, Elva
continued working for my dad. He was a fixture of
my family and was definitely a fixture in this plant.
And Elva had nine children and they've all worked out
here in some form or fashion to smoke the turkeys.
And Elva's son, Elva Cole Junior, is now the foreman
of the plant and oversees all the smoking operations, so
we can't operate without the coal family.
Speaker 1: Turkeys come into the plant fresh daily. The wings and
any excess fat is removed and they're seasoned with the
proprietary spice mixture. I can tell you that it's heavy
on black pepper. Slits are made into the meat to
get the seasoning deep into the bird. The exterior is
covered and it sits overnight before being hung in the smokehouse.
There's no brining or wet curing. They finish at half
the weight of the raw turkey. It's a double whammy
due to the spike in turkey costs recently, but Greenberg
didn't raise their prices to compensate. He still demands no
blemishes on the smoke skin, which he describes as majestic
mahogany in color. It's a great looking bird with a
heavy smoke aroma.
Speaker 2: Our turkeys are not for everybody. Not everybody likes apples.
You know. People will complain from time to time about
a turkey being too salty or too dry, and those
I can deal with because everything's done by hand, and
there's always the possibility of a turkey getting out and
it stayed a little too long in the smoke ass
or it was got a little too much seasoning on
it made it too salty. I can understand that. But
there's one thing I don't ever apologize for, and that
is for the turkeys being too smoky. It's in our name.
They are smoked turkeys.
Speaker 1: Now, I've always eaten my Greenberg smoke turkeys at room
temperature on a sandwich with mayo, mustard, and horseradish. I
asked Greenberg how he ate his.
Speaker 2: Cut a slice off, put some mayonnaise on it, enjoy.
Speaker 1: He has no need for bread, cheese, or other accompaniments except.
Speaker 2: A bag of fresh free toes and a good cold beer.
Speaker 1: The season for Greenberg begins on October first and slowly
ramps up. By mid October. They're smoking at full capacity
by Thanksgiving they've smoked, packaged, and sold eighty thousand turkeys.
Another one hundred and thirty thousand are expected to go
out the door by Christmas Eve. A crew of forty
employees monitor orders they come in from the website and
by phone. He said the fax machine was being phased out.
It's been less than a decade since they've started accepting
credit cards. Before then, turkeys were delivered on the honor
system with an enclosed invoice. Nowadays they're carried at Central
Market stores and a Brookshire, Brothers and Tyler. Of course,
you can also get them at the retail counter inside
the Greenberg facility. Customers can order from gobblegobble dot com,
a web address secured by Greenberg's genius nephew, but Greenberg
said that's the only side of the business where they
rely on anything high tech. The smoking will always be
handled with tradition in mind.
Speaker 2: I'm a caretaker of what my parents created. I don't
want anything to change in this business. I wanted to
say exactly the same, because it's not just the turkey,
it's the experience when they were young and their dad
would come home with the white box and the red print,
and they want that same tradition.
Speaker 1: Today, a red turkey silhouette is the only sign outside
the Greenberg facility. It's because the local tradition is so
important they don't even need a name on the side
of the building, the same building where the old Greenberg
Dairy once was. That fire seventy some odd years ago
would have been enough to drive most out of the
smoke Turkey business, but Greenberg told me the business was
lucky enough to have great employees.
Speaker 2: An old employee, ed Anda Wright, worked out here till
she was like in her nineties. She and her husband
lived near the plant or the barn at that time,
and she knew that all the building information was in
the file cabinets, and she and her husband drug the
file cabinets out of the fire so that it would
save my dad's business.
Speaker 1: It was certainly a tough Christmas for them that year.
They could have gone the way of Rose Diamond and
the animals of smoke turkey lore. Instead, they rebuilt and
stuck with a traditional smoking method, the same method that
had first grabbed the attention of that mystery customer in
Dallas in nineteen thirty nine.
Speaker 2: I know this isn't just conjecture or thought, I know,
I've got the best customers in the world, and on
top of that, the best people working for me that
anybody could ever have. And our customers come back every
year for that same thing, and I'm just lucky to
be part of it.
Speaker 1: Texas barbecue is built from the ground up, from the
wood to the smoke to the meat. You have to
have the right tools to create a masterpiece on but
your paper YEDTI coolers have you covered? Built to be indestructible,
keep ice for days, and keep a brisket hot for hours.
Yetti is built for Texas barbecue. You've been listening to
Fire and Smoke Texas Monthly is Barbecue podcast. I'm Daniel
Vaughan and I'll see you out there on the barbecue Trail.