-We come from the underground.

We got labeled as underground barbecue.

I was like, "That's cool."

You're doing everything illegally.

People were supporting it.

Our local health department basically told us that we couldn't do what we were doing anymore.

We got the rug pulled out from underneath us.

When your livelihood depends on it, just keep fighting.

The brisket, it's the pectoral muscle.

It's one of the most toughest pieces of meat that you can cook and barbecue.

It's the muscle that actually holds up the animal.

A Central Texas-style barbecue was mainly German and Czech influence.

It was a way of preserving meat that was spoiling in a lot of the old German-Czech butcher shops.

Yes, making that meat last longer.

The pepper is what helps the bark form on the brisket.

What we're trying to achieve is this really juicy, black, shiny piece of meat that looks really delicious and enticing.

I could always tell when a brisket's done cooking because of the way it smells.

To me, it smells like chocolate, like warm brownies.

When you know brownies are done because you can smell them, the same thing with brisket, being a pit master, that's what you're doing.

You're mastering your pit.

They're all different.

They all have their own personal.. That's a time where you can pretty much figure out anything that you have going on in your life.

You have to spend that time with you in the fire to see how it breathes and how it eats and to realize that it's alive.

It teaches you how to be patient.

You're on its time.

You're sweating.

You're getting burned.

You're getting smoke in your eyes.

Then you still have to come back and do that again the next day.

It takes a special sort of individual that's going to do that over and over again.

I met my wife back in Orange County when I was in high school.

She got pregnant at a young age.

She dropped out.

I dropped out.

We were teen parents, so we struggled a lot.

We barely scraped by.

We lived paycheck to paycheck.

I just loved gathering people together and cooking, looking back that we were preparing ourselves for these gatherings and cooking for big groups of people.

My wife would be like, "Oh, these people are just coming over, and they're just mooching off of us," and this and that.

Finally, she was like, "Hey, we got to start charging for this."

It was her idea, really.

We had our first pop-up in late 2017, in the backyard of our first home in Garden Grove.

Most of them were just friends and family.

We had people show up that we didn't know.

It went on like that for quite some time until we actually got in trouble.

We got pop.

We had this raid done on us.

It was a city of Garden Grove and Orange County Health Department.

They basically told us that we couldn't do what we were doing anymore.

The hardest thing was the offset smoker.

It wasn't approved for food use.

I went back and typed out some documents, tried to argue my case on why this would be a safe way to do it.

I had to write all the procedures.

We got an answer back and that was, "Okay, well, if you can get somebody to build this apparatus with these specifications, then we will allow it."

We then went to our builder and then had the smokers build the specific .. We became the first in the state to have an offset smoker approved for food use.

Evan.

-Yes, brother.

-Hey, good morning.

-Nice.

Yes, great to see you.

-How are you doing, brother?

Good to see you.

-Yes, man.

Welcome.

-Thank you.

The Ecology Center is a regenerative organic.. in San Juan Capistrano.

One of the biggest things that they do for the city is .. education for all ages.

Yes, I love coming out here.

-Yes, beautiful day.

-You got such a hard job.

-Well, we're all doing the good work, putting the culture back in the agriculture, as we like to say.

-Yes, absolutely.

-No, we're lucky to be here.

This is a 28-acre paradise.

-It is.

Evan is someone who has been an advocate for su.. to nourish their bodies with the best that they can get.

-The conversation that we're having as farmers is really exploring that bioregional cuisine that's not just indigenous.

It's really this evolution of time of-- Because trading has happened from Mexico all the way through San Juan Capistrano for hundreds of years.

The Spanish came in the 1800s but before that even.

The milpa has a strong anchoring here.

We grow the milpa, the traditional corn, beans, and squash for a lot of reasons, not just to preserve the past, but really to bring culture into the future.

-Yes, you can really see why the natives would settle for this land here.

It's in this valley, and then we have the river that runs through here, right?

-Absolutely.

This is some of the most fertile soil .. This watershed, this San Juan Creek watershed that connects the Saddleback Mountain, or Calapa, as the Ahajans say, all the way to Doheny, it's pretty epic.

You want to harvest some tuna?

There's some low-hanging fruit right here.

-Yes.

Actually, I had my eye on some of these ones over here.

-Do it.

Yes, rock it.

You need a knife or you're going [crosstalk]?

-Yes, I got one.

There's an abundance of everything here, huh?

-That's true.

-I get some of these prickly pears, these tunas.

-Yes, help yourself.

It's so good.

-Yes, grab a couple more.

-This is the San Juan Blue.

This is our heritage ingredient that we've been growing here for years.

It's just starting to flower.

There's nothing like a corn field, right?

This is one of the most powerful ingredients for the Americas and for the people, which is-- This is the sustenance and the spirituality of the people of the land.

On the other side of that, in America, is we've bastardized this sacred ingredient.

We've turned it into a commodity that's not even edible.

Even though this specific corn isn't from San Juan.

That's the journey that we're all on, embarking on, is how do we become native to this place?

Of course, honoring all of our indigenous communities that are showing us the ways of being.

It starts with conversations like this, and it follows through with so many other ways.

-On my dad's side of the family, my grandmother was born here.

Her bloodline stems from being what people call Californian.

What do Californians look like?

It could be mestizo, which is a mixture of Spanish and Indigenous.

There was no boundaries back then.

The people of this land were the people that were here before anybody else.

Before there was a flag.

Who was really anywhere?

Does anybody really have a right to be someplace?

Using the land to cook with outside, there's nothing better.

We're using a local California white oak, burning it down to coals.

From there, we're going to take our beef heads that we actually marinated in some orange juice from some Valencia oranges that are here on the farm, and citrus leaves, and avocado leaves.

We are going to rub that down with a spice mixture of achiote and some other dried chili peppers.

Wrap them up in some palm leaves because that's what we have here on the farm.

We'll lower those into the pit, and then we'll cover the whole thing with earth.

They'll cook overnight.

These cuts of meat that would normally be thrown away, they were the cuts that all the poor people were eating.

Tomorrow, we'll find out how we did.

I think that's a wrap.

We're just going to let the land do its thing and trust in our ancestors to finish the process for us.

This is their method, so we'll just leave them to it.

One, two, three.

Okay.

As long as it doesn't combust right now.

[music] -There it goes.

I knew that was going to happen.

Oh, no.

No.

-Want to eat?

-No.

I've got to save it.

There you go.

-Good save, good save, good save.

-That looks good, actually.

-Yes, it does.

Look at the meat.

-There you go.

-Oh, man, that's good.

[laughter] -Yes, put it right there.

Fire is going to do what it wants to do.

We're basically going to pull all the meat off of him, the cheeks, the tongue, and we'll pull everything apart.

Come on, Dwayne.

You know I'm not going to leave you out, bro.

I'm not going to give you more brains again.

That's what I gave you the last time.

Did you know that?

I reached in and grabbed a piece of brain.

-I was going to- -You know I got to mess with you, dude.

-It's like Cooper when we made him eat the eye.

-That's some of the cheek.

-Is this some of the cheek?

-You know I got a brain left.

-We're going to take some blue corn that we got from the ecology center, make these tostadas, lay some beans down, put a nice layer of the beef head on there, a couple of eggs, prickly pears, some tunas.

We're going to roast this off.

We're going to make a nice ranchero salsa for it and some of the little nopal relish that we got from the farm, too.

Eat it with a little bit of queso fresco.

That's a ranch meal right there, right?

After all this hard work, that's something that we deserve.

-I love the cabeza.

It tastes just perfectly cut, soft, with a little bit of crispiness, the salsa de tuna.

What I really love is the tostada, because most tostadas, they just shatter.

There's nothing to it.

You eat it, all right, it's hard, but.. you can still taste the corn in it, and it's the tiniest bit soft on the inside.

Danny never messes up.

-Heritage Barbecue is full of ragtag chefs, but we all find a common interest, and that's cooking.

I try to give them something to think about when they hear our story of where we started in our backyard, with no money, and that sort of thing, and you can be anything that they want to be.

Not any of us are here because we did amazing in school .. We're here to learn the trade.

A bunch of rebels and outlaws, and we're all degenerates.

Barbecue is the only really thing that I've been really good at.

I'm very blessed that it found me because I don't know where I would be if I didn't have it.