WEYBURN - A chef and owner of Bud’s Barbecue in Ogema, Adam Mazer, is hoping to create a Saskatchewan version of southern barbecues as part of the culinary landscape, and shared his experiences with the Weyburn Rotary Club and guests on Thursday evening.
Born in Weyburn and raised in Ogema, Mazer and his wife Kaitlyn opened the barbecue restaurant in 2020, literally days before the lockdowns began for the COVID pandemic, and four and a half years later the business is still doing well. The restaurant is named for Adam’s grandfather, “Bud” Greer, who lived in Weyburn.
They started their culinary careers in culinary school where they met in 2011, and they began dating as Adam worked as a chef at Beer Bros. in downtown Regina.
Kaitlyn enrolled in the Culinary Institute of Canada in Prince Edward Island in 2015, and he worked as a chef at a high-end steakhouse in Charlottetown, then she was part of a culinary competition team that went to Germany and won a number of medals.
Adam and Kaitlyn were married in 2018, and early in 2020, they decided to look for a place of their own to run a restaurant, and after first looking at a place in Weyburn, found a restaurant in his former hometown of Ogema.
“There’s not a lot of barbecues in Saskatchewan, which kind of surprised me. That’s what we’re hopefully changing,” said Adam.
He described his restaurant as a Texas-style barbecue restaurant, but noted, “In Texas, they would throw me out the back door for using a pellet smoker. However, they have a better climate than we have for running a wood smoker outdoors. If you go down to Texas, everywhere you go is the smell of smoke, as they’re actually burning wood pits outside. You can’t do that here – when it’s 40 below, you’re not going to have cooked meat.”
Adam noted they began with a home smoker unit that they had to set up in a shed outside, as it wasn’t fire-rated, then more recently they upgraded to an indoor pellet smoker.
The advantage for the young family, who have a young daughter, is this smoker allows them to have a home life and smoke meat overnight for serving the next day.
This also works for their underlying philosophy to always have fresh food, made in-house everyday, including the sides.
In talking about the various meats he works with, he said the brisket is a very simple meat to prepare as he keeps the preparation easy.
“I wish there was magic to it, but there’s not. It’s surprisingly simple,” he said.
For pork, he mainly does back ribs and pulled pork, noting he prefers to use bone-in pork shoulder for the pulled pork. He has tried both bone in and bone out, and prefers bone-in as it helps to regulate the moisture level of the meat to cook evenly.
Adam noted some restaurants marinate their pork in brine, which is a salt and sugar solution that is boiled to dissolve the sugar.
“I don’t do that myself,” he noted, saying for pork butt he mainly uses brown sugar, black pepper, paprika and basil to season it.
For ribs, he cooks it for three to four hours in the smoker, then he wraps them in butcher paper and back into the smoker for another two to three hours. He unwraps them and finishes them in the smoker to caramelize the sauce on the ribs.
For poultry, he said, “If you’re going to do a slow cook wit poultry, you must brine them,” noting he mainly cooks turkey breast, and doesn’t do chicken any more.
“When we went to Texas, that’s what everybody uses, hardly any chicken anywhere.”
He uses a molasses-based brine, soaking the meat for four or five days at the most, and commented, of the lessons he learned in Texas from how they operate their barbecues, “It’s not the razzle-dazzle you put on it, it’s the quality of the meat. We use our special barbecue sauce with poultry seasoning, and we find that really clicks with that product. It’s one of the tastier menu items that we have. It’s better than you would think, and a lot of that is due to the brine.”
The basis of their restaurant is to apply fine dining French culinary principles to American-style barbecue, adapted for cooking in Canada, said Adam. “The result is we’re still in business after four and a half year. I think that’s worked for us pretty well.”
They have also added a food truck this year, which made twice-weekly appearances in Weyburn by the end of summer, and he plans to continue doing that next year, after making tweaks to how it runs.
