Crosdales BBQ wins Oustanding New Business at Hawkesbury Local Business Awards

American barbecue is as ‘on trend’ in Australia now as Asian dumplings and sushi were a decade ago, and one Hawkesbury business is pulling out all the stops to bring the juicy meaty goodness to our bellies.

“Our cooker is about 900 kilograms,” said 31-year-old Russell Crosdale of Crosdales BBQ, who has converted both the shed and the backyard of his childhood home in Glossodia into a smokey outdoor kitchen (dry goods live in the shed).

The beast of a bbq, a Radar Hill creation which set Russ back around $10,000 (he burns through $500 worth of wood per month, loading it every 35-40 minutes for up to 16 hours), lives on a special concreted area outside.

“That’s what we cook on. We use wood fire, so we don’t put the cooker inside because of the chimney on it,” he said.

The colossal contraption is a reverse flow offset smoker that operates with a fire box at one end that generates heat which travels along the bbq and back through a chamber to exit the chimney on the same side as the fire.

“It’s the kind of cooker I learnt to cook on,” said Russ.

Russ actually learnt to cook while living in Canada a few years back, working at Hank Daddy's BBQ in Toronto and cooking up slow-smoked traditional southern barbecue.

Following a trip to the US where he fell in love with their approach to barbecuing, Russ had wanted to live and work in America but, alas, he couldn’t get a visa.

Canada provided the next best thing, allowing him to travel to and from Texas where he ended up cooking in a number of establishments.

The style - sometimes dubbed Low n’ Slow - is how Russ still cooks today at Crosdales BBQ.

Russ does the cooking, his girlfriend Kailey organises events, his best mate Adam is his right-hand man, Michael runs the front section at events, and Russ’s parents run the operations, including deliveries and bookkeeping.

Craig from Munro’s Quality Meats in Wilberforce - an old mate of Russ’s from Hawkesbury High School - supplies the meat. (During Winterfest Sydney Medieval Fair at Hawkesbury Showground in July, they went through 700 kilograms of beef in only two days.)

“I can start cooking anywhere from 6pm the night before until 2am the morning of an event,” said Russ.

“Everything is cooked fresh, and we work backwards - so if [a client] wants dinner at 7pm, we start cooking at 2am. We don’t reheat or pre-cook anything.”

Crosdales BBQ does weddings, festivals, markets and pop-ups, as well as other special events. The entire team also works Monday to Friday doing day jobs; Russ works in appliances and outdoor living, selling bbqs.

“So basically all I do is bbqs!” he laughed.

He claims to run on very little sleep and drink a lot of Red Bull - especially when he’s cooking on the weekends, and he’s booked up almost every weekend until January next year.

“We try to be as authentic as possible. We love American barbecue and lifestyle, and we want to bring that feeling and vibe to people’s backyards,” Russ said.

So, what’s on the menu? “We don’t try to do anything different, we don’t try to do an Australian twist on it - we try to stay as true as we can to traditional American barbecue. We stick to basically the same menu as they do, and make it as authentic as we can using local ingredients.

“Our catchphrase is, ‘Bringing Texas to the table’.”

Meat is seasoned using mostly just salt and pepper. “We don’t use complicated rubs and we don’t sauce a lot of things. We’re just about bringing people together through the love of barbecue - that’s what was taught to me and that’s what we try to teach people who we cater for here.”

Their most popular dish is beef brisket - the front portion of the chest of the cow.

“It’s a big piece, ranging from 6 kilograms to 10-11 kilograms, depending on the beef that supplies it. That takes us anywhere upwards of 12 hours to cook,” Russ said.

“We wrap it in butcher’s paper half way through and continue to smoke it until we know it’s ready. We’ve cooked thousands of briskets now and we can tell by feel when it’s ready.”

Their signature side is brisket and beans: baked beans with brisket pieces and candy bacon, smoked for three hours.

They also do bacon and blue cheese with grilled potatoes, using baby red potatoes smoked and mixed with candy bacon.

The next local event for the crew is the Rainbow Festival at Rouse Hill House & Farm on Saturday, September 29, followed by a Hawkesbury wedding the next weekend.

Just last week, Crosdales BBQ was named winner of the Outstanding New Business category of the Local Business Awards.

“It just proved that what we’re doing, people enjoy. That’s why we do it. To win an award like that, it gives us the passion to keep going,” Russ said.

“The fact I moved overseas to cook barbecue, and I was working in minus 30 and 40 degrees in Canada - which was an experience! - but it just proves that people appreciate it and we’ll keep doing it because people love it and we love it.

“We don’t need to do this, because we all work Mondays to Fridays, but we do it for people’s reactions and to bring authenticity to American barbecue in Australia and so people can have this kind of food without moving to the US.”