On social media he’s known as GoBlueBBQ. I know him as Joe, a Michigan football fan, barbecue aficionado, and all around good guy.
Beyond being a good friend, Joe has been instrumental in my barbecue growth over the past few years, so I wanted to put him in the spotlight to share how he got into barbecue, what he loves and hates to cook, and how he went from tyring to impress his girlfriend by lifting weights to a barbecue influencer with over 10,000 followers.
Travel back in time with me to 2002 when Michigan football was still good and barbecue wasn’t nearly the lifestyle that it is now. Joe had grown up in Michigan and cooked pizza and cookies with his mom and grandma as a kid, but didn’t set out to become a cook — until that fateful day in 2002, that is.
Joe had moved to Texas with his step dad in 1987 and graduated from Plano East High School. While he wanted to move back to Michigan, it wasn’t in the cards and he has been a Texan ever since. Still, it took a while to catch the barbecue bug.
“Just like all things that get a guy to do something, it was a girl, right?” Joe said.
He had moved in with her and was working out with her one day in her indoor gym. Trying to impress her by lifting heavy weights didn’t work, and so he told her he was going to cook dinner. She suggested beer can chicken, something he had never made before, but he did it anyway on a little Weber Kettle she had in her backyard.
“I cooked it and as I’m standing there drinking a beer over the Weber, the girlfriend goes, ‘Wow, that’s sexy,'” Joe recalled. “I asked what and she said, ‘A man cooking on the grill.’ I was like, ‘Hold up. We just got done working out, I was in a tank top — and this was back when I was in shape — and I was doing lifts to try to accentuate the arms and shoulders and I didn’t even get a second look, but this is what’s sexy?’ and she said yep. So I was like, ‘Well this is way easier than working out!'”
It was the boost that Joe needed to dive into barbecue. He started watching cooking shows, bought a cheap $50 smoker at a garage sale, and started cooking every chance he got. Like so many pitmasters before him, Joe began cooking as a hobby for friends and family and his love of it and talent for it grew.
“Every weekend that was my hobby, just basically cooking out and inviting friends over and trying stuff,” Joe explained. “They were my guinea pigs for years. Then you start to build friendships through barbecue and people start inviting you over to cook at their house, then catering and social media and things like that kind of took off.”
From that $50 smoker, Joe saved some money to buy a Masterbuilt Electric Smoker from Bass Pro Shops, but that made it too easy, he says. He wanted to learn the science behind smoking meat, so he started going to cooking classes. The guy running the class recommended a Weber Smokey Mountain, so Joe saved up again and bought one on Amazon a month later.
It’s a story as old as time: guy gets the barbecue bug and buys a smoker, then buys another one and still isn’t content, so he buys another one. That’s just what Joe did.
“After I had the Weber Smokey Mountain for a couple years, I said, well, I’ve got an extra two feet on my patio, I can probably fit another smoker on here, so I got a Big Green Egg.”
He also got a Kamado Joe, but decided he needed something bigger for competitions, catering, and tailgates, so he commissioned El Ray Smokers to build him a pull-behind smoker trailer with a custom Michigan winged helmet paint scheme.
While attending cooking classes at Premier Grilling in Frisco, Joe started helping out, and one day the teacher didn’t show up so the guy in charge asked Joe in front of the rest of the class if he wanted to teach it and he took it.
“Basically, it just kind of started with, ‘Hey, you want to help out?’ You’re knowledgeable about this, so if you wouldn’t mind helping’ and that transitioned into, ‘Hey, you want to run a class?'” Joe said.
He taught master classes at Premier for over a year, teaching recipes from breakfast fatties to braided pork belly tacos, over the top chili, and more, and it is the response he gets from students and others who try his food that keeps him going.
“You could cook a brisket for, say, 16 hours and let it rest for six, and if someone takes a bite of the brisket and smiles and says, ‘Oh man, this is absolutely fantastic,’ that just made the whole 24 hours worth it,” Joe said. “That smile and that reaction — that’s why I do it. I like the process, I like the relaxation of sitting around the pit, having a couple of beers with friends, but when people say, ‘Man, that was some of the best barbecue I’ve ever had’, that’s what makes it worthwhile.”
It’s also the people you meet, and every barbecuer needs both influencers and counterparts to bounce ideas off of. Joe credits Meat Church’s Matt Pittman, Melissa Reome (aka Grill Momma), and Matt Eads (aka Grillseeker) as a few of the industry friends and people who have been influential to him in one way or another.
On the competition circuit, Joe was part of the 2016 Big Green Eggfest national championship winning team along with Chris Gentry of Gentry’s BBQ, Jack Arnold, Craig Tabor (aka Big Green Craig), Blake Carson of Carson Rodizio, among others. They won with an Elvis-inspired dish that included a grilled banana wrapped in cookie dough, dipped in batter, and deep fried, then covered in candied pork belly and drizzled with a peanut butter bourbon glaze.
He has since graduated from competing in Eggfests to teaching at them. For the past two years, Joe was a celebrity chef at the Grill on the Hill Eggfest at Treetops Resort in Gaylord, Mich. There, he taught attendees how to make braided pork belly, smoked bologna, and more.
All of that experience and notoriety has helped Joe land gigs such as catering the University of Michigan basketball alumni weekend in 2019. He was scheduled to return again this summer but the event was canceled due to Covid-19.
He was also brought in to cater a tailgate prior to the Michigan-Notre Dame football game last fall for a large group of Michigan alumni. There, he and his team served around 300 people despite a monsoon that came down all afternoon.
So what is Joe’s favorite thing to cook? Well, it depends on the day, but right now he’s enjoying tablitas, which are cross-cut beef short ribs, also known as flanken ribs that are popular in Korean cooking. He also loves doing pork belly, tri-tip, and picanha.
If you’re not following him already, give Joe a follow on Instagram. Just don’t ask him to make bacon wrapped stuffed jalapeños.
“Down here they’re called ABTs — atomic buffalo turds. When I started out I made those every single time I fired up a smoker for like two years,” Joe said. “There’s a lot of work involved in them. Take out the seeds, you have to bake the bacon strips, a piece might not be long enough so you have to cut another. I’ll eat them all day long but I’m sick of making them.”
