By ROBERT BRUM
Daniel Raiffe has had a busy career as a producer of films and television, but you’ll find his latest production slow-cooking in his Katonah home’s front yard.
That’s where he patiently tends his trailer-mounted, 250-gallon wood-burning Franklin smoker, preparing authentic Texas-style barbecue brisket, ribs and pulled pork.
“It’s not a sprint, it’s a marathon,” Raiffe said of the 12 to 16 hours it takes to prepare an Angus beef brisket with his savory rub, then keep the fire at 225 to 275 degrees to produce the flavor and texture he’s after.
On a recent afternoon, while racks of St. Louis ribs cooked on the smoker, Raiffe cut slices of still-warm brisket on a cutting board.
“When you’re going to pull it off the smoker, you’re really looking for the bottom side of the brisket to get very spongy, like it’s almost ready to fall apart but really not,” he said.
Raiffe’s barbecue pop-up, Bark and Brine BBQ, debuted in August at John Jay Homestead Farm Market, where he’ll be on the market’s last day of the season, Saturday, Oct. 26.
The “bark” in the name refers to the dark crust that forms on barbecued meats; brine is the solution used to soak meats like pastrami before smoking.
The choice of wood is a critical part of the process; a mix of hickory and white oak sourced from Evergreen Nurseries in Katonah is Raiffe’s preferred blend for coaxing the smoky tenderness from his brisket.
Have brisket, will travel
Like other Manhattanites, Raiffe and his family decamped to Katonah when COVID-19 struck in March 2020.
His long-simmering passion for cooking heated up when he purchased a small smoker from Lowe’s and began studying the art of slowly producing the “tang” unique to Texas-style barbecue.
“I really fell down this rabbit hole of learning the process, reading a lot of books on smoking, watching YouTube videos,” he said. A one-day class at Hoodoo Brown BBQ in Ridgefield, Conn., refined his skills.
Raiffe was inspired to turn what was essentially a hobby into a business by the raves he got from friends and family.
“We hosted a big Fourth of July party,” he said, “and I made one brisket and had to make more briskets the next year, more briskets the next year, more ribs the next year, because everyone really loved it.”
And you can include Raiffe’s mother, who lives in Florida, among his devotees.
“For Passover I had to make it and bring it to Miami with us,” he said. “I had to come with a suitcase full of briskets for Passover dinner.”
Bringing people together
Raiffe has a long list of credits in film and television production, including award-winning documentaries, television shows such as “Throwdown! With Bobby Flay,” short films and music videos.
The born-and-raised Floridian has degrees in film from Syracuse University and production from Columbia University. He and his wife, Jaimie Mayer, a theater producer and board chair of a social justice foundation, have two children, a son, Rye, 5, and a daughter, Wren, 2.
Working mostly from home allows Raiffe to balance his job with Manhattan-based Stick Figure Productions with intermittent pitmaster duties.
“There’s a hurry-up-and-wait component to barbecue where you prepare everything and you put it on and then you watch the fire,” he said. “It’s really sort of an art in that sense rather than a science in a very slow way, watching and waiting for it to change over a very long period of time.”
The next step in Bark and Brine’s evolution, Raiffe said, would be to stage pop-up events once or twice a month at a regular location where barbecue aficionados can preorder or purchase whatever he’s cooking that day.
For now, there are no plans to step away from his full-time film production gig. And that’s just fine.
“It still is really a passion project of enjoyment and love,” Raiffe said. “The way food brings people together, it’s a really wonderful thing.”
Bread, wine and barbecue
Raiffe will be bringing Bark and Brine for a one-day pop-up — Brisket and Beaujolais — Sunday, Nov. 3, at LMNOP Bakery, located at 25 Katonah Ave., Katonah. Beverages will be provided by Folkways Wines of Croton Falls.
Jesse Mayhew, who co-owns LMNOP with his wife, Anne, said the event is in keeping with the traditional idea of the bakery as a community space.
“We’ve been friends now for a while, and we decided to take his barbecue and do a little bit more with it,” Mayhew said. “We like barbecue and we like wine and bread, and it all seems to fit nicely together.”