Man Fire Food

Roger Mooking helps two Louisiana chefs prepare smoked meat for their classic Cajun dishes. He pitches in to season and smoke a whole hog for a New Orleans restaurant, and then he helps fill an outdoor smokehouse in Ville Platte.

Roger Mooking drops in at two backyard cookouts: a spectacular seafood feast cooked over a live fire in Louisiana and a hearty spread of smoked ribs and crispy fried fish in California.

From live-fire cooking to low-and-slow barbecue, Roger Mooking meets with two couples making fiery feasts in California. He helps hang legs of lamb, cook vegetables on a plancha and season lamb shoulders for sandwiches.

Roger Mooking visits the Louisiana bayou for barbecue, brunch and a crawfish boil. He meets with local caterers to prepare baby back ribs, brisket and 200 pounds of live crawfish before helping with barbecue breakfast sandwiches.

Roger Mooking is in Lockhart, Texas, to meet the team responsible for designing and crafting a monster rig that offers seven different cooking contraptions.

Roger Mooking finds two chefs in Texas who are pushing the boundaries of whole hog barbecue. He helps smoke the meat for Carolina-style sandwiches in Austin and stuffs a hog with spicy sausage for a stew in San Antonio.

Roger Mooking visits two TX pitmasters adding global flavors to smoked beef. He helps season and smoke meats for short rib tamales with brisket chili in Pearland, TX, and then helps make brisket pho and beef rib nigiri in Houston.

Roger Mooking meets up with two chefs in Texas who are cooking with unique rigs. In Fort Worth, he helps slow-roast whole hogs and make cobbler crisps, and he loads pork butts and chicken thighs on spits for tacos in Houston.

Roger Mooking meets up with a few culinary titans with outrageous rigs in Tennessee. He hangs meat, fish and veggies on a rig with Chef Trey Cioccia and checks out a converted swing set rig with the Porter Road butchers.

Roger Mooking heads to the South to visit two family-run barbecue joints: Smokin' Joe's Bar-B-Que in Townsend, TN, and Shack in the Back BBQ in Fairdale, KY.

At A&R Bar-B-Que in Memphis, Roger helps load racks of St. Louis-style ribs and learns how to make Barbecue Spaghetti. In Lexington, NC, he tries the smoked pork sandwich and four-pound banana split at Bar-B-Q Center.

Roger Mooking joins NC pitmaster Christopher Prieto to season and smoke a whole hog. Then he fires up the latest contraption from VA's Tuffy Stone, and they hang whole spiced and buttered chickens.

The smoke signals of fiery feasts lure Roger Mooking to the Southwest, where he loads more than 300 pounds of pork in a brick pit in Arizona. Then he loads spice-rubbed legs of lamb and more on a rig in Las Vegas.