Jaime Sosa is the owner and pit master for Sosa’s Barbecue. This organization has been in business since 2017 and is currently working towards a huge dream with family, friends, hard work, and ambition behind it. Jaime’s mission is to bring good quality smoked barbecue to the Oak Cliff area. His passion for barbeque continues to flourish in this family-oriented business with his younger brother, Josh River Sosa. They are currently taking their mobile smoker across the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex to quality events.
I remember seeing that you grew up in the Oak Cliff area and I was wondering did you inherit the love for barbecue from any family members or were you visiting a lot of barbecue places in Oak Cliff?
Well growing up in a Mexican household family, we all cooked in the family. My grandparents’ brothers were all cooks, which helped influence my love for cooking. But the way I got into barbecue was actually by accident. It was back in 2016 when I was just looking for a job, a friend of mine named Louis Acosta said, “Hey man, I got a job for you,” and I’m like “What is it?” He then mentions that the role would be around barbequing and I decided to take it with limited experience. I started from washing dishes, cutting up onions, prepping, to actually learning how to be a pit master. The way that happened was I was put in charge of the pit mastering work. I would have to come in early, start prepping the meats, and start making up the sides. And then while you were serving that, people fell in love with it, they gave you this look that was like “Oh my God.” There are people who have never tasted quality barbecue, and that was when I fell in love with that. I was like “Dude, like this is so awesome, this is a great feeling. This is something that enlightened me and continued learning the barbecue business, just trying to make it better, trying to perfect it and so on.” And that’s pretty much how I started to get my love for barbecuing.
Are there any common mistakes or things that people don’t work on when it comes to smoking meat? Is there any part of the process where people mess up a lot?
Yeah, even I messed up. Even to this day, every time I do barbecue, I’m still learning something different. To answer your question, when it comes to barbecuing, the number one thing people mess up on is the dryness of the meat. And to this day, there are times when I do mess up a lot. Sometimes we cook brisket that’s not good and we just don’t serve it. I think one of the hardest things was trying to get a piece of thick meat just right. The most difficult item would probably be the brisket. Why? Because it normally takes 18 hours to smoke, and the reason why, in my opinion, it’s one of the hardest is because I mean you’re cooking for 18 hours. Who wants to stay up and watch 18 hours, right? What I believe a lot of people do, they give up. They don’t dedicate the time. The way I like to tell people is that you must respect the meat and you must give it time. You can’t rush this piece of meat and try to have it done or perfect it in a certain amount of time. You must give the respect and the time it needs to cook, and the long wait.
When did the mobile portion start for your business?
I had a little smoker. The smoker I have now is not what I had back in 2017. I had a smaller smoker that I had purchased, and I was trying to do small gigs here and there, and on my days off. We started off in 2017, but we had to cut it and had to stop the business because we had faced adversity and from the adversity, we didn’t know how to handle the next step. We just called it quits, me and a buddy of mine. It wasn’t until the pandemic, around April of 2020 when we were going to go ahead and do the barbecue again. And this time I’m going to dedicate my time and my life into making something happen. That’s when I bought the smoker I have right now, which is an andouille smoker. And we decided to go on from there and we haven’t looked back.
Are there any advantages to the mobile business vs. a brick & mortar?
I feel like having a brick and mortar spot is more of a responsibility with the cost of labor, the cost of utilities, the cost of tax and so on. Having a mobile food truck, you could just get up and go anywhere you like. For us, right now we operate in a mobile set only. But that’s something that we choose not to do in the long run. We choose to have a brick and mortar in the long run, is just right now that’s what we have, and that’s what we got to work with. We’re trying to introduce the people to Sosa’s barbecue, letting the people know who we are and what we can do, especially in the Oak Cliff community. Because I was born in the Oak Cliff area, and obviously there’s going to be more adversity having a brick and mortar spot than versus a mobile food truck.
Are there any upcoming projects you want to dive into?
I definitely want to get involved in these high barbecue competitions that they have going on in Texas, but somehow, I can’t get myself into those competitions because I guess I’m not really big. The name of my barbecue isn’t well-known for me to be invited to these barbecue competitions or just to show up. I guess they want like high names out there to compete in these competitions. But that’s something I want to do, is me and the smoker to go out and do these competitions, to show the people what Sosa’s barbecue can do and that a kid from Oak Cliff can do barbecue too.
