When I first saw a pastrami beef rib on the menu at The Granary in San Antonio, my heart nearly skipped a beat (no blood pressure jokes, please). It was late 2012, and I’d never seen such a thing. Six months later, after I was named the Barbecue Editor, it
Oliver Sitrin is no stranger to pastrami experimentation. During his time as chef at Blind Butcher on Greenville in Dallas, he’s taken his thin-sliced beef pastrami and piled it high on rye (a traditional presentation, to be sure), as well as tucked it into an egg roll. He’s made tender duck pastrami,
The best fried chicken in Dallas is served at a barbecue joint. Any self-respecting pitmaster might cringe when I suggest the fried chicken to prospective customers, but chef and pitmaster Jeffrey Hobbs at the Slow Bone Barbeque in Dallas is plenty proud of his unique smoke-brined
Despite the blasphemous ways they treat their smoked meats, Garcia’s in San Antonio makes a mean barbecue taco. I knew all about their now-famous smoked brisket taco because of its rapid rise in popularity: CNN named it one of the ten best tacos in America; Eater called Garcia’s one of
There’s little room for variety in the smoked beef ribs you find at Texas barbecue joints—salt, black pepper, and smoke are doled out in big doses on impressively large hunks of beef and bone. They make for an imposing sight, and are a far cry from what anyone would consider refined.
The Smokey Denmark barbecue trailer on East Fifth Street in Austin has a new head pitmaster: Keenan Goldis. Goldis recently took over for Bill Dumas (who is now working with Lance Kirkpatrick at Stiles Switch), and he may be a familiar name to anyone who enjoyed his wild creations at
I ate a lot of lamb around the state a few months back, but it’s a protein I had never cooked in my own smoker. Given that the most common cut found at Texas barbecue joints is the bone-in lamb breast, that’s what I went searching for. While the cut isn’t easy to
Kansas City deserves all the credit for one of barbecue’s greatest inventions: the burnt end. These are the crusty ends from the fatty side of the brisket that are cubed into bite-sized morsels. They’re sometimes re-seasoned and/or sauced, then smoked further to get more tender and a bit crunchy
Since delving into a Bubba Tater from Pappas Bar-B-Q in Dallas, I’ve been eating a lot more baked potatoes than normal. It’s been a search for some of the best and most outrageous stuffed potatoes. This is by no means a complete list of the best potatoes
I was eating the third of several courses at a Texas Monthly dinner hosted by Chris Shepherd at Underbelly in Houston. On the family-style platter were meaty ribbons of beef belly (smoked by Ronnie Killen) topped with a chile mostarda. Underneath were bright orange carrots with a black crust. They were
Meat suppliers are always looking for ways to fetch a premium for their cuts of meat. Maybe they just get lucky with something like beef brisket that just gets more popular, but more often they accomplish this by finding different ways to market the cuts they already have or alter the
The Bubba Tater is one of the most daunting dishes to tackle in Texas barbecue, that is if you plan to eat the whole thing. Most joints just list it as a barbecue baked potato, but it usually starts with a russet potato the size of a Nerf football. When
San Antonio chef Tim Rattray visited Dallas last week to be the guest chef at Knife for one in a series of special collaboration dinners benefiting RED*. Throughout the week, Knife’s chef John Tesar invited five chefs including Aaron Franklin of Austin’s Franklin Barbecue and Rattray from
The sausage wrap is underrated. It’s too simple to get much attention, but it deserves more than bottom-of-the-menu status. At its most basic, a sausage wrap is a link of sausage wrapped in a single slice of white bread. You can call it a wrap, a roll-up, fold-over, or sandwich.
Making sausage ain’t easy. There’s the trimming, grinding, seasoning, stuffing, and then the smoking. For barbecue joints, buying a few boxes of cheap sausage from your food distributor is a tempting prospect when compared to the hours required to make your own. But Texas is a place where smoked sausages are a
It was Valentine’s Day, and some neighbors – who have also been married long enough to stay away from restaurants on the 14th – agreed to join us for dinner. I picked up a couple racks of beef ribs and had planned to smoke them indirectly. After too many dinosaur rides
Joshua and Paige Kaner opened Pieous in early 2013. They took over an old Cartwright’s BBQ building southwest of Austin on Highway 290. The plan was always to cook with fire, so a custom wood-fired oven was installed to cook the pizzas. A rotisserie smoker was left behind
Barbecue and pizza are two items that usually don’t join forces on a restaurant menu, but in the East Texas town of Daingerfield they’ve come together at Fran’s Barbeque and Pizza since 1971. Fran’s is named for Frances Neely. She was married to Dick Neely, and worked at
The Rabrokers have been selling their family recipe German sausage out of Westphalia Market since 1963. The tiny town of Westphalia sits between Zabcikville and Lott on Highway 320 (about twenty minutes east of Temple), and the market is a great reason to take a detour. They make several kinds
Nothing about this bungalow with a French name screamed smoked meat. Well manicured ivy enveloped the Épicerie sign out front, and the interior looked more like a wine and cheese bar, but the menu had a different message. Smoked house made boudin and beef pastrami, a smoked goat sandwich special,
When Jack Perkins opened the Slow Bone in Dallas last year, it was with a standard barbecue menu. Since then he’s been tinkering with ways to use up leftover meat. Perkins doesn’t want to serve you yesterday’s ribs, but throwing them out would be bad business sense, not
As one third of the Texas barbecue trinity, smoked sausage has important stature in Texas. Central Texas has its beef sausages, East Texas has got hot links, and you’ll find plenty of smoked boudin along the Louisiana border. In Houston, they have it all as J.C. Reid and Michael Fulmer
Smoke has become a popular new ingredient in all kinds of cuisine outside of the barbecue realm. Chef Richard Gras of Oak in Dallas is pushing those limits. He is smoking pasta. Well, technically he is smoking flour over mesquite chunks, then using that flour for his house
When you think of smoked salmon, it might be thin slices of rosy meat that come to mind. That’s the smoked salmon common on deli menus or vacuum-packed on a grocery store shelf which is generally a cured and cold-smoked product. Jon Alexis at TJ’s Seafood Market in
In the video above, chef John Tesar of Spoon in Dallas raises the smoked-filled glass dome to reveal one of his signature dishes. It’s a headcheese made of apple wood smoked sturgeon. The presentation is dramatic, but the that’s only the beginning. The smokiness of the fish is deep. It
Schlenkerla in Bamberg, Germany makes what is probably the most famous smoked beer, or rauchbier, in the world. Recently they started selling it in the US, so I was able to get a bottle at my local Spec’s. On the same shelf was another rauchbier, but it came
Hans Peter Muller is a second generation baker. His father came over from Switzerland and started the Swiss Pastry Shop in 1973. While Hans is a great baker and I’ve enjoyed every pie and cake he can dish out, he also has a passion for barbecue. He runs
The sausage section at our local Kroger is well-stocked with dozens of sausages. Several weeks back my wife brought home a gift of the latest option: Nolan Ryan Beef Brisket Sausage. It was introduced to Kroger shelves back in July, and as Nolan Ryan Beef CEO Charlie Bradbury
Southwest of Austin is a farmhouse brewery called Jester King. They make unconventional beers with unique names and sometimes sinister looking labels. It’s considered a farmhouse brewery because they allow their beer to take in wild yeasts floating in the air during the brewing process. Their facility also looks a
Paula Lambert has been making cheese at the Mozzarella Company in the Deep Ellum neighborhood of Dallas since 1982. The store/factory produces a wide variety of cheeses, but mozzarella is the flagship as the name suggests. After mastering fresh mozzarella Paula started smoking it. The smoked
As a companion to this week’s column on beef back ribs and last week’s on beef short ribs, here is a list of barbecue joints offering beef ribs in Texas:Beef Short Ribs:3 Stacks Smoke and Tap House, FriscoBlack’s BBQ, LockhartBlue Ox BBQ, AustinCattleack BBQ, CarrolltonCooper’s, Llano, New Braunfels
Easy Tiger in Austin is many things. A bakery and coffee shop, a beer garden, and table tennis tournament grounds. They also have a great food menu with homemade sausages and sandwiches. The most impressive might be the pastrami sandwich. The slices of cured smoked meat
I sat down with a panel of beer drinkers to sample a smoked beer made in Texas. Ranger Creek in San Antonio makes a Mesquite Smoked Porter. According to their description it is “brewed with a Texas twist, using malt smoked in-house over Texas mesquite.” This is made
