California is known for a lot of things—sunshine, wine, earthquakes—but its barbecue scene isn’t one of them. Which isn’t to say they don’t have it at all. There are, of course, the smattering of “Texas-style” and “Louisville-style” and all the other ex-patriate homages to various barbecue iterations. But California has
Before brisket dominated Texas barbecue, meat markets served a vast variety of smoked beef cuts. The old-school meat markets of Central Texas would smoke anything left in the case too long, most often cuts from the forequarter, like shoulder clod or beef chuck. In the Dallas area during the forties and
When it comes time to fire up the smoker on Memorial Day . . . wait, let’s consider you, the average cook. You probably don’t own a smoker; you probably just own a grill. And perhaps those new summer issues of the glossy food magazines have convinced you that you can turn it into a
Pastrami is to New York City like smoked brisket is to Lockhart, Texas: they are the signature smoked meats of their respective cities, and both lay claim to being the originator. Black’s BBQ has said in the past that they were the first to put brisket on the menu in Texas. They were
Sausage. It’s one of the signatures of our state’s barbecue style, but the time intensive process of grinding, stuffing, and smoking sausage fell out of favor when barbecue left the meat market. With the rise of commercial sausage makers, many barbecue joints were (and are) happy to purchase their sausage
With the rise of review sites like Yelp and the ascent of food blogging, restaurants are scrutinized more than ever. Traditional restaurateurs have long understood the power of a negative review, but concern with the critics was rarely something that barbecue joints worried themselves with. But the barbecue zeitgeist—which I recognize that I,
We love our beef in Texas, and historically, the rest of the nation did too. According to numbers from the USDA, beef and pork battled for protein supremacy until about 1950, when beef took a clear lead for the next six decades. Today, with falling beef consumption and the surging popularity
On January 18, 1910, a newspaper advertisement for Watson’s Grocery included “Smoked Brisket Beef” for thirty cents per pound. It’s the earliest advertisement for smoked brisket that I have found in Texas, and it was in El Paso. With such a long history of smoking briskets you’d think they would
Bad brisket is nothing new on the barbecue trail, but there are some days when you just can’t catch a break—or, as was the case for me recently, two consecutive days where I searched high and low for a good slice of smoked beef in Beaumont and Southeast Texas.It began in
If you live on the outskirts of Austin, your suburb might be the new target for barbecue joints looking to open in Travis County. That is if prospective restaurateurs see a new resolution from the Austin City Council as too onerous. It requires that barbecue smokers (and other wood-fired cooking devices)
Barbecue pulls at a traditionalist’s heart strings like few other cuisines, but it is no stranger to innovation. An offset smoker filled with brisket bathed on oak smoke has only been common across the state for about fifty years, but introducing science into a cooking process so reliant on
There’s hardly a better way to discover a slice of Texas, so to speak, than with a barbecue road trip—especially one that takes you outside of the city borders. In Central Texas, Austin is undeniably the area’s greatest barbecue city, and its proximity to some of the state’s greatest smoked meats make
If you follow barbecue news (and I’m going to assume you do if you read TMBBQ.com), you’re going to hear a lot more about barbecue in Alabama in the coming months. Or at least that’s the goal of the Alabama Tourism Department, which launched its Year of Alabama
Barbecue’s reputation in the culinary world has turned a corner. Last week the nominations for the New York based James Beard Foundation’s annual awards were announced, and a pitmaster was among the names that were otherwise a roll call of haute cuisine. Under the heading “Best Chef: Southwest”
Brisket may dominate barbecue menus in Texas today, but nearly a century ago, a Dallas institution built its mighty restaurant empire on a simple Tennessee-style barbecued-pork sandwich: the “Pig Sandwich.” Perhaps some already know that I’m referring to the signature item served at the Pig Stand, a Dallas-based chain that formed
No matter how much barbecue I’ve consumed (typically five times the recommended daily allowance), it always feels like there’s room left for something sweet. A bowl of peach cobbler or a slice of buttermilk pie offer comfort, but their recipes don’t really vary much from one end of the state
If you’ve spent any time on the interstates of Texas, you’ve probably seen barbecue restaurants advertised on numerous billboards, blue service signs, or obnoxiously huge structures situated along the access road. Who among hasn’t seen one of those logos and thought, is the food worth stopping for? If a place needs that
Last week, seasoned pitmasters and aspiring barbecue cooks descended on tiny Murphysboro, Illinois, for the fourth annual Whole Hog Extravaganza and Brisket Bonanza. The students had paid good money to learn the secrets of the professionals, and the teachers weren’t shy about sharing their recipes for porchetta, whole hog, beef
Later today, after the inauguration of Greg Abbott as the forty-eighth governor of Texas, 17,000 hungry ticket holders clamoring for food will line up for lunch on the Capitol grounds in Austin. Forty-five minutes later, they’ll all have a full plate of barbecue. At least that’s what mega-caterer Eddie Deen has
Houston Wright cut meat, made sausage, and cooked barbecue at Kreuz Market in Lockhart for sixty years. He was tying sausage there before the brick building that housed the market (and is now home to Smitty’s Market) was built in 1924. He was deaf and mute by then—former Kreuz Market
That beef is more expensive than it was a year ago is no surprise, and this trend doesn’t look to be easing up anytime soon. As David Anderson, a Texas A&M professor of ag economics, told a room full of barbecue joint owners last month at the university’s first-ever Barbecue Town Hall,
In a Dallas city directory from 1948, there is a listing for Hardeman’s Barbecue. In fact there were two at the time, both of which were located in what was known as Freedman’s Town. It was a segregated African-American neighborhood just north of downtown in what
Can the beef industry sustain it?
Conventional wisdom holds that traditional Texas barbecue doesn’t need to be sauced. That Texans have an aversion to the stuff. Case in point? A recent primer on national barbecue styles in America on Eater noted that “while the rest of the nation is busy making barbecue sauces, many
The popularity of Texas barbecue—and specifically Texas-style smoked brisket—has launched a frenzy of new activity. New joints pop up all the time, and relatively new pitmasters are hailed as masters of craft. Many of these places and people are deserving of considerable attention and high praise, but we shouldn’t lose sight of what
Texas seems to export our barbecue styles as far and wide as our natural gas. Earlier this year I noted how often the aesthetic of meat on butcher paper, a decidedly Texas design is imitated on both coasts (and a few places in between). But as anyone who has
Patience. Not only is it a virtue, it’s the key to good brisket. No meat in barbecue suffers more when it’s subjected to the foolish habits of the impatient pitmaster: cranking the heat too high in the smoker; obsessively opening and closing the lid to check on the smoker’s contents; or just taking the
The only thing easy about the restaurant business is failure. For every five new restaurants that open in the U.S. this week, three will be gone within three years. That’s a sixty percent failure rate, and my guess is that it’s even higher with barbecue joints. In barbecue, the waste
Bacon is more popular than ever; cooking with lard is no longer taboo; and lardo—cured pork back fat—is a luxury item on charcuterie plates around the country. America is slowly rediscovering its love of pork fat, and yet good, fatty pork is still hard to come by.It all started back in 1977
If you’re a Texan looking to expand your barbecue literacy with a trip to the Missouri/Kansas border, be warned that the brisket you order will not resemble the beautifully carved, thick, juicy slices of black crusted beef you’ve come to expect in Texas. Rather, an order of brisket in KC
Last week I spent some time in West Texas eating barbecue. I’ve done a few tours through the area already, so I know not to get excited when I see “German sausage” on a menu, but I had a temporary memory lapse. The prospect of finding a coarsely ground and smoky beef
If you’ve spent any time on the interstates of Texas, you’ve probably seen barbecue restaurants advertised on numerous billboards, blue service signs, or obnoxiously huge structures situated along the access road. Who among hasn’t seen one of those logos and thought, is the food worth stopping for? If a place needs that
Another fast food giant is dragging the good name of barbecue through the sauce. Late last week, Wendy’s announced their new line of pulled pork menu items: the predictable pulled pork sandwich with slaw; a pulled pork-topped burger; and pulled pork cheese fries—all served with your choice of three barbecue sauces.
In a state currently obsessed with brisket, the lean side appears to be always the bridesmaid. The bride, of course, is the fatty stuff. (As the tired saying goes, “fat is where it’s at.”) Further evidence of this love for adipose was on full display in a recent article for Maxim magazine,
“There is no one definitive way to make Memphis barbecue.” So says Craig David Meek, author of Memphis Barbecue: A Succulent History of Smoke, Sauce & Soul. After a four day tour through the River City, I must agree with him.Those who
If you’ve eaten barbecue in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, there’s a good chance you’ve eaten it at Sonny Bryan’s Smokehouse. For more than a century, four generations of Bryans have operated barbecue restaurants, eventually creating a national franchise that’s now nine strong (eight in DFW and one in Utah). Their saturation in the market
You’d think finding good barbecued goat in the Texas Hill Country wouldn’t be so difficult. This area has been the U.S. epicenter of sheep and goat ranching since the nineteenth century when wool and mohair (wool from goats) production took a foothold. Herds expanded greatly in the twentieth century, and while numbers have fallen in this
This past Sunday, three tons of sausage and brisket were consumed at the 132nd St. Louis Day Celebration in Castroville, Texas. It was part of an annual event the town hosts to mark the feast of Saint Louis, a celebration that has has been dubbed “The Homecoming of the State of Texas.” The community
If you’ve spent any time on the interstates of Texas, you’ve probably seen barbecue restaurants advertised on numerous billboards, blue service signs, or obnoxiously huge structures situated along the access road. Who among hasn’t seen one of those logos and thought, is the food worth stopping for? If a place needs that
Texas-style barbecue seems to be taking over the world, and that doesn’t just mean you can find smoked brisket on the menu in Seattle and New York. There’s an aesthetic to presentation that has permeated these places deeper than post-oak smoke has seeped into Louie Mueller’s walls. Places across the country
Last week we took you to Tioga, Texas, where Warren Clark developed a three-day smoked brisket recipe that is still served at Clark’s Outpost, the restaurant he founded decades ago. His method was borne from his earlier days using a traditional smokehouse in Arkansas, where cooking time was measured in days.
Smoking brisket takes time—sixteen, eighteen, even twenty hours. These cooking times get thrown around with a little pride, but none of the braggarts can top the hours a brisket spends in the smoker at Clark’s Outpost in Tioga. I’m talking more time in the smoker than Jesus spent in the tomb. It takes
The formation of Operation BBQ Relief, the only nationwide barbecue charity, began with a phone call. On Monday, May 23, 2011, the day after the massive tornados in Joplin, Missouri, Stan Hays called his barbecue buddy Jeff Stith. Hays, who was walking to his office at the Farmers Insurance building near Kansas City,
Texas smoked brisket—especially the good stuff—can be addictive. That’s what President Obama learned last week. After eating John Mueller’s beef ribs for dinner during his stop in Dallas on Wednesday, the President took a whole brisket with him for the ride on Air Force One to Austin. I just can just imagine Obama
When you ask people to name the five “tastes,” the average person typically has an easy enough time naming four: sweet, salty, sour, and bitter. It’s the fifth–umami–that’s a bit more elusive. The concept of umami has been around for more than a century, but it was largely unheard of until the Wall Street
As I’ve talked about before, smoked brisket wasn’t always the cornerstone of Texas barbecue. Before the beef purveyor IBP started shipping individual cuts to meat markets, these establishments (if they smoked meats at all) were cooking the entire beef forequarter. This meant they were smoking both the cuts familiar to us
Austin County has served as the cradle for German Texans since 1831 when Friedrich Ernst founded the town of Industry. It was the first permanent German settlement in Texas, and Ernst became a huge promoter of Texas through his letters back to his home country. His home also became
During the nineteenth century public barbecues in Texas, you were likely to find a whole calf, goat, or lamb roasting for the crowd. But it was more likely that you’d find a whole hog. Hogs were prevalent in the eastern part of the state, which made them easier to come by,
A barbecue sauce specific to North Texas.
In the middle of this Wednesday’s lunch hour nearly 16,000 people were watching a brisket smoke in real time on YouTube. Arby’s was re-airing their record-breaking thirteen-hour commercial that was first shown on a single television station in Duluth, Minnesota, over the Memorial Day weekend. They were promoting their
