Hey there! Welcome back to the travel blog for my BBQ pilgrimage to Austin, Texas.
In my first post, I talked about what inspired this whole trip — my love for Texas-style barbecue. The more I thought about it, the more I thought that some readers may have no idea what that means and what's the difference in barbecue styles. Some might even think it just means brisket, and while brisket is one of the marks of Texas barbecue, it is also much more than that.
Even if you know some of the differences, you may also be curious as to why I have become so interested in it. I mean, me, the guy who never really wanted anything to do with Texas, now a lover of one of their defining cultural past times. What is it that's got me so passionate about it?
I thought this would be a good time to tell you all about the style and how I came to love it.
I have to start with a couple of caveats, of course. Within each region of barbecue, there are variations within it. So there is North Carolina barbecue, but there is also eastern and wester style North Carolina barbecue. In the same way, I've learned that "Texas-style barbecue" can actually be subdivided to east, central and west Texas-style barbecue. Just for shorthand, what I call Texas-style is really closest to central Texas-style barbecue.
Secondly, this is my best understanding of what Texas/central Texas-style barbecue is, as shared with me by some of the best barbecuers in central Texas. I've learned there's a great degree of variation even within the region. So just in case you are an expert on Texas barbecue and you think this is all completely wrong, just know this is all to the best of my knowledge!
What is Texas-style BBQ?
To me, barbecue boils down to a few basic factors:
The meat you cook
The wood you use
The seasoning
The sauce
The pit
Pretty much all of these variables are based on whatever was historically easily available in each region. For example, Carolina barbecue features a lot of pork as pigs were readily available.
Some factors simply come down to preference. To use the Carolinas again, North Carolina is split up into eastern and western styles. In the east, they favor a vinegar-based sauce, which is thin and tangy, without any tomato. Western style, however, is a sweet, tomato-based sauce.
So what defines Texas barbecue?
Beef is King
Cattle thrive in Texas. As Robert Caro describes it in his biography of Lyndon Johnson, cattle were literally roaming free around the countryside. The early U.S. settlers in the region could claim the cows for free, and some made quick fortunes driving cattle to the north, where they could sell them for 400% of what they might have paid for them. For reasons God or any cattle rancher could tell you, cows thrive in the dry countryside of Texas.
If beef is king, then brisket is the king of kings for Texas barbecue. Brisket is a cut of meat from the front chest of the cow.
The cut is actually two muscles that converge together. The first is known as the "point," and it is the thicker and fattier end of the brisket cut. It has fat running throughout, and has a ribbon of fat that runs through the middle of it. The second is known as the "flat," and it is thinner, with a layer of fat that runs on top of a thicker portion of muscle.
Brisket is a perfect cut of meat for barbecue. Barbecue is the art of taking cuts of meat that would otherwise be too tough or unusable for eating, and turning them into almost a delicacy. The brisket cut is a large, tough cut of meat that can't really be consumed unless it it is cooked low and slow to tender perfection, or it can be ground up into burger meat. It has a great amount of fat content, which can be slowly rendered down to make the meat incredibly tender, juicy and delicious.
Plenty of other cuts of meat from the cow make for great barbecue as well, and for similar reasons. Things like the chuck roast, beef cheeks and oxtail may not be appealing otherwise. But seasoned properly and cooked at a low temperature for a long time, and those muscle fibers start breaking down into a juicy and wonderful bite of beef.
Post Oak Wood
In the same way that certain regions barbecue the meats readily available to them, they also use the wood that is plentiful in the region. It makes sense if you think about it. In a world pre-mass transit and pre-national supply chain, you just use whatever was around you, rather than having supplies from other areas of the country shipped to you.
Barbecue typically involves using wood to impart a smokey flavor onto the meat. Smoke woods generally fall into two categories. There are sweeter woods: cherry, maple, apple. Then there are the heartier woods, like mesquite, hickory, pecan and oak. As you can imagine, the sweeter woods pair well with things like bacon and pork belly.
In central Texas, might oak trees are plentiful from the hill country all the way to Austin. Post oak wood is great for beef, as it imparts a mild to medium smokey flavor, without overpowering the meat. It is also made to burn slow and long, which is again great for beef cuts that need many hours to cook.
(This, by the way, is one of the major differences in the three regions of Texas bbq. One uses post oak, the other mesquite and another hickory. But again, this is getting really into the weeds!)
K.I.S.S. (Keep It Simple Seasoning)
In a lot of ways, everything flows from the meat. That's especially true of the seasoning. Pork, for example, has a sweet taste, so it lends itself to sweeter seasonings, like brown sugar.
A lot of barbecue seasoning includes a number of ingredients in differing proportions: salt, pepper, brown sugar, garlic powder, onion powder, paprika, cayenne and even different kinds of chili powders. This can give the meat a deliciously complex and nuanced flavor profile.
That's not needed for beef, however. Beef only needs a few simple seasoning to make the flavor really shine.
Beef lends itself to a very savory flavor profile. Pepper, especially, is the ingredient of choice. Some of the Texas barbecuers I've seen use only salt and pepper — that's it. Kosher salt, heavy course ground pepper, maybe some garlic. That's really all you need for a good Texas rub.
The Sauce (We don't need no stinkin sauce!)
As mentioned above, in some barbecue regions, the sauce is what defines the barbecue. The Carolinas, Kansas City, Memphis — these are regions where the sauce is really what makes their barbecue different.
My mantra is "Good barbecue doesn't need sauce." I picked it up from my experience watching Texas barbecuers. In this broad, arid country, it kind of makes sense that the flavor comes from dried spices, rather than runny sauces.
I've seen some use things like apple cider vinegar or brown sugar to help enhance the meat in the cooking process. But to the best of my knowledge, there is not a particular style of Texas barbecue sauce. And if there is, the focus is certainly much more heavy on the meat, the fire and the seasoning.
This bears true in my experience with Texas barbecue so far. Everywhere we've gone, they've had INCREDIBLE sauces. But none of the meat we've had has needed it for flavor or moisture. It's simply a bonus to add a little kick to an already delicious plate.
The Pit
The last piece to the puzzle is how you cook the meat. You might not know it but there are dozens of ways to barbecue meat. There are barrel-style pits, direct-heat pits and pellet smokers. There's even a South American-style of cooking where you build a fire and just put the meat on a giant skewer that you plant in the ground next to it, angled towards the fire.
In Texas, the pit of choice in most cases is the offset smoker. For this kind of pit, wood is burned in a chamber called the firebox, which then funnels into the cooking chamber connected to it. In this way, convective heat flows into the chamber and smoke wafts over the meat on its way out through the smokestack.
If you want to dive deeper into the history of Texas barbecue and how the offset smoker came to be the staple pit, Texas Monthly has a great article for that.
And barbecue joints around here don't just have a couple of backyard, offset smokers like you see at Home Depot. They usually custom build these massive smokers out of 1,000 gallon propane tanks to handle the massive amounts of meat they will cook each day.
Why Texas Barbecue?
I think it's a little bit easier for me to explain in person, but I will try.
I started my journey of learning how to barbecue. And like many humans, I got caught up with the shiny things. I watched pitmasters whip up their own spice rubs, using fifteen different ingredients. I saw them whip up their own homemade sauces, too, and with another 15-20 ingredients. I tried my hand at their recipes as well.
Every time I tried, something would be off. And because there were so many variables — the fire, the cooking of the meat, the seasoning and the sauce — I could never quite tell what part of the process was off.
Besides that, I never could quite nail the flavor profile I was looking for. I love the combo of really spicy and really sweet. So I started off trying to nail that, with absolutely zero luck. With barbecue, sometimes you really have to double and triple down on those kinds of extreme flavors if you want to taste them in the end.
Suffice it to say, I tried so many flavor profiles and found them wanting.
I have to admit that I was partially spurred on by my pitmaster friend at the time. He came over to grill some spare ribs with me. While I fretted over how to meticulously trim the meat, he didn't trim a single piece of fat off his ribs. While I carefully proportioned out the right amount of garlic and cayenne and salt, he held up a jar to me and said, "You know what I put in here? A load of brown sugar and some pepper and salt."
At the end of the day, his ribs turned out way better than mine. That's when I started to realize that it's easy to overcomplicate barbecue. In a lot of ways, it comes back to the simple truth of cooking the Samin Nosrat brought to our attention: salt, fat, acid and heat.
From that time on, I became obsessed with this idea. The idea was how to best let the meat speak for itself. How to use the fewest amount of ingredients possible while transforming the meat into something entirely different and delicious. This was my new quest.
And it was about this time that I discovered a simpler way to barbecue. It was people like Aaron Franklin and Bradley Robinson. People who used only salt and pepper and oak wood, and that was it. People who didn't cook the meat to a certain temperature, they cooked it until it looked and felt like it was done. These were people who wanted to let the meat speak for itself, and only use spices to enhance its flavor. These were people who were obsessed with fire, because they knew the alchemy of fire and meat and spice would always lead to something delicious in the right combination.
So that's the long and short of it. I became obsessed with Texas barbecue because I came to love meat with a heavy pepper bark. I came to see beauty in the simplicity of the ingredients. I became passionate about finding how to make the flavor of the meat sing with the fewest ingredients possible. I rediscovered my love for playing with fire and learned the slow patience it takes to cook the meat to tender perfection.
I have become firmly convinced that the best barbecue in the world can be made with five ingredients or less.
I hope you will tune in tomorrow as my BBQ pilgrimage continues onto day 2!
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