“I’m interested in the story that surrounds good food,” Montreal chef David Ferguson said to me as we were driving to Austin after polishing off some brisket sandwiches at Hinze’s Bar-B-Que in Sealy. “And all good restaurants – from fancy to neighbourhood joint – have a story.” True, some Texas barbecues’ stories can be coloured with tales about shooting deer from vehicles (this thanks to Floyd Wilhelm, the avuncular proprietor of the award-winning Chisholm Trail BBQ in Lockhart), but, sure as shooting, none of them is as simple as just putting flame to meat.
The French-trained chef and I were combing through the big dining halls and small smoke shacks around Austin to get schooled in the rules of barbecue for a menu he was developing for his restaurant, Le JolifOu. While barbecue and haute cuisine are not antagonists in a hicks-versus-townies way – lowbrow Southern fare, such as grits and mustard greens, now graces the menus of the fanciest Manhattan restaurants – barbecue, because of its cheap-eats, slow-cooking, highly aromatic nature, does not meld easily with notions of prim, full-service, seven-course meals. (A barbecue joint smells better than heaven’s aromatherapy room, but it is not a neutral aroma.)
Still, Ferguson was quite happy as the more-than-generous staff of the Southside Market & Barbecue in Elgin put him to work, laying out links on the smoker, cutting into the beef brisket. The chef noted that almost all barbecue expertise is passed on informally, and few chefs come to such institutions to apprentice and learn the more vernacular art the way they do other cuisines. As we were wryly told by Kent Black, owner of Black’s Barbecue, the oldest continuously family-run barbecue in the state, “Well, the idea that people would be coming all the way from Canada to ask how my daddy made barbecue is something I never once considered.”
Along with a serious case of the meat sweats, here’s what we picked up along the way.
1 Forget About the Sides, Forget About the Sauces. Forget About Utensils, for That Matter
All barbecue places gladly provide side dishes (from fried okra to coleslaw), but in traditional Texas barbecue, the only point is the meat. You order it by the pound and it comes in a clutch of brown butcher paper that you unfold at the nearest spot, be it table, picnic bench, car hood or conference room. Then you eat it with your hands. That’s right, your hands. Ask any Texas food guru and you soon learn that the only true sides that come with your barbecue are crackers, pickles and onions. And condiments? As the moistness of the delectable star of the show is at stake, you will be accommodated if you ask for sauce (politeness, both Chef Ferguson and I learned, is an obsession among Texans, and very few successful barbecues have failed to recognize the commercial opportunity that bottling your own sauce represents), but the subtlety of fine Texas wood smoking is best tasted au naturel. It is also quietly considered to be somewhat out-of-state to request or want your meat to come with barbecue sauce.
2 All You Can Eat
The amount of food – and by food I mean meat – in front of the chef and me at Smitty’s Market would have made lesser men cry. Beef brisket, hot links, ribs, pork chops – it was all there in its moist, smoky glory. I imagine it’s possible to have a modest, simple lunch at any good barbecue – but seriously, why? The comedian Mitch Hedberg once quipped, “I like Texas, ’cause Texas is the only state ballsy enough to have its own toast,” and in this bigger-is-better spirit, I’d recommend you loosen your Willie Nelson & Family belt buckle and get ready to dig in.
3 Where’s the Beef?
For true aficionados of pit-smoked barbecue, coming into the axis of deliciousness – the towns of Elgin, Lockhart, Luling and Taylor – is like finding the El Dorado of meat. Our first stop was Elgin, “The Sausage Capital of Texas.” About the size of a good bus station, Southside Market can feed about a thousand carnivores on any given day, and everything the chef and I eventually devoured at the end of our hands-on tour was beyond-reproach delicious – especially the sausage and the more curious menu item of mutton, which I had only known before as a barbecue item peculiar to western Kentucky. Regardless, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Nothing says Good morning like barbecued mutton.
The next day we ventured to Lockhart, “The Barbecue Capital of Texas,” where the prominent barbecues are all tied together in history and the competition is high. The owner of Chisholm Trail once worked at Black’s, as did the owner of Smitty’s (whose decor is the most stunningly old-fashioned insofar as many of the walls are blackened with years of smoke), which is now located in what used to be Kreuz Market (another can’t-fail Q-palace), which is now in a big barn-like building by the highway. Lockhart’s barbecue family is beginning to resemble an old European house of royalty, where everybody is connected in lineage in some way to the crown.
We ambled into Black’s, stomach first, and were greeted by Kent Black and his father, Edgar, who would be referred to with deferential respect as “Mr. Black” throughout the visit. With characteristic Texan charm, they brought us through the whole process of their operation, replete with stories about the building of their brick smoker (sturdy as a bomb shelter!) and small-town lore about an old domino parlour and the impromptu slaughtering of a one-ton bull that broke loose into the streets of Lockhart, ultimately ending with us grabbing dripping moist brisket straight off the butcher block (both the chef’s and my own favourite brisket on the trail).
4 Brisket Is the Missing Link, and Links Rule
Texas barbecue distinguishes itself on the barbecue map not with classic pork entrées like rib or shoulder but with beef. Beef brisket is the measure of a Texas pitmaster’s mettle, and as Montrealers, used to our own version of smoked beef brisket called smoked meat, we were thrilled to find this obscure culinary consanguinity between Texan and East European Jewish traditions. The other beefy standard of Texas barbecue, as opposed to other classic American smokeries, is hot links.
5 Listen to the Pitmaster
Wherever the chef and I dined, our most common articulations, when we combined his culinary expertise with my literary background, were statements like “Omigawd” or “That’s some good” and, finally, “I can’t stop eating.” But the story the chef looks for in a place is not just about food but about the culture surrounding the meal as well. And if there was one maxim that suited us best in appreciating the hot-damn goodness of all that dang eatin’, it was Mr. Black’s assertion that good Texas barbecue depended on “not what you put on, but what you leave out.” Of course, after a week or so of steady barbecue, the phrase “not what you put on” may have had a different meaning, but such are the welcome ponderings when blazing a trail deep in the delicious heart of Texas.
Photo assistant: Kim Jeffery; Food styling: Carol Dudar; Prop styling: Martine Blackhurst; Illustrations: Fiodor Sumkin
