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Stalking 4-Star Barbecue in the Lone Star State
AUSTIN, Tex. April 20, 2007 Like cowboy boots and the Alamo, barbecue lies at the very heart of the Texas psyche. No two Texans can agree on what the perfect barbecue is, of course, but they'll fight for all they're worth to defend it against all others. Texas barbecue is as dark and shiny as a lump of coal, but tender and juicy. The aroma of wood smoke is omnipresent. Brisket is the meat: pit masters stake their reputations on it. Seasoning is salt, pepper and perhaps cayenne. If there's a sauce, it is merely ketchup, vinegar and meat drippings. "It's not what you put on," said Rick Schmidt, owner of the Kreuz Market, a legendary barbecue purveyor in Lockhart, Tex. "It's what you leave off." It all starts in a long, deep brick pit with a fire at one end and a chimney at the other. Hickory and pecan are the favored fuels in the eastern part of the state, oak in the center and mesquite in the west. And while low heat and slow cooking is prevalent elsewhere, Texans barbecue at a high temperature (upward of 400 degrees) for a relatively short time. You can find good barbecue in Dallas and Houston, but the best is served in small towns. With some serious time behind the steering wheel, you could visit four of the best barbecue spots, all located within a 100-mile radius of Austin, in a single day. Your first stop could be the Kreuz Market, founded in 1900 by a German immigrant, Charles Kreuz (rhymes with brights). A grocer, he took each day's unsold meat, cooked it over a wood fire and sold it at bargain prices. In 1948 he sold the market to an employee, Edgar Schmidt, who in turn sold it to his sons, Don and Rick. A family feud left Rick running the business. Three years ago, he moved a tub full of burning embers from the original pit through town to his new location, a huge barnlike structure with seating for 550. Mr. Schmidt's moist, smoky brisket and crusty, fork-tender prime rib are right on the money. The house specialty, clod (barbecued beef shoulder), remains the exemplar of the species. Accompaniments are simple: crackers, onions, pickles, avocados, tomatoes, jalapeρo peppers and bright orange slices of Wisconsin cheese. There's no barbecue sauce ("We let our meat speak for itself," Mr. Schmidt said) and customers are not given forks ("God put two of them at the ends of your arms," he observed). Louie Mueller's, in Taylor, also began as a grocery store and meat market founded by a German-American. Its menu and decor have remained pretty much the same since the 1940's: mismatched wood tables are lined up under bare fluorescent lights, and the once-green walls have darkened to an indeterminate shade of brown. Decades worth of business cards flake off a bulletin board like paint off the side of an old barn. If you want to know the secret ingredient at Louie Mueller's, just look at the skylight: it has been completely blackened by smoke. The 63-year-old owner and pit master, Bobby Mueller, like his father before him, burns only native post oak in a pair of pits. He swaddles each of the 30 to 50 briskets he cooks daily in red butcher's paper to keep them from drying out. "There are no steam tables here," he said defiantly. His smoky beef and pork are the epitome of Texas barbecue, and the homemade "hot links" (jalapeρo sausages) all but burst under the weight of their own juices. The house sauce is a runny amalgam of ketchup, margarine, water, onion, salt and pepper. "We keep it pretty simple," Mr. Mueller said. "We don't want to distract from the meat." Texans love barbecue so much that they routinely eat it for breakfast. Mueller's opens at 10 a.m. Patrons arrive in a trickle, then a stream. By lunchtime, there's a torrent. "How hungry are you?" the counterman asks a customer. "Huuun-gry," expressed in a long, slow drawl, is the reply. A mountain of fresh sliced meat, a delectable mustardy potato salad and all the white bread you can eat is the reward. Mueller's, obviously, isn't a place for the calorie-conscious: the dining room can sometimes look like a sumo wrestlers' convention. For Hill Country barbecue, head for Cooper's in Llano. The first thing you see when you pull off the highway is a mountain of mesquite logs, which are burned to glowing embers in a man-high "burn barrel." The embers are shoveled into seven rectangular pits that sit under a corrugated steel awning next to the parking lot. There, briskets and sirloins are roasted to smoky perfection. The cabrito (goat) alone is worth the drive. The ribs are as slender as Popsicles, and the delicate, moist meat tastes like a cross between lamb and veal. Cooper's meat owes its robust smoke flavor to mesquite, and it is cooked by a process more akin to direct grilling. Cooper's also makes its own barbecue sauce: ketchup, vinegar, water, black pepper, Louisiana hot sauce, lard and brisket drippings all smoked together in the pit for 48 hours. "We sear our briskets for a couple of hours over the coals, dip them in sauce, wrap them in foil and finish cooking them over a low heat," Bruce Hatter, the manager, said. Service at Cooper's is no frills: you order at one of the pits and take your uncut meat inside, where it is weighed on a red plastic tray and sliced as you desire. Accompaniments include chopped onion, pickled jalapeρo peppers and simmering pots of the sauce and pinto beans. The dining room is equally spare, with just a few mounted deer heads as decoration. Just 20 minutes outside Austin is the Salt Lick in Driftwood. The rambling dining room resembles a ranch mess hall, with swinging doors and big sunny windows that look out on 80 rolling acres of twisted cedar and pear trees. It attracts some 5,000 people each weekend. The Salt Lick was the brainchild of Thurman and Hisako Roberts, he a Texan, she a Hawaiian of Japanese descent. Weary of traveling for business, Mr. Roberts sat down one day in 1969 to make a list of businesses he could run from Driftwood. He decided on a barbecue joint. Accompanied by his son, Scott, and a ranch hand, he strode to the center of a cedar grove, made a mark with his boot, and ordered the construction of an open circular stone pit, still in use today. The Salt Lick serves a fine brisket with a readily discernible smoke ring. The telltale mark of true barbecue, the smoke ring is a thin layer of pinkish-red just below the surface of the meat. The must-tries here are the habanero chicken and ribs. The chicken, served only on Sunday, owes its kick to a lengthy soak in habanero hot sauce. The ribs spare ribs during the week and baby backs on Sundays play spice off smoke and are just tender enough to pull apart with your fingers. (Ribs shouldn't fall off the bone: if they do, they've probably been boiled or braised in the oven.) Ribs are an afterthought at most Texas barbecue restaurants; at the Salt Lick they are a star attraction. Then there's the sauce, a golden mixture of mustard, vinegar, sugar, paprika, cumin, cayenne and a dozen or so other seasonings. The Roberts family left northern Alabama for Texas around the time of the Civil War, and this sauce, closer in kinship to an Alabama or South Carolina mustard sauce than to the typical Texas ketchup-based condiment, has been passed down from generation to generation. The sauce is brushed on the roasting meats frequently to add a distinctive veneer of flavor. "The secret of our barbecue," said the chef, Carmen Gonzalez, "is the way the sauce bonds with the fire." One thing's for sure. Texans certainly bond with barbecue. There are thousands of barbecue joints in the Lone Star State, and no matter where you are, the pungent scent of wood smoke and pit-roasted meat are never far away. |
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