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Texas Barbecue: Where There's Fire, There's Smoke
| Article
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20355 |
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Section : |
LIFE
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| Issue
Date : |
6 / 1992 |
1,451 Words |
| Author
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Sharon Hudgins
Sharon Hudgins is an author and journalist who lived for
fifteen years in Germany. Her ancestors emigrated from Prussia
to the United States in the 1860s. |
How many different ways can you spell BARBECUE? In Texas, you'll find it spelled barbecue, barbeque, bar-B-cue, bar-B-que, bar-B-Q, BBQ, and BQ (the last spelling is a cattle brand read as "bar-B-Q").
Texas barbecue, however you spell it, is without doubt some of the best-tasting eating in the world. Just thinking about that quintessential Texican dish--if you can call it a dish--is enough to induce veteran barbecuers to make a right turn into their favorite Houston, Dallas, Lubbock, Austin, or El Paso restaurant. Even uninitiated greenhorns, beyond the borders of Texas or within, can feel their appetites awaken on hearing the pleasing rhythm of the phrase "Texas barbecue." The stirring is a response grounded in the belief that Texans, of all people, can be expected to do barbecue right.
Of meats and methods
To do Texas barbecue right, the meat has to be smoke roasted at low temperatures, anywhere from 140 to 200 degrees and in some cases up to 250 degrees. The meat is cooked this way for several hours (or even days), either inside a closed pit or over an open pit.
Texans favor three kinds of meat--beef brisket, beef and port ribs, and sausage (either pork or beef-pork mixtures). Other favorites include beef clods (the top of the beef shoulder), beef steaks, beef tenderloin, chuck roasts, pork loin, ham, goat, kid, lamb, turkey (domesticated and wild), chicken, venison, quail--and even soft-shelled turtles, armadillos, and rattlesnakes. It is said that Texas is a place where people barbecue everything except ice cream.
And Texans use all kinds of woods to fuel the barbecue fire, the aromatic smoke of each one lending its particular flavor to the meat. They use mesquite, scrub oak, or pot oak (cut during the winter when the sap is low), pecan, seasoned hickory, or any other hardwoods available locally. Sometimes pecan shells are also added to the fire. Back in the old days, on the plains and prairies of Texas (where wood still is scarce or not available at all), early settlers and ranch hands barbecued with fires made of dried cattle dung, known as "cow chips" or "prairie coals."
Because the meat is cooked in a pit--either closed or open--Texas barbecue is often called "pit barbecue." With either method of pit barbecuing, the meat is cooked slowly by indirect heat given by the hot smoke, never over a direct flame. The open-pit method
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