Story: Pride Without Pretense - The Texas BBQ Trail

It’s a little after 8 a.m. on Highway 142 in central Texas and the pick-up trucks keep pulling onto the extra wide shoulder of the road to let us pass. We’re moving quickly but not that quickly, not ambulance fast, so I ask about this.

“That’s just the Texas way,” my brother tells me.

That’s good enough for me so we keep passing, flashing our taillights in thanks and bearing down on the town of Lockhart. The one barbecue shack we pass on the way—a trailer with a barrel smoker and a picnic table out front—is closed, owing to the fact that not many people wake up willing to eat large amounts of beef fat first thing in the morning.

But we are willing. In fact that’s why we’re here now, hung over and hungry after a long night of karaoke with carnies and bikers at a beer joint in San Marcos, on our way to Smitty’s Market because it’s the first place on the barbecue trail that’s open. Our goal for the day is to hit as many of the classic shacks and markets in Taylor, Elgin and Lockhart as our stomachs can stand. We want the best Texas has to offer.

Of course any time you start looking for the best barbecue around you’re going to get a lot of varying opinions and that’s as true in Texas as anywhere else. Out in Houston and further east you’ll find the more traditional Southern style barbecue with sticky sweet sauces slathered over pork. Further south and west you’ll see the Mexican influence with chile-infused sauces applied to mutton and some less desirable parts of the cow. Here in central Texas, the heart of German and Czech country, you’ll find beef, always smoked over oak or hickory and sometimes sauced.

This kind of barbecue originated as food for the working class. Back when German and Czech immigrants were opening meat markets in this part of the country, they’d sell their fresh cuts out front and smoke their tough cuts of meat and stuff the rest into sausages in the back. When farmers and laborers started showing up and buying lunch portions of these less valuable cuts then eating them on the spot, the enterprising new Americans realized they’d stumbled in to an entirely different business: The business of barbecue.

The beauty of Texas barbecue, however, is that even today it doesn’t feel like a business. While the beef may not be organic the experience feels that way. In the old market days meat was bought by the pound and served on butcher paper. If you wanted sides you could go around to the front of the store and buy a box of crackers, hunk of cheese or some pickles. More often than not there was no barbecue sauce.

That’s how they gave it to us when we arrived at Smitty’s Market. Occupying the building that housed the universally praised Kreuz Meat Market, Smitty’s was a good introduction to what awaited us on the trail. A dark, soot-stained building just off the town square, Smitty’s brick pits have been in use for over 100 years and the fires smolder right there on the concrete floor. There was no notion of design, no license plates on the walls or neon signs that barbecue joints the world round use to give their walls some “authenticity”. There was just simple food in a simple setting with no forks or sauce to be found.

Down the street in Lockhart at Black’s Barbecue they’ll give you the sauce but still no plates. Forks are also available but everyone talks about brisket you can pull apart with your fingers and Black’s truly has it so I recommend going without.

A little more than an hour north at the Taylor Café—a honkytonk hewn out of corrugated steel and particle board that unfortunately sits next to a railroad and under an overpass—you might have to squint through the smoke to read the hand-written menus but the sandwiches we had there were significantly better than a simple combination of white bread, onion, pickle, sauce and sausage has any right to be.

In Elgin, The Sausage Capital of Texas, they produce over 3 million pounds of links every year. While the two big meat markets in town, Southside and Meyer’s, lack some of the folksy charm of the other stops on the trail with their cafeteria style dining situated in huge factory-like buildings, the food stacked up with any barbecue I’ve eaten anywhere else.

We didn’t make it to every stop on the trail. After four different towns and six different restaurants we had barely scratched the surface of what’s in the hill country much less the rest of the state. It’s hard to define Texas barbecue and even more difficult to experience it completely in one day. I wouldn’t claim that we did that but I do feel like we got a good idea as to what makes this particular style of barbecue Texan.

Texas barbecue is pride without pretense. It’s knowing you do something well and allowing that work to speak for itself, an increasingly rare commodity in these gourmet times. More than anything it’s simple. Simple food, simply prepared.

That’s just the Texas way.

For more information:

www.texasbbqtrail.com