The Hunt for Great Texas Brisket - 2008

** A NOTE About the PHOTOS — On the detailed pages, if you see a photo, most likely you can click on it to get more zoom in choices **
Thanks for visiting to read about the Hunt for Great Texas Brisket - 2008.
Unfortunately, we didn’t find a lot of great brisket, at least not as much as I would have expected.
There’s not much in the blog posts below this - the meat of these pages are found in the individual links posted to the right side of the page. They are numbered in the order that we visited those places.

INTRODUCTION
As of Dec 2008, Cyndi and I own a 3-yr old BBQ restaurant. Over 3 years we haven’t cut corners or portion size. We don’t boil our meat, reheat chicken, buy outside sauce, use a premix for cole slaw or many other ’shortcuts’ that could be done and are done by other BBQ shops. We don’t sauce our meats and we don’t pull the membrane’s on our Baby Back ribs before cooking (we do score the membrane on full slab Spares). And to top it all off, we didn’t like Red Robin burgers in Dallas, so all this says something about our “Taste” and standards - and it may not be the same as yours, so if you don’t agree, then please move on.

The late Tom McHale had a nice BBQ shop in Brandon FL in the early 2000s. One day we talked about ‘touring’ Texas and the old joints in the Austin/New Braunfel’s area - to get a taste of that old-style great BBQ. Time away for us, with a new restaurant open, is hard to come by, but we planned to get away to Texas this Thanksgiving to sample some of that great BBQ.

PLANNING
My general plans were formed by reading The Texas BBQ Trail. Its strictly a marketing engine from the businesses on “the Trail” and some of those Cities’ Chambers/Tourist offices. A great marketing/tourist idea and I got sucked in as well - but the quality of some of those places may leave you longing for better food. If you’re heading to this area, my advice would be to ask “the locals” or your friends in the area. Many of these places I’d already heard about and many have seen on TV BBQ specials.

ORDERING
With a few exceptions, we were there for Brisket. Cyndi wanted to try some Sausage. Ribs were not a priority. Most places, we’d order 1/2 lb of Brisket. Where possible, we wanted slices of “the lean” - the brisket flat meat that is usually turned in at a BBQ competition. When you didn’t specify it, they just cut across the whole brisket and who knows what you’d get. The lingo changes on the menus - at Smitty’s, you have to see that lean is shoulder CLOD (not brisket at all), and if you order Brisket, you MAY get a mess of crap like I got in the photos. (OK, I admit, that food at Smitty’s is a bad experience for me, so I’ll move on).
At Blacks, even if you specify Lean, they don’t cut it across the grain (like normal) but WITH the grain - go figure. The grandson told me “thats the way grandpa’s been doing it for 58 years”. OK. It was a lot better though after they re-cut ours correctly.

CONCLUSIONS
Back at Jaymer-Que, we’re going to re-label our Brisket. I’ve always said we have Texas-Style brisket, but thats a disgrace to my Brisket. Instead, we’ll refer to it as KCBS Competition-Style Brisket. Mikeska’s sliced flat meat (they cook only trimmed flat meat, marinated in a vacuum tumbler) was almost identical to ours. And Vince’s (Taylor Cafe) sure had a great taste that even made us enjoy eating the fat.

Thanks for reading.
Jaymer…

Woke up in San Antonio and went out for Breakfast Tacos.
Drove around 1604 to the north to see how things had built up out there. Amazing to see how busy 1604 and Blanco/281 is.
Wanted to drop by and say hi to Bjorn at Bjorn’s, but had no time. Stopped off for Bill Miller on the way to the airport.
Oh, and remember ADVANTAGE RENT A CAR… yep, those guys nicked my iphone car charger that we left in the cig lighter. Called them up and they just “couldn’t find it”. sassafrassin jerks.
Arrived home without incident.

We needed to head to San Antonio for lunch at Tip Top Cafe for a great chicken fried steak. Met our friend Mark there and then headed down to the Riverwalk. We decided to have dinner at County Line BBQ but not at the Riverwalk area - though we did stop in there and have a great chat with manager Xavier. We ate a not-so-great meal out at the I-10 location at 8pm.
Stuffed almost to the gills with BBQ we have only a Day 6 stop at Bill Miller to check out the onion mix - we use their recipe at JQ and want to see how close we are.

Headed out for some BBQ after some homemade breakfast tacos this morning.
Saturday is train day - we went to the Dallas Railway Museum and onto the Grapevine Railroad for a short little trip out of the Ft. Worth Stockyards. Bodacious BBQ on Division (arlington) had a sign posted to be closed on this holiday weekend, so we had to catch some Dickeys BBQ on the way to the Ft. Worth Stockyards.

We spent $38 on a bunch of junk. The brisket was basically just tender beef, but not resembling brisket. We had remembered the sausage being yummy from several years ago - it wasn’t bad. We headed toward Temple for dinner and had another meal with family (Schoepf’s) before ending the day.

Well, we ate a mess of BBQ on Friday and safely arrived at Brad’s house in Arlington.
Uploaded a ton of photos to the Gallery, just have not organized and annotated them yet.

A link to the JQ Smugmug Pages

Later, I’ll embed photos into the post.

I took 2.5 lbs of our own Beef Brisket and heated it in a vacuum sealed bag. Came out terrific with great texture, aroma and the perfect feel. I wanted to use this as a baseline for our travels on Friday. Ate with plenty of turkey leftovers… another great meal.

Had a great meal at my brother’s place in Cameron Texas and saw some cool & different trains. Great day all around.

We get to Dallas without incident and quickly see a Dickies BBQ. Cyndi asks “Are you ready to start?”, so we got half a lb. We’ve eaten at the Arlington Dickies several times, but this left a bit to be desired. Sure it was 8:10am - they serve breakfast so were open anyway and the guy said he had brisket. He had a chunk of Point meat there in the warmer. As he cut me some slices I guess he was concerned when I asked “Is it always like that?” So he went and got us an apparently fresh whole brisket. I asked to taste the scraps and I’m glad he got me fresh, cause that point meat was awful. The sliced was kinda weird and I still think he sliced us point meat… I dunno, it was weird. Tasted great with his sauce though.

As Erika said when we were taking off…. “Goodbye Dallas, Hello Austin”
Guess what? We land and there’s a Salt Lick in the terminal, so we try this again. The brisket LOOKED like it should and this at least had some smoke ring, but it was still very different than ours. Again, good with the sauce. Was some kind of honey mustard BBQ sauce, but meat was dry and really needed the sauce.

Rental car… I know things are tough, so it just makes sense that some car companies need to ‘go the extra mile’ to attract customers. In this case, Advantage Rent A Car has a new policy of offering various freebies in their rental cars. Today, we got a bag of marshmellows, a top to a baby formula bottle, a skittle, some hair and a nice used stack of coffee napkins (with a coffee stain) in the glove compartment. Gee, all those years of renting from Avis and they never gave me freebies like this. Anyway, took a while to get out of the airport… it was a little slow making sure all the existing damage was marked down on the rental form and eventually we got out of there. Well, at least they had the best rate!

Oh yeah, did I mention that the TSA went through our carefully packed bags and ransacked the nicely folded clothes, even opened up the gift box of fudge? thanks guys.

All goes well. Off to airport in plenty of time. Check bags in time. American has a 45-minute checkin time, and Delta is going to 45 mins in Dec 2008 too. Pay 30 bucks to check our 2 bags Also, one is over the 50lb limit… I guess all those Christmas-gift BBQ Sauce bottles we stashed kinda add up the weight. Had to do some last minute shuffling curbside and all was well.