The Hunt for Great Texas Brisket - 2008

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.

OK, its late and I’ve got to get up at 4am to make the plane!
Photos to come…