Final Entry / Introduction / Conclusions
Sunday, December 14th, 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…