Stalking 4-Star Barbecue in the Lone Star State
By STEVEN RAICHLEN
The New York Times
AUSTIN, Tex. � LIKE cowboy boots and the Alamo, barbecue lies at
the very heart of the Texas psyche. No two Texans can agree on
what the perfect barbecue is, of course, but they'll fight for
all they're worth to defend it against all others.
Texas barbecue is as dark and shiny as a lump of coal, but
tender and juicy. The aroma of wood smoke is omnipresent.
Brisket is the meat: pit masters stake their reputations on it.
Seasoning is salt, pepper and perhaps cayenne. If there's a
sauce, it is merely ketchup, vinegar and meat drippings.
"It's not what you put on," said Rick Schmidt, owner of the
Kreuz Market, a legendary barbecue purveyor in Lockhart, Tex.
"It's what you leave off."
It all starts in a long, deep brick pit with a fire at one end
and a chimney at the other. Hickory and pecan are the favored
fuels in the eastern part of the state, oak in the center and
mesquite in the west. And while low heat and slow cooking is
prevalent elsewhere, Texans barbecue at a high temperature
(upward of 400 degrees) for a relatively short time.
You can find good barbecue in Dallas and Houston, but the best
is served in small towns. With some serious time behind the
steering wheel, you could visit four of the best barbecue spots,
all located within a 100-mile radius of Austin, in a single day.
Your first stop could be the Kreuz Market, founded in 1900 by a
German immigrant, Charles Kreuz (rhymes with brights). A grocer,
he took each day's unsold meat, cooked it over a wood fire and
sold it at bargain prices. In 1948 he sold the market to an
employee, Edgar Schmidt, who in turn sold it to his sons, Don
and Rick. A family feud left Rick running the business. Three
years ago, he moved a tub full of burning embers from the
original pit through town to his new location, a huge barnlike
structure with seating for 550.
Mr. Schmidt's moist, smoky brisket and crusty, fork-tender prime
rib are right on the money. The house specialty, clod (barbecued
beef shoulder), remains the exemplar of the species.
Accompaniments are simple: crackers, onions, pickles, avocados,
tomatoes, jalape�o peppers and bright orange slices of Wisconsin
cheese. There's no barbecue sauce ("We let our meat speak for
itself," Mr. Schmidt said) and customers are not given forks
("God put two of them at the ends of your arms," he observed).
Louie Mueller's, in Taylor, also began as a grocery store and
meat market founded by a German-American. Its menu and decor
have remained pretty much the same since the 1940's: mismatched
wood tables are lined up under bare fluorescent lights, and the
once-green walls have darkened to an indeterminate shade of
brown. Decades worth of business cards flake off a bulletin
board like paint off the side of an old barn.
If you want to know the secret ingredient at Louie Mueller's,
just look at the skylight: it has been completely blackened by
smoke. The 63-year-old owner and pit master, Bobby Mueller, like
his father before him, burns only native post oak in a pair of
pits. He swaddles each of the 30 to 50 briskets he cooks daily
in red butcher's paper to keep them from drying out. "There are
no steam tables here," he said defiantly.
His smoky beef and pork are the epitome of Texas barbecue, and
the homemade "hot links" (jalape�o sausages) all but burst under
the weight of their own juices. The house sauce is a runny
amalgam of ketchup, margarine, water, onion, salt and pepper.
"We keep it pretty simple," Mr. Mueller said. "We don't want to
distract from the meat."
Texans love barbecue so much that they routinely eat it for
breakfast. Mueller's opens at 10 a.m. Patrons arrive in a
trickle, then a stream. By lunchtime, there's a torrent.
"How hungry are you?" the counterman asks a customer.
"Huuun-gry," expressed in a long, slow drawl, is the reply. A
mountain of fresh sliced meat, a delectable mustardy potato
salad and all the white bread you can eat is the reward.
Mueller's, obviously, isn't a place for the calorie-conscious:
the dining room can sometimes look like a sumo wrestlers'
convention.
For Hill Country barbecue, head for Cooper's in Llano. The first
thing you see when you pull off the highway is a mountain of
mesquite logs, which are burned to glowing embers in a man-high
"burn barrel." The embers are shoveled into seven rectangular
pits that sit under a corrugated steel awning next to the
parking lot. There, briskets and sirloins are roasted to smoky
perfection. The cabrito (goat) alone is worth the drive. The
ribs are as slender as Popsicles, and the delicate, moist meat
tastes like a cross between lamb and veal.
Cooper's meat owes its robust smoke flavor to mesquite, and it
is cooked by a process more akin to direct grilling. Cooper's
also makes its own barbecue sauce: ketchup, vinegar, water,
black pepper, Louisiana hot sauce, lard and brisket drippings
all smoked together in the pit for 48 hours.
"We sear our briskets for a couple of hours over the coals, dip
them in sauce, wrap them in foil and finish cooking them over a
low heat," Bruce Hatter, the manager, said.
Service at Cooper's is no frills: you order at one of the pits
and take your uncut meat inside, where it is weighed on a red
plastic tray and sliced as you desire. Accompaniments include
chopped onion, pickled jalape�o peppers and simmering pots of
the sauce and pinto beans. The dining room is equally spare,
with just a few mounted deer heads as decoration.
Just 20 minutes outside Austin is the Salt Lick in Driftwood.
The rambling dining room resembles a ranch mess hall, with
swinging doors and big sunny windows that look out on 80 rolling
acres of twisted cedar and pear trees. It attracts some 5,000
people each weekend.
The Salt Lick was the brai
Original Post
