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Texas BBQ King recipe page This is not a cookbook by any means. Anyone looking for a good Texas Barbecue cookbook should pick up The Legends of Texas Barbecue Cook Book by Robb Walsh. He's done a good job capturing the variety of tastes Texas' best pit bosses have offered up for over a century. The King pretty much flies by the seat of his pants when it's time to bbq. Improvisation, not carefully measuring; simple, not overbearing so the meat and the wood speak for themselves. Meat Obviously the most important factor when it comes to bbq is the meat itself. How to cook it, how long to cook it - ergo when to start cooking, what to serve with all depends on the choice of meat. BBQ doesn't have to take 24 hours, but it can. A smallish cut of prime rib or a chicken can finish in a couple of hours. Buy your meat according to the time you can devote to cooking. Every first time bbq'er should start with a pork butt. Boston butt is the full name. Don't ask me why. It's cut from the shoulder. Perhaps the butt of the loin? Anyway, it's hard to screw-up and always tasty. About 275° for eight hours should do it, and the longer the better. Cover or wrap it if it starts to get too black for your taste, but don't be afraid to let the outside get pretty dark - there's a lot of meat that needs to get smoke flavor. Beef brisket, pork picnic shoulders and spare ribs, and mutton
are all sorry hunks of meat. If they aren't cooked low and slow they're
tough as a tire. Flavorful if done properly, a disaster if done Sorry cuts of meat are usually cheaper. Brisket seems to be an exception these days. Occasionally it's on sale for $0.79/pound, the price it should be every day, but it usually seems to hover around $1.79. Sick. Especially when butts go for $1.59. Don't be afraid to engage or haggle with the butcher. They're usually willing to cut a deal with you. I like chopped beef brisket better than the sliced flat. It takes patience to dig all those tasty, stringy pieces of meat out of the fat cap. But it's the most flavorful meat with the crispy burnt ends. A lot of restaurants just chop up the leftover flats from the day before, slather it in sauce and call it chopped beef. There's not much of the best, real chopped beef on a brisket. A twelve pound brisket yields about a pound of chopped beef. That's the King's personal stash. If twelve-plus hours of cooking time isn't feasible, the only option is to buy a nicer cut of meat. If it's tender you can cook it faster. A two inch sirloin steak is as flavorful as brisket and can still be served a little pink. Pork loins and beef rib roasts will cook in less than six hours. Beef tenderloin cooks in two hours or less, pork tenderloin can finish in an hour. The trade off is that the best cuts of meat command the highest prices. Rather than go to the store with my mind made up about what's going in the cooker, I wait to see what's on sale and adjust the menu accordingly. Planning ahead is essential. Chickens need time to brine. Turkeys need time to thaw. Brisket needs time to cook. Start shopping Thursday for a weekend bbq.
Marinades Liquid marinades are for grilling. Fajitas and the like. A good fajita marinade is some olive oil, soy sauce, balsamic vinegar, a little sweet white wine, garlic, an onion cut up, a couple of jalapenos cut up, and a couple dashes of cumin. Squeeze lime juice on the meat after it's cooked; marinating for too long in a liquid that is too acidic will make the meat tough. Cook over mesquite for best results. Technically, putting a dry rub on the night before and refrigerating overnight could be considered marinating. I'm not a big fan of marinating or injecting anything into hunks of meat that are going to be slow cooked. Given the option of injecting a butt and cooking it for eight hours or a dry rub and cooking really slow for sixteen hours I'll take the slow cook every time. Mopping is a completely different thing, altogether. <Mopping is a completely different thing> A mop sauce is used for sopping down meat while it cooks to help keep it moist. Some cuts of meat - pork loin cuts, beef sirloin, lamb, chicken - can benefit from a little basting. Particularly when cooking at higher temperatures. Keep the mop sauce warming in a sauce pan on the stove or firebox. Plain old oil and vinegar works just fine. Italian dressing is easy. An onion or two, a few jalapenos, some soy sauce, and some Coke dress up a mop sauce.
Foil I feel like I'm cheating when I use foil. When everything is perfect there should never be any need to wrap meat in foil. Things are rarely perfect. Heavy Duty Aluminum Foil can salvage an otherwise hopeless bbq disaster. It's better to work toward getting all the variables worked out, but sometimes circumstances dictate wrapping the meat to keep it moist until it's done. Weird thing I've noticed about foil, sometimes after refrigerating meat wrapped in foil it looks like the foil has been eaten through in spots. There's holes with oxidation around them. So I always wrap in plastic first, then foil. It won't work while the meat is still in the cooker; but once it's time to pull it off and let it rest wrap it in cellophane first. Since I'm currently cooking in a smaller pit than I really need, I have to rely on foil more than I'd like. When meat is wrapped tightly so steam doesn't escape and finished in the pit it can leach out up to a cup of moisture and leave the meat stewing in it's own juice. Great for making sauce, but it can dry out meat and make it less tender than it could be. A large aluminum roaster pan with a loose tent of foil over the meat lets the smoke continue to penetrate without oversmoking, while letting the meat breathe and stay tender. A butt can essentially cook this way forever, a brisket needs to be completely wrapped when it's done and kept at holding temperature until serving. The heavier gauge foil the better. Don't skimp and get stuck with an oversized roll of thin, flimsy foil.
Not that the King's bbq needs any sauce. But when you make a sandwich with a couple of slices of Texas toast the bread can get a little dry. Hell, beef tournedos are served with a demi-glaze. So there's no shame in serving sauce on the side - although you've got to wonder when you get a platter of ribs swimming in sauce like I got in North Carolina. The real vinegary mustard sauce they serve with the pulled pork in NC was pretty tasty, though. I thought the pork kinda tasted like it was cooked in an oven, but I really liked that sauce. Sauce starts with ketchup, mustard, vinegar, brown sugar, Tabasco, soy, and Worcestershire. Simmer with a onion cut in half, a couple of jalapenos and garlic cloves, a bay leaf, whole peppercorns, whatever's in the kitchen and seems right. Sweeten or heaten to taste. Honey and real maple syrup instead of brown sugar for sweetness. Fruit and jalapeno jellies are tasty starting points for sauce. Reducing three cans of Coke to a syrupy consistency makes a base for a great pork sauce. One thing that makes any sauce better even if you're using the bottled stuff from Kraft is to add meat drippings. Make sure you carve on something which will catch all the juice that runs out when you cut up bbq. Especially if you finish your meat wrapped in foil; there could be a cup of drippings in the foil with the meat when it's done. Put the drippings in the refrigerator for a while and the grease will congeal on top and leave the aspic-like au jus underneath. Simmer it into the sauce at low heat. Ketchup-based sweet and hot seems to be everyone's favorite kind of sauce in my neck of the woods. Easy enough. I try to keep it on the runny side so it coats the meat without covering it up. So it catches the sweet receptors at the tip of the tongue and the tanginess and heat mix with the flavor of the meat. There's no bigger drag than meat drowned in sauce. It should compliment the bbq, not overwhelm and mask it's taste. Less is better.
Side items Thick slices of Texas Toast makes the best sandwiches. The King's Million Dollar Birthday Queso The King's real Texas guacamole
Fries Baked potatoes Scalloped
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wrong. Ribs especially are tricky. It takes some practice to hit the
sweet spot between tough and mushy, flavorless or oversmoked. Small racks
of ribs are best - look for full racks weighing around 3.25 pounds. A five
pound rack of ribs takes forever to cook; you've almost got to braise them (i.e.
wrap them in foil) to get them tender without turning them black as coal.
