After the writeup on Texas barbecue, several folks asked if I would repost my original brisket recipe as text, not an image, for easier reading. Here you go. I’ve added a few thoughts on technique, in italics. This recipe came to me in a package of materials purchased through some kind of multilevel marketing exchange back in the 80s. You would pay the sender $1 for the packet and then send it on to 10 new people, each of whom would send $1 to you. For whatever reason, this did not make me rich, but the recipe is worth all of $1 and more.
5 Easy Steps to Delicious Brisket
(8 to 10 lb. Brisket)
1. First – Rub salt, pepper and brown sugar on both sides of brisket. Leave the fat side up thru entire cooking time. Unlike some, I recommend lightly trimming away the fat while still leaving a good layer over the meat. If you don’t trim at all you are going to end up with a lot of tasty smoked fat.
2. Second – Put on smoker “fat side up”. Remember not open flame, just hot fire with smoke. Charcoal broquett is fine. Smoking is cooking with indirect heat, in which the fire is in another part of the grill and the smoke and heat are drawn across the food by the way you manage your airflow. The good smoky flavor is going to come from chunks of hickory or oak (I find mesquite and apple too light in flavor) that you will soak for 30 minutes or more before adding to the fire. Also, you need a source of moisture, such as a pan of water inside the cooking vessel, to humidify the cooking atmosphere and concentrate the flavor.
3. Third- Leave on smoker for 3 hours checking fire every 45 minutes so bottom of brisket won’t burn. During this time you should be steadily replenishing the charcoal and wood chunks for a constant smoky fire. I like to leave the smoke vents open at the beginning to build up a good fire, then shut them completely to grab all that sweet smoke, then open them a little just before the fire is about to go out and leave that way for duration of cooking.
4. Fourth- To finish for perfect tenderness wrap in foil, put in loaf pan, and finish in the oven at 325 degrees for 2 to 3 hours. The last hour of cooking in oven, test by sticking a fork in brisket at both thick part and thin part. When fork goes in easily without force it’s done.
5. Fifth – Unwrap; let cool slightly before slicing. Remember: Never put B.B.Q. Sauce on brisket while cooking. The smoke gives the flavor and the oven gives great tenderness.
Brisket with perfect smoke ring from Snow’s BBQ, Lexington, Texas.
It isn’t hard to make good brisket. (Brisket = barbecue, at least for the purposes of this article.) You need a reasonably fatty piece of meat, USDA Choice or higher. You need a rub containing brown sugar for a nice crispy crust. You need a smoker with a good tight seal to keep the smoke in while letting air circulate so the fire won’t go out. You need moisture, in the form of well soaked wood or chips and a steaming pan inside the cooker. And most of all you need patience. Have all those elements at the ready and you can look forward to a tender and tasty piece of meat several hours hence, whether you use a massive smoker and aged hickory logs or a backyard kettle with chips on top of charcoal.
It is, however, hard to make great brisket. And that is why Texans of all ages and social perspectives travel considerable distances to taste the best that can be had. On a recent trip to South by Southwest I found myself on such a journey, repeating some of the same itinerary as when I coming down from Dallas in my college days not a few years ago.
Original dining hall at Smitty’s BBQ, Lockhart, Texas.
First stop is Lockhart, 30 miles south of Austin by a fast country highway. This is the home of Smitty’s and Kreuz’, two establishments with near-identical menus and customs. The tale is that the owner of Kreuz died and had a son and a daughter, and he left the business name to the son and the original smokehouse and market to his daughter.
For a proper Smitty’s experience you need to go in from the original entrance on a sidestreet, not the big parking lot next to the highway. You will pass through a long dark hall lined with hard wooden counters and benches. When I was young these walls had big dull knives hanging on chains. You would buy your meat by the pound, bring it to the counter, and hack it with a knife to your liking. I assumed somebody came along and wiped the knives clean at the end of the day. Even so they would not pass today’s health regulations and today the hallway exists only as a relic.
From this you emerge into the pit room, a dark smoky atrium which probably should be visited in summer heat for a properly hellish atmosphere. You will gingerly step past an open fire to get to the counter. In the background a butcher is prepping meats on a butcher block and a counter person will scoop up your order for “hot rounds” (sausages tied together at the end), brisket and ribs by the pound.
You’ll also get a few slices of white bread in case you want to make a sandwich, or crackers if you prefer. The counter person weighs your food and delivers it on a large piece of butcher paper atop a smaller piece of butcher paper (this is your plate) and you carry this into a big dining hall where you can buy sides and soda or beer. There’s sauce on the tables, not the sugary abhorrent “BBQ sauce” found in supermarkets but a thin red mixture that’s like a mild Tabasco.
I always take my first bite neat, no sauce. I am looking for a smoky dryness, an intense flavor of beef combined with the effect of long smoking. Even though brisket is a fatty cut, it has gone through hours of cooking and lost much of its original weight and the first taste and mouth feel should not be fat, pleasurable though that may be. And I don’t want chewy meat. Fall-apart tenderness is a plus, but not mandatory; what is essential is that the texture of the brisket should not distract from the taste.
My meal was a rib, 1/4 pound of brisket and a hot round. The rib was tender but the brisket wasn’t, and it had a row of fat across the top. (Even though brisket is sold as “fat meat”, a thoughtful butcher will trim off this layer before weighing.) And not a lot of smoky flavor. I’m not a sausage person, but the hot round was pleasant, a coarse grind of beef and pork with pepper flecks mixed in and (I think) a bit of grain for density. A side of cole slaw was forgettable.
Identical sausage twins in Lockhart, Texas. Kreuz is on the left (I think.)
Next stop is Kreuz’s which needs less description because everything is pretty much the same as Smitty’s except that the building and the smoke pit room are recently built. But you’ll find the same meats and the same procedures, down to the pair of straight-edged spatulas the server uses to scrape the meat from the butcher block onto the serving paper.
I can’t do a straight up comparison, however, because Kreuz’s was out of brisket! That’s right, they’d sold the last of it shortly before my arrival and no more would be ready for a while. So I had to settle for a slice of “lean”, or barbecued shoulder. It was surprisingly tender for “lean” and tasted fine on a sandwich. The rib was suspiciously light in color but had the smokiest flavor of anything so far. The sausage was fine and tasted a lot like Smitty’s—which isn’t surprising because they apparently come from the same source (see photo).
If you’re headed to Lockhart I’ll send you to Smitty’s, I think. The food is marginally better at Kreutz’ but not enough to make up for the atmosphere at Smitty’s. Still, neither one will give you the best barbecue I’ve had in Texas. For that you have to wait until Saturday and journey a little farther, in a different direction, to Snow’s in the tiny and out of the way town of Lexington.
Snow’s caused a stir in winter 2009 because it was named over the Lockhart twins as the best barbecue in Texas by Texas Monthly, and soon after that the lines were out the door on Main Street and the barbecue was selling out by 10 am. It’s a tribute that the folks at Snow’s (who have other jobs and only smoke for the weekends because traditionally that is when the ranchers brought their cattle to auction) kept their good humor and quality and perspective through it all. Now (4 months after the article) the lines are down to a manageable size again.
What makes Snow’s the best? First, the brisket is sublime. Mine had a perfect smoke ring… pink around the edges of the meat and also pink inside along a layer of fat separating two layers of muscle. (Brisket is the “chest” of the animal, in the very front between the two front legs where a number of muscles come together in a criss-cross arrangement.) And not only was it fork-tender, it fell apart at the first touch of the fork.
Ribs were at least as good as Kreuz. (You may have guessed that pork ribs aren’t really my thing. If made from a commercial pig, they have a pleasant and not very complex flavor and you really can’t go wrong so long as the excess fat is cooked away.) And the sausage was crackling with goodness, cooked until the interior fat was boiled through the skin leaving it crispy and the interior hollow in spots.
Aside from the meat, what makes Snow’s special is that they are good marketers of what they sell. And this is important. It is one thing to bite into a perfect apple in a farmer’s market, something else to dine in a restaurant where a good chef has taken the trouble to ensure that everything is coordinated for a satisfying experience. Snow’s does this where the other establishments don’t.
You can get a plate with sides (solid Texas renditions of mustardy potato salad and vinegary slaw). You can have endless, very good, smoky pinto beans at no extra charge. You can take it outside and dine on picnic tables surrounded by barbecue pits and assorted rolling smokers which I assume are used to cater events in other locations. And you can even get it mail order since they’ve discovered if you smoke once a weekend you might as well smoke again (on Saturday, while the counter is open) and freeze that meat and send it around the country.
But Snow’s does have a weakness and it is their sauce, a sour blend informed by the insidious Carolina influence which has spread across Texas in recent years like Johnson grass. (Thank goodness there is no “pulled pork” at Snow’s.) . Do not under any circumstances put it on your food until you have tasted the meat naked, followed by a trial squirt of the excellent Cajun Chef hot sauce on the table. This should be all you need, especially because Snow’s meat tends toward the salty side and the hot sauce acts as a corrective.
It’s nice to know that the best barbecue store in Texas still has room for improvement. I will be back.
Newspaper coupons grasp at 2009 Super Bowl Three years ago, I did a post on newspaper inserts and the Super Bowl… and how snack manufacturers contort themselves to create a “big game theme” without ever actually mentioning the Big Game, which is a copyrighted product with big licensing fees attached. Looking at this past Sunday’s crop of FSI’s, it’s reassuring to see that nothing has changed. The nation’s economy may have melted down and the web has transformed marketing for most products, but for salty snacks and their teammates it’s still “game on”.
Smirnoff offers us a “smart choice for your super party”. Newman’s Own wants you to “go natural for the big game”. Tums will let us “enjoy the game heartburn free” while Pop-Secret popcorn promises a “home field advantage” and Hersheys wants us to “treat your home team” to a “candy bowl blitz”. Marie’s salad dressings invite you to “tackle the taste” and Dean’s Cool & Creamy exhorts you to “bring the ultimate dip to the ultimate game.” You can also “score one for the home team” with Ling Ling egg rolls, say “it’s good!” [umpire with upstretched hands holding up two hamburgers] for White Castle or enjoy “football food… ready for game time in minutes” from El Monterey Taquitos.
It’s clear that the marketers are doing an end run around the NFL by not mentioning the Super Bowl by name, and that the NFL has dropped the ball by not figuring out a way to bring them into its licensed marketing huddle. But more important, there’s a flagrant violation by most of these marketers because they forget that coming up with a catch-phrase is not the same as selling a product.
And so the winner, in overtime, is an ad from Butterball cold cuts with the theme “One taste brings the party together”. Because after all, the reason these marketers are trying to tie in their products to the Super Bowl is that you’re going to serve them at a party—and here’s one marketer with a generic ad (originally created around the election, maybe?) that says how their product is going to make your event a success. Touchdown!
Like CES, the January 2009 Fancy Food Show is down a bit in both attendees and exhibitors. But there’s still room for people like Mr. Bacon here, and his product Bacon Salt which is based on the premise that “everything should taste like bacon”. It’s all vegan and there is a bacon survival kit including bacon chapstick, bacon flavored vegan-aise etc for converted vegetarians who miss the taste of bacon.
Footnote: Fancy Food is where food purveyors, mostly regional distributors or mom-and-pop shops, come to present their offerings to potential retailers or food service clients. There are also a number of international country-sponsored booths though those are really down this year.
Cole slaw, that happy transformation of cabbage into a tart and appealing salad, has to be one of our most healthy, tasty and also inexpensive foods. So why is it that when we order a meal with a “side of cole slaw” these days it’s often served in a micro-cup that would be better suited to sample collection in the doctor’s office?
My theory is that this is related to the predatory financial practices that got us into our current mess. Once you’ve settled on a business model that markets home equity loans to widows on social security, why stop there? Let’s wring a few more pennies from the populace by downsizing the cole slaw served with their early bird specials.
Which is all the more reason that the pictured side of cole slaw, at Compton’s in Saratoga NY, is so reassuring. This is what a side of cole slaw should look like. (Note also the romaine and 3 slices of tomato which are not even mentioned on the menu—a garnish reminiscent of a bygone day.)
I’ve been through multiple market downturns in my copywriting career. Each time, I had some clients who took the stance that you need to maintain or even increase your marketing budget because that’s when you buy market share, on the cheap, from competitors who are cutting back.
Compton’s is doing the same thing in their marketplace, and they’ve won my business. I’m going back at lunchtime for a burger… and a side of cole slaw.
So a chef brought a great tasting chardonnay blend to a party, and I wanted to have more of it. Fortunately I’d saved the bottle (Novella Synergy 2007) and started checking with the usual Bay Area sources where a chef might buy his wine including Ferry Plaza Wines, K&L, Wine Warehouse and Jug Shop. No luck with any of these so I stopped by the eclectic and wonderful Bi-Rite Market on 18th St and spoke to Joshua the wine buyer who expressed interest because it is a Paso Robles wine (one we don’t see as often as others) and offered to see if he could get it.
The next day he called me at home and said he had telephoned the winery and learned that the entire vintage had been sold to… Trader Joe! Which of course is the Walmart of crunchy gourmet stores, threatening to put the independent Bi-Rites of the world out of business, so it was even more remarkable that he passed this info along. Of course I am going to go over to TJ and buy a case, but I am also going to make a far greater attempt to give Bi-Rite my business including their 10% off a case sale next month.
This is another example (the first was from Timbuk2) of a company giving extraordinary, old-fashioned personal service which is all the more distinctive, and consequently more valuable for both the customer and the vender, because others are dumbing down their service. Compare, for example, to this experience with Electronic Arts, when I found my 11 year old has discarded the paper with our CD key for an electronic game and asked EA if I could have a new one if I sent them the receipt and a photo of the original disks to prove we own them. They responded with an email that told me to go to a web page to read the response there, always a bad sign, where I found:
If you have not register the game and if the Registration code/Serial
Number/CD Key for the game has been lost or misplaced then you will need to
purchase another Registration code/Serial Number/CD Key from our warranty
department, please mail our Warranty department the following information:
-The [Proof of Purchase] page from the manual, or if that is not available
the game disk.
Note: If you send the game disk, please send it using a traceable method as
Electronic Arts is not responsible for products lost in transit.
-A letter explaining that you need a replacement serial number.
-A money order for $10.00 USD.
-Note: We do NOT accept cash, checks, or credit cards.
So EA is going to make me spend basically the original price of the game to get satisfaction, while Bi-Rite is sending me to a competitive store. The cost of the EA response was minimal, the cost of Bi-Rite’s probably $5 when you consider Joshua’s time and his phone calls. But in terms of future buying behavior from me that might result in profits to the vendor, Joshua’s approach makes far better sense. Bi-Rite is at 3639 18th St (parking difficult). If you need wine suggestions, call (415) 241-9760 and ask for Joshua.
I spend a lot of time on the SF Chowhound board, where (just to pick a random example) “Best Bun Cha in the Bay Area” recently accumulated 37 quick posts. So when I wanted to know how the food is at the iconic Highland Park Cafeteria, recently reopened in Dallas, I naturally clicked over to the Texas CH board.
And how many posts did I find there? None. In fact, the most recent post on Highland Park Cafeteria was my own back in January, lamenting its closing, with no more recent messages to correct me. A wider search of the web found only stories about the restored portraits of the Presidents in the waiting line, and a couple of quick comments on personal blogs. This is a temple of Southern home cooking that has served some 36,000 diners since it reopened a month ago (based on published stats of 1200 meals a day) and not a single one has been moved to share their experiences in any depth.
In the Bay Area, online chatter about a restaurant event like this would have melted the copper in the DSL lines. Texas, as we see, is different. I happen to think the Bay Area has the right idea (which is why I’m here and not there, where I was born). But the purpose of this article is to note how really different groups of people can be, with this minor data point to prove it. Something to think about next time you fall into the copywriter’s trap of writing to yourself, AKA thinking everybody has the same priorities that you do.
I gave my mother the highly-touted new edition of the Joy of Cooking for her birthday, and bought a second copy for us to have at home. I like to leave the book open for reference when I’m cooking, and soon I noticed I was doing a lot of squinting and carrying the book into brighter light. Could it be that the type had gotten smaller?
A comparison of two identical passages shows that’s exactly what happened—20% smaller in fact. (Count the characters in the first line of the new edition, at left in the picture, and compare to the 1975 edition, at right.) I can understand why they didn’t want to make the book too unwieldy with all the new additions. But I’m too preoccupied to memorize the recipe before I cook it, and too finicky to be satisfied when I misread and put a tablespoon of salt in when the recipe calls for a teaspoon. Sorry, but the type’s too small.
This is why I advise my students and clients to double-check the work of their designers. If it looks too pretty, it probably is—something’s been sacrificed for the sake of great design. If there’s a coupon, try filling it in to be sure there’s room to write—or better yet, have your art director do it.
I’m finishing up a project that had me writing web product copy for over 150 different cuts and preparations of beef, pork and lamb. I need to describe each one in a way that makes the reader understands how it’s unique. A lot of this has to do with taste. Or does it?
So much great food writing is about the experience surrounding the eating—the origin of the ingredients, the way they’re prepared, the environment in which they’re consumed. Tasting itself is when all these elements come together—it’s the payoff for being in this place, at this time, eating this food. And if it’s good, that first bite and the flavor released becomes a time capsule or shorthand for remembering the entire experience.
Prepared dishes are easier to describe because the flavors play off against each other. The other day for lunch, for example, I had the Pork Bacon Sandwich at Cam Huong in Oakland’s Chinatown. The crunchy baguette lends crispness while showering my lap with crumbs. Mayonnaise adds sweetness and lubrication. Cucumber sliced and pickled daikon and carrot shreds provide coolness, crunch and slight acidity. Jalapeno means more crunchiness plus the anticipation of a delayed reaction mouth tingle from the aromatic chili oils. And all this is a backdrop for two meats. The “bacon” is one of those Asian special-pork concoctions that has very little taste but the slippery mouth feel that we love from fat. And the other pork, shredded, is cooked with salt and red spices and ends up with a gamy intensity which we recognize as the essence of meat. The day laborer who’s grabbed the seat opposite me asks how is it, and I say “great”.
By comparison, how does a New York steak taste? I find myself writing about musculature and where the beef comes from on the animal in part to make the reader an expert so they’ll feel comfortable presenting this expensive meat to their guests. And when it’s time to deliver an institutional message it comes through sounding like this:
“Eating dry-aged beef is as sensual and satisfying as drinking well-aged wine. The flavors have deepened and mellowed. The taste is concentrated, an effect brought about by moisture loss and by changes in the meat itself. Natural enzymes in the meat break down the fibers, enhancing the taste with a delicious nutty flavor and tender texture.”
So, science and nature come together to make magic which translates to user satisfaction. Appealing? I hope so. One of the greatest challenges, I found, is that there are actually only two words that describe this experience—“taste” and “flavor”. Can you tell me some others? Another word, “tenderness” which is universally used as a compliment for really good steak, is more closely related to the amount of fat than anything else. While “texture” is a promise, that when you bite into this stuff it WILL be tender, or perhaps crunchy, or maybe it will coat your tongue with the eggy creaminess of a rich sabayon.
Food writing may be hard, but it is easy and fun to read because it is so experiential and suffused with the joy of life. My personal favorite example, and in fact a book that was mentioned by many of the chefs I interviewed, is Heat by Bill Buford (that’s an Amazon.com ordering link). Buford, whose day job is an editor for The New Yorker, decides to see what life is like as a line cook at a Mario Batali restaurant. Before we know it, he’s made a lifelong commitment to a summer job carving meat in a Tuscan village. Go get it, and read it. But be sure you go hungry.
I’ve been working on a project that has caused my to read Michael Pollan’s “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” and re-read “Fast Food Nation” by Eric Schlosser. I’m pretty much in agreement with the pro-natural food, anti-factory food arguments made in both books. However, I found the polemicizing in one book far more compelling for reasons that are worth noting by marketers.
Pollan follows four meals from farm to table and makes commentary along the way as to how the food is raised and processed. The first meal is fast food, and the villain is “big ag” which seeks to coopt sustainable sources, organic standards, traditional family farms and foods free of drugs and pesticides in order to deliver something that follows the letter of the law while totally disrespecting the spirit by which honest, healthy meals have traditionally come to the table. So far so good.
The problem is that his is a holistic outrage; you need to totally buy into his argument to accept each part of it. And while in most cases I was nodding my head, at one point I found myself thinking “that’s actually pretty cool” when he described all the things you can make with corn. This is preaching to the choir and to the extent that Pollan wants to make new converts, I don’t know that he is doing it.
Schlosser, by contrast, adopts a “but wait, there’s more” approach to layer on the outrages of eating at McDonalds et al. It starts modestly, even acknowledging that the stuff can taste pretty good. Nothing here to make a Big Mac lover put down the book. But he gradually adds outrages and pulls you in. “You don’t like the feces in the beef? Well, let me tell you about the factory workers that get their limbs chopped off.” You’re led to agreement in baby steps, and thus potentially converted.
We direct marketers are happy to ignore the 98% or so of our audience that doesn’t pay any attention to our work, and focus on tweaking and maximizing our message to the remaiing 2%. It’s probably a worthy goal for a polemicist to get 2% of his or her readers to change their attitudes somewhat. I think Schlosser does a better job, but I recommend you read both books and decide for yourself.
(This post has been edited. There are four meals described in Pollan’s book and I want to make it clear his fast food outrage is specifically about the first meal, thus offering an apples-to-apples [or fries-to-fries] comparison with Schlosser. Be sure you read on about the other three meals, and don’t miss Angelo and the pigs.)
Cole slaw, that happy transformation of cabbage into a tart and appealing salad, has to be one of our most healthy, tasty and also inexpensive foods. So why is it that when we order a meal with a “side of cole slaw” these days it’s often served in a micro-cup that would be better suited to sample collection in the doctor’s office?
