Some of the best barbecue in the world can be found in small central Texas towns like Lockhart and Luling. When barbecue shrines matter of factly serve unpretentiously great food wrapped plainly in butcher paper, the effect is unsettling to someone used to eating mediocre barbecue at inflated, big city prices.

The one slice of brisket I ordered at Kreuz Market (photo below) cost me a paltry 96 cents. You might ask how a restaurant would be willing to sell just one measly slice of brisket, and the answer lies at its humble beginnings.

These joints started life as meat markets and groceries which sold lunch to cattlehands and cotton pickers at the turn of the previous century. These working stiffs may have been too poor to eat in restaurants, but they could afford cheap cuts of smoked meats. The butchers would sell it by the pound, along with pickles, saltines, and “rat cheese,” which were the only side dishes available in those days. Since every grown man carried a pocket knife, no utensils were provided. Communal knives were chained to the wall at Kreuz Market for any hapless schmuck who forgot his.

The tiny town of Luling has two top notch BBQ joints

Brisket and links served with no plates or utensils. City Market Luling, Texas

Skip forward to 2006, and barbecue isn’t cheap any more. Finding skilled pitmasters to babysit a cooker for 18 hours isn’t as easy as hiring a high school kid to flip burgers, and retail prices reflect that expense. All the same, prices here seem low compared to restaurants paying rent in West Los Angeles.

The style of barbecue in Central Texas is austere: a monastic incantation of meat, salt, pepper, smoke. It might be the purest expression of barbecue I’ve found. Dry rub still hasn’t encroached on a minimalist style that predates the Depression, but barbecue sauce is available (on the side) at the places which have caved in to modern times.

The wee town of Luling has two renowned barbecue joints (City Market and Luling Bar-B-Q), but its larger neighbor Lockhart has no less than four (Black’s, Kreuz Market, Smitty’s Market and Chisholm Trail). I only had time to visit City Market, Black’s and Kreuz Market in a progressive dinner blitzkrieg.

Black’s Barbecue has continuously operated in this location by the same family since 1932. It looks exactly as you’d expect an old time barbecue joint to look. Its woodpaneled walls and timeworn cafeteria tables might have been last updated during LBJ’s administration. Like the other shops I visited, you order at the back of the restaurant, where the BBQ pits are walled off in a room designed to keep smoke from infusing the whole building.

Black’s Barbecue. Lockhart, Texas

Slicing a rack of ribs at Black’s. Note the brick BBQ pits.

Time warp

Brisket, pork rib, and sausage at Black’s.

Kreuz Market dates back to 1900, but a recent famly spat forced the current owner to move the business into a larger building down the street from its original location. His father willed the original building to his daugher Nina, and the business to his son Rick. The children don’t get along, yet both of them wanted to continue in the barbecue business. So Rick built a big new building and took the Kreuz name with him, while his sister renamed the old place Smitty’s, after their father “Smitty” Schmidt.

Kreuz cooks shoulder clod, an unusual beef cut that’s leaner than brisket. I was stuffed by this point so I didn’t try the shoulder clod, the pork chops or any of their famous sausages. Rick Schmidt’s method of cooking shoulder clod is in Peace, Love, & Barbecue. I plan to cook it at home to see what this Texas specialty is all about.

The pits at this new location are designed exactly like the pits from the original Kreuz store. Post oak logs fire the brick pits, rather than mesquite, which is more commonly employed in Texas. Heat and smoke are drawn across the long brick pit and up the chimney at the far end of this photo. This is only one of the ten or twelve such pits I saw that supply their 23,000 square foot restaurant.

Note the open firebox and the blazing flames. Kreuz Market cooks hotter and faster than most places (400 degrees F versus the usual 200-250, so the pitmasters must be attentive to avoid burned meat.

Elvis lives

96 cents worth of Lone Star brisket. No BBQ sauce, no utensils!

Every little town in this part of Texas seems to have a smokehouse or a hole in the wall with a barrel smoker out back. Most aren’t as nationally famous as the three places I’ve mentioned here. Unlike other barbecue restaurants across America, these can trace a direct lineage to their 19th century German immigrant ancestors who settled this region. Outsiders gradually brought influences like barbecue sauce and side dishes, but the core Texas values remain stubbornly intact at these old school joints: meat seasoned only with salt, pepper and smoke, and served without plates or utensils. Eating cottonpicker style is a proud anthropological legacy from families who’ve been keeping their food real for over 100 years.

For further reading about barbecue across the vast nation of Texas, visit DallasFood.org and Texas BBQ Trail.

City Market
633 E. Davis St.
Luling, TX 78648
830-875-9019

Blacks Barbecue
215 N. Main St.
Lockhart, TX 78644
512-398-2712
www.blacksbbq.com

Kreuz Market
619 N. Colorado St.
Lockhart, TX 78644-2110
512-398-2361
www.kreuzmarket.com

The LA Times ran a story today exposing a lawsuit among the family that owns the In-N-Out hamburger empire. Free registration required for the LA Times.

In-N-Out is still a privately held company and none of its stores are franchised. The lawsuit will reveal previously hidden details of the company’s internal workings. The Times story tells of the drama centered on the 23 year old heiress of the empire, who allegedly wants to accelerate expansion into regions where elder members of the family have been reluctant to go. Those lusting for a Double-Double in other parts of the country might get their wish, that is, if the company doesn’t falter under the weight of overambitious expansion. Remember Krispy Kreme’s rollercoaster IPO and subsequent market collapse?

Note to heiress: sometimes, slow growth is better.

For those of you not in the Western USA, this legendary California fast food burger chain dates back to 1948. Many of America’s international fast food empires started in post-war California. To this day, southern California is home to this country’s best hamburgers of the chain and gourmet types. Fatburger, Original Tommy’s, In-N-Out . These are burgers that have been imitated all over the world. I’m especially fond of the Japanese chain MosBurger, which makes burgers that look every bit as good as their ads. How many corporate chains can you say that about? Their Spicy MosBurger, with chili and jalapeno peppers, kept me happy on many a late night. If you have a great burger chain where you live (especially if you’re from outside the US), please leave me a note and tell me about it.

We got skunked on the Colorado elk hunt this season, but Gurlfren’s dad sent us home with several packages of frozen meat from last year’s hunt. I’d never eaten elk before, much less cooked it, so the process of figuring out how to prepare it was a fun challenge.

These medallions were marked backstrap meat. Hmm… what’s that? A little internet research reveals it’s from the loin of the animal, what we’d anthropomorphically call its lower back. Check. So it’s a tender muscle that can be cooked quickly over high heat. Right. Now what?

The butcher trimmed these raw crimson medallions a bit less than 2 inches thick, and sliced a pocket into it suitable for a stuffing. Backstrap meat has very little external fat and no marbling, and barely any connective tissue: very much like a beef filet mignon. Really lean meat.

So how do I approach this? That pocket called for a big wad of herb butter made with finely minced parsley and sage from my garden. As the steak cooked, the butter melted gently and infused the lean meat with herbs. I crusted the outside of the steak with cracked black pepper & salt, seared quickly in a hot pan for a couple minutes on each side, then tossed the pan in a 400 degree oven to roast for about 10 minutes.

Meanwhile, I started a couscous for the starch component of the meal. Finely dice carrots & celery and add them to boiling chicken broth, and let simmer until tender, about 5 minutes. Turn off the heat, add the couscous, cover and let it sit for ten minutes to steam. Easy.

Does elk steak need a sauce? It couldn’t hurt. We brought back a locally made Colorado wine made from sour cherries. It tastes like a barely sweetened cherry pie filling, with a big fruity nose and a bitter / tart cherry flavor. When I first tasted it, I immediately thought it will make a great sauce, and it did. To add more dimension to the sauce, I bought some frozen sour cherries at my local Persian supermarket.

I pulled out the medium-rare steaks from the oven and rested them on a warm casserole while I prepared a sauce using the same pan. I deglazed the pan with chicken stock, and reduced about a cup of it to a syrup consistency. I then added roughly a cup of cherry wine and the thawed, pitted cherries and reduced again to a thick glaze. Season to taste at the end. Simple, and not overwrought.

While the cherry sauce reduced I started a sage brown butter on another burner. Melt butter over a low-medium heat, add whole fresh sage leaves until the milk solids turn brown and the sage crisps nicely. Drain off the butter and sage leaves, and reserve it. To this pan, I threw in sugar snap peas and parboiled fresh fava beans (also from the Persian market), and sauteed over medium high heat. Season with salt and pepper, and add back the browned butter at the very end as a sauce.

Verdict: elk is delicious, and not at all gamey as I expected. It’s almost like beef with a firmer texture and a slightly stronger flavor. Considering the distances these large animals migrate in the wilderness, that makes perfect sense.

Sorry I didn’t keep track of the ingredients, so no recipe for this one. For me, half the fun of cooking is envisioning the final outcome and improvising a way to get there. For the next session of You Kilt It, Now Eat It, we tackle a frozen lump of elk roast and try not to screw that up too much.

Mike Mills makes the best barbecued ribs I’ve ever tasted. I’ve eaten a lot of barbecue across the southern United States, but his stand head and shoulders above anything else I’ve tried.

Mills owns a small, otherwise ordinary looking restaurant in a tiny Southern Illinois college town called Murphysboro. Like many other people, I learned of Mills from Vogue food writer Jeffrey Steingarten, who wrote of his unprecedented three Grand Championships at the Memphis in May BBQ World Championships. My buddy Matt and I drove from New York to visit both the restaurant and the Memphis in May competition back in 2000, and we were simply blown away at Mills’ amazing ribs.

Real barbecue cooks slowly over wood smoke and low heat. It takes about four hours to cook a rack of ribs, during which time the fat renders, tenderizing the tough rib meat and connective tissue in the process. Spicy dry rub and smoke penetrate the meat as moisture and fat slowly escape, coloring the outer later of meat with a rosy pink smoke ring. There’s a 20 minute window when the ribs are perfectly cooked. When two rib bones are pulled apart, the meat should stay attached to them, and tear easily between the ribs. “Falling off the bone” ribs are overcooked and mushy.

Competitive barbecue teams expend a lot of effort to deliver one perfectly cooked rack to the judges. They’ll stagger ribs at 20 minute intervals so one rack will be peaking at the exact moment they’re judged. Restaurant pitmasters can’t afford to be so picky. They start cooking large batches hours in advance of mealtime and you’ll get what you get: Mama Bear, Papa Bear, or Baby Bear.

What we got on that visit to Mills’ Illinois restaurant near closing time on a slow weekday was Baby Bear: a perfectly cooked rack of ribs. Also: the best baked beans I’ve ever tasted, great coleslaw, and amazing cornbread. Barbecue restaurants usually focus on the meat and make lousy sides. Not here. It was simply the best barbecue meal I’d ever eaten.

Fast forward to 2001: Mills had partnered with a Vegas businessman and opened up 4 corporatized restaurants with faux down-homey decor. Just as Vegas apes New York, Venice, and Paris, these restaurants mimic what a barbecue restaurant in small town America might look like, tongue firmly embedded in corporate cheek. Think TGI Friday meets county fair.

I visited about a year after their openings, and the Vegas store’s food was a faded, illegible facsimile of the Illinois original. I’m glad to report things have improved in four years.

We started with a basket of fried dill pickles, which I loved. Thick waffle cut slices are dredged in a flour heavily seasoned with cayenne and Mills’ dry rub. Fried crisp, spicy and rather salty, these might be the ultimate beer snack.

We ordered the massive Mama Faye’s combo of baby backs, chicken, beef brisket, pulled pork and hot links:

The Memphis style baby back ribs are Mills’ specialty and my favorite of all the meats. They’re cooked with what’s oxymoronically called a wet dry rub. The ribs are mopped with apple cider near the end of cooking, and dry rub is reapplied, leaving a moist spicy sweet coating that tastes great without sauce. The other meats? Nice, but not nearly as distinctive as the ribs. Next time, I’d order just the baby backs and call it a day.

A food epiphany like the one I had in Illinois doesn’t happen often. I realize I’m judging Jan by Marcia’s accomplishments here. Really, Jan is terrific. Definitely stop in when you’re in Vegas. But that Marcia. Marcia, Marcia, Marcia!

Memphis Championship Barbecue
2250 Warm Springs Rd.
Las Vegas, NV
702-260-6909
and
1401 S. Rainbow Blvd
Las Vegaas
702-254-0520
and
4949 N. Rancho Dr
Las Vegas, NV
702-396-6223
and
4379 Las Vegas Blvd
North Las Vegas, NV
702-644-0000

17th Street Bar & Grill
32 North 17th Street
Murphysboro, IL 62966
618-384-3722
and
2700 17th Street
Marion, IL 62959
618-998-1114

PS: I picked up Mills’ new book, called Peace, Love and Barbecue, which is one of the better colections of barbecue lore I’ve read. It also lists recipes for some of my favorite dishes from his restaurants. The award winning ribs, his Magic Dust dry rub recipe, the baked beans, the fried dill pickles: they’re in there. I’ll write a book review after I’ve had a chance to go through it more thoroughly.