Barbecue, Texas Style!

I promised I would tell you about Texas Barbecue. First I will say it is the best meat I have ever eaten in my life, and I've eaten a lot of meat. All you veggies may as well stop reading right now, or else you might get converted.

So last week after the basketball game, Charles escorted Mardi and me to Luling, to the City Market, to sample real Texas Barbecue. These are photos of the fine gentlemen who cooked out meat. It's more like smoking than what we know in Canada as barbecue, which is grilling over coals. These places have a separate room, with a wood fire drawn into large "ovens" where the meat cooks ever so slowly and fragrantly. The meat gets tender and absorbs all the wonderful smoke aroma and flavour.

When you arrive, you head into the smoke room and order your meat. In Luling, they had only ribs (pork) and brisket (beef) left by the time we got there. Barbecue is more of a lunch thing on Saturdays, and we were there for dinner. You tell them what you want and they cut it off the rack for you and slap it onto a few pieces of brown paper. No plates. No cutlery. You tell them how many slices of bread (white bread) you want, and in this case, sweet or dill pickles. You order your "sides" and your drinks, and get your sauce, up at the front. Beans, coleslaw, potato salad, and pop. They let you have a plastic fork for your sides. The sauce was mustard-sweet-vinegar, not hot; perfect for the barbecue.

Then you pull up wooden chairs to a wooden table and dig in. It ain't elegant, but you are so happy you don't care.

I was so excited I forgot to take a picture of the actual food, but you can see one of the cooks holding up a side of ribs behind the loaf of whit bread in the picture on the left.

Then the next day, we had the most amazing brisket that Charles' friend James had cooked up practically all day and all night, for his church's fund-raiser. I could not stop. Even though I was in public, and usually I can show restraint, this meat was so tender, juicy and richly smokey and flavourful that we were all of us a little beyond showing restraint. But life is short, and food that good doesn't come along everyday. Trust me, you have not truly eaten until you have had this Texas Barbecue.