Smoked salmon chowder with salmon bacon.

Smoked salmon chowder with salmon bacon. © Ryan Schierling

There are so many brilliant smoked meats in Texas it's a shame that no one really pays much attention to the fishes.


Granted, this is bovine country and the nearest salmon, be it Pacific or (heaven forbid) Atlantic, is an ocean away. Wherever you hail from, there’s always something sacred about cooking with smoke. Brisket is the gold standard by which barbecue joints are judged in the Great Republic, and if you've got a line out the door for beef, then pork ribs and chicken are pretty much a gimme.


Geographically, barbecue in this part of the country has never had a reason to be about the fish. Southern barbecue is beef and pig and yard bird. About the only ocean-sourced thing you’re likely to see on the grates of a Texas smoker are gulf oysters.
 

Salmon has a little less real estate to work with than most things that end up in the smoke. If someone could engineer and farm a salmon the size of a cow, you'd have cheap sides of salmon cluttering up everyone's offset, and apple trees would be shaking in their boots, err... at their roots. But salmon are not the size of cows and they're a little harder to catch than cows, pigs and chickens, so their most delicious parts are at a premium. 

Hot meat dip.

Hot meat dip - queso with smoked beef brisket. © Ryan Schierling

You've all certainly heard of the Great Velveeta Shortage of 2014 by now. "Increased seasonal demand" and a shifting of production lines from one plant to another led to a shortage of the famous pasteurized prepared cheese product, especially the more moderately-sized eight- and sixteen-ounce loaves. Moderately-sized... how cute. Your Super Bowl party is screwed. 

Thankfully, here in Texas, every grocer worth their inflated sodium content has a year-round endcap with nothing but #10 cans of Ro*Tel and five-pound chubs of Velveeta. No man, woman or child will ever go without queso here because, in The Great Republic of Texas, queso is a birthright. 

Back in the Ghetto Melrose days of Seattle, hot meat dip mysteriously became a party staple. I'm not sure how it all started, but browned ground beef, Velveeta, a tin of tomatoes with green chiles and a secret mix of spices would bubble away in an ancient, volcanic crock pot next to a gigantic bowl of tortilla chips. It was easy, and it was always a hit. 

Micklethwait Craft Meats.

Tom Micklethwait, moving meat. © Ryan Schierling

Barbecue in Central Texas is getting progressively more difficult.

Thanks to the telegraph, the telegram, the radio, the telephone, the television, the barbecue televangelists, the godless liberal media and the internet, there are no secrets anymore. Luling, Llano, Lexington, Lockhart? Austin. AUSTIN. This town is loaded with the new-guarde when it comes to the old-style, and we're wearing the biggest, baddest buckle in the barbecue belt. 

Julie and I drive up East 11th, passing a queue easily in the hundreds already at Franklin Barbecue. It's 9:30 in the morning… today, Sunday, and that's a regular thing. A week after a Franklin spread graced a gloriously glossy cover of Texas Monthly's issue with "The 50 Best BBQ Joints in Texas in the World!" I drive around the north side of the building, just to see where the line ends, and it's halfway around the block. I smile, because Aaron and Stacy are some of the nicest folks we've met in Austin, they deserve every bit of success, and also probably a good nap. We have a previous engagement with a man and some meat, so we continue up the street. 

If you come to the fork in the road at East 11th and Rosewood, take a left. You will pass East End Wines, Raymond Tatum's Three Little Pigs trailer, the RS Food Mart, and if you're not careful, you'll also pass Micklethwait Craft Meats. On the right side of the street, tucked into a bit of a dip in the landscape, is a pale yellow trailer with a smoker next to it. Follow your nose.

Oklahoma prime rib redux.

Fried smoked baloney sandwich with dill pickle spread. © Ryan Schierling

"What the hell are you smoking?"

I get that question from time to time, especially when I come up with oddities like Chicken-fried Chicken a la King Ranch Chicken or the unholy marriage of gas-station snack-pack jerky and cheese inside a homemade jalapeño popper. But today, since you asked, I'm actually smoking bologna, thank you.

Bologna, Italy would have been my first guess as to the genesis of smoked bologna. They probably figured out every way imaginable to prepare that mishmash meat loaf and I'm betting the guy that perfected it wasn't named Oscar Meyer. But, from what I've heard, Italy didn't want to have anything to do with this bastard-child treatment of their lard-studded mortadella. The Sooner State takes full responsibility for the further preparation of this one.

As with any legendary regional recipe, there are disputes when it comes to origins. Cheap and plentiful, fried bologna sandwiches have been around forever, and everyone from states south of the Mason-Dixon line probably has a fond childhood memory of their favorite version. Smoked bologna is another tall-tale altogether, with a pair of pushpins stuck squarely in a map of Oklahoma – one in Tulsa and the other in Oklahoma City. Stories go back fifty or sixty years about the creation of "Oklahoma prime rib" and wherever it started, you know there had to be some drinking involved. 

Barbecued beef bierocks.

Barbecued beef bierocks. © Ryan Schierling

I saw a lot of strange things growing up in Kansas. I saw the skies turn a deathly still, hot ochre moments before a funnel cloud dropped down and started sucking the roofs off of houses. I saw an elderly woman speaking in tongues beneath an ominous, menacing mural of abolitionist John Brown. I once saw a six-legged cow. But I ain't never seen a beer rock.

Now, I understand there are many cultural variations and spelling disparities of the bierock – a meat-filled wonder of German and Russian origin, brought to the United States by German Russian Mennonites. They call it "beer rock" in Kansas, but I'm pretty sure – even as an expat – that's got to be a successor to the horrible 90s-dance-music compilation album Jock Jams (Vols. 1-5). If beer rock is what you want, there must be a cheerleading competition on ESPN2 because of the NHL lockout. If you'd rather have a bierock, I've got your number.

Pasty or pastry, pirogi or piroshky, pirok, börek, runza, empanada, calzone… all are a regional version of stuff, stuffed into dough and baked. 

I was introduced to bierocks as a kid, probably at a Mennonite church function in Harper, Kansas. My ancestry is German/Russian, and the version I remember was filled with ground beef, onion and cabbage. If one of the church ladies got a little crazy, there might have been some caraway seed and unseemly gossip in there. 

In my early 20s, I lived in Fort Collins, Colorado and found runzas at a fast-food chain called, oddly enough, Runza. They served a delicious, fresh, beef-filled bierock facsimile that fueled my nostalgia and kept me from having to craft my own. 

If only I'd known how simple it was. 

My coleslaw can beat up your coleslaw.

BFF on a bun. Slaw on pulled pork with mustard sauce. © Ryan Schierling

There is only one coleslaw recipe in this household. I will admit, we have prepared others on a whim, when experimenting with dishes that seemed like they'd benefit from a crunchy, slightly sweet and tangy cabbage salad on the side. As much as I love cabbage in all forms, none of them stuck.

This one, I wrote down for the first time in 2005. I don't remember how long I'd been making it before it was finally put to paper, but full of bluster and bravado on an old blog, I branded it Ryan's Bad Ass Coleslaw. Somehow the moniker stuck. If I had to rename it now, in 2012, I might be a little more humble. I'd call it... Ryan's Bad Ass Coleslaw. Hey, we're all proud of our children, right?

Alright, sorry, it is a nice slaw, and it's a perfect barbecue side. It also has no mayonaisse, which is a sticking point for some coleslaw traditionalists, but mayo weighs down a lot of picnic dressings and I wanted to keep this as light as possible to give the cabbage, carrots, green apple and jalapeños center stage. The simple dress for this salad is a mixture of cream, apple cider vinegar, honey or agave nectar, and salt. That's it. That's all it needs.

Unless you wanted a little help from Bad Ass Coleslaw's friends – pulled pork and mustard sauce. 

BBQ pop-up.

(L) Hot BBQ. (R) RL Reeves, Jr. © Ryan Schierling

By the time this has posted Sunday afternoon, you'll have already missed it. Like a finger-lickin'-good flash-in-the-pan – this one-shot meat-and-two melee, noon-time, barbecue pop-up at Three Little Pigs is history.

Chef Raymond Tatum's pork-centric trailer is closed Sundays and Mondays, so Tatum's friend RL Reeves, Jr. (scrumptiouschef.com) got the green light to throw a little brisket party. Word was passed around in the days prior through various channels, and if you were in the know, you got proper Texas plate lunch. There was brisket (smoked on the old mobile pit that followed Willie Nelson and ZZ Top around on tour in the 70s), beans, slaw, peach cobbler and sweet tea.

What felt like a summertime backyard picnic – old country on the radio, Lone Star tall-boys being passed around, folks hunkered over pecan-smoked meat and pinto beans so sweetly porcine you'd swear they were a part of the animal – could become a regular, if somewhat impromptu, gig with a rotating menu.

Baby's first brisket.

Baby. © Ryan Schierling

When I was eight years old, our family moved from a tiny town in Kansas to a little bit bigger town in Kansas. There would be a new house and a new school, new friends and new adventures. I was riding in the moving truck with my dad, and when he pulled into the cul-de-sac I remember wondering which house was going to be ours, what my new bedroom was going to be like, and how fast we could get my bike out of the back so I could explore the neighborhood – all very important stuff when you're eight.

He pulled the truck to the curb in front of a yellow, split-level house with brown garage doors, right at the shoulder of the court. Coronado Court. That was my new address… I'd gone from E. 8th Street to Coronado Court. It was a lot to take in.

My mom and sister got out of the car behind us, and once the front door was unlocked, I bolted upstairs to see which room I was going to get.

A few minutes later, I heard my mother yell for my dad, and then I heard her crying. I ran from my new room to the kitchen and saw her standing with the refrigerator door open, holding a green bottle with a red ribbon tied around it.

A solitary bottle of champagne in an otherwise empty refrigerator, left by the previous owners of the house, for the new owners of the house.

I didn't completely grasp the significance of this gesture at the age of eight.

The Road Food to Perdition.

Spanish For 100's Corey Passons, somewhere in mid-America. © Ryan Schierling

Austin is the "Live Music Capital of the World." 

The South by Southwest Music Conference and Festival – which currently draws some 12,000-plus registrants just for the music portion of the event  – is a yearly influx into this city like none other. It's a lot of bands, because it's a lot of fans and the numbers are growing every year. 

The majority of those bands are touring around the SXSW dates, and the festival is not just a destination, but one more stop on the highway to load in, play, and load out before hitting the road again for the next city. While they are here, they will no doubt ask someone "What's the must-eat" thing in Austin before we leave in the morning?" Or maybe they've played here many times before, and really dug on that Casino El Camino burger, great Indian food and beer at Whip-In, or some incredible taco joint on the east side that the bass player found and they've been going back ever since. 

For non-Republic-of-Texas bands on tour, Austin is road food. 

"Love letters to barbecue" winners.

© Ryan Schierling

Congratulations to Kristi R. and Gary B., who penned the winning love letters to barbecue. They each will receive a $20 gift certificate to Franklin Barbecue to satiate their cheatin', eatin' hearts.

"...I yearn for your scent, your smell on my napkin is now gone and it brings me to tears. My dreams are filled with memories of our times spent together, but they are old memories; I want to make new ones with you..." -K.R.

"...you always evoke a sense of comfort, and can be used as an excuse to gather friends, get drunk and get fat... and even if and when I do lose my teeth, I hope to learn how to get really good at gumming the hell out of you..." -G.B.

If I told you you had a nice brisket, would you hold it against me?

Love. © Ryan Schierling

There are only four more days to tell us how much you *heart* barbecue, and you can score one of two $20 gift certificates to Franklin Barbecue! Write a lusty love letter to BBQ and send it to us by Jan. 31.

"My darling bbq, I can't believe it's been less than 24 hours since I last saw you. I can still taste your juices on my lips, your smoky fragrance lingers on that white v-neck t-shirt I was wearing and I just can't stop... smelling my fingers. I don't mean to be ribald, barbecue, but your brisket is so beautiful it makes my breath catch in my throat and I am lovestruck, lovesick..." (To be continued...)

Love letters to barbecue.

(L-R) John, John, Stacy & Aaron. Franklin Barbecue. © Ryan Schierling

A while back, I told you about some brisket like none other.

You don't eat something that good and not dream about it, talk about it, write about it, take photos of it. And I did. But I wanted a little bit more. I wanted to meet the people ultimately responsible for my gustatory gushing. So I got in touch with the fine folks at Franklin Barbecue and asked if they'd be up for me shooting some portraits before they moved to their new, non-rolling location in February.

Julie and I met Aaron and Stacy on a Wednesday after they'd sold out of everything and I took some photographs.

After that, they showed us around the new digs at 900 E. 11th and I could tell the remodel exhaustion still hadn't outweighed the excitement of the next step in Franklin Barbecue's evolution/takeover. Stacy gave Julie a pair of $20 gift certificates and said "we'll see you guys soon."

We will be going back to Franklin Barbecue again and again – gift certificates or no – so we thought we'd share their generosity with you (with the Franklin's blessing, of course).

So here it is:

Write a love letter to barbecue.

Tell us of your sordid pasts, your smoking hot love affairs, how you just can't stop loving barbecue no matter how hard you try. Tell us what you want, tell us what you need. Tell us everything.

But you must WRITE. Not type. This must be analog – pen, pencil, crayon, marker on paper, cardboard, grocery bag, sauce-stained butcher paper or your finest stationery. Whatever you need to get the job done.

Submissions may be scanned or photographed and emailed with hi-res images to us@foiegrashotdog.com. Or, if you'd like to send it via USPS (bonus old school points), shoot us an email and we'll provide you with an address. The deadline is Janurary 31, 2011.

Two love letters will be selected, and the two $20 gift certificates will be awarded.

And that heartbreakingly good Franklin Barbecue brisket can be yours. 

The prize. © Ryan Schierling

Franklin Barbecue.

To be perfectly honest, I do not know anything about Aaron Franklin. I do not know where he grew up or where he honed his barbecue skills. 

Aaron Franklin, serving up Franklin Barbecue. © Ryan Schierling

I do know there are a great number of mouth-watering disciples proselytizing furiously for Franklin. Magazines (the November 2010 issue of Food & Wine heralded Franklin Barbecue as one of the best U.S. restaurant openings), newspapers (Austin Chronicle and Dallas Observer have effused) and local food blogs (too many to mention) fall all over Franklin.

I have tried my best to avoid influence. 

I subscribe to the mantra of "believe nothing of what you hear and only half of what you see."

Taste is the truth, the way and the light.

But, I want to believe. 

It's nearly 2011. "Trailer food," once heralded as the next wave of culinary adventure, is already being lambasted as played-out, from Portland to Pensacola. Too popular, too quickly, they said, and now the food-hipsters are haters. 

But, as I find out, Franklin is not trailer food. Open only a little more than a year, there are a pair of enormous propane tanks that have been converted to smoke meat, and apparently, communicate with the Gods. The white and aquamarine trailer serves only as food dispatch and cash-out, an ever-so-brief altar between the heat and the eat. 

Ah, yes. The eat.