We've been locked up in the house long enough! After almost a year of this pandemic and restrictions lifting, we were ready to dwindle down the stock pile of vacation days and enjoy a safe, socially distanced trip in the RV. Warm weather and good Barbecue were our only requirements. Time for a Texas BBQ Roadtrip!
We packed up the the 44ft travel trailer and left the Chicago area February 2nd with everything looking good in Texas. Mid 70s predicted all week with a couple of cold days looming at the end of the trip. Hardy Midwesterners like ourselves should be able to handle that easily. We happily loaded up our shorts, flipflops, swimsuits and a few lightweight jackets and pants in sub zero wind chill. Giddy to soon see all that snow melt off the camper!
The plan was to stop our first night in Springfield, MO (home of the world's largest fork) and spend our 2nd night as close to Austin, TX, as we could get. There, we were planned to pick up my son and daughter in law, enjoy a little barbecue and then head down to South Padre Island for a few days of beach time before spending the next week devouring smoked meats.
The List
I had a list of about eight barbecue joints I wanted to see after South Padre. Mapping them out, they resembled the spokes of a wheel spinning off of Austin, Texas. So we decided that Austin should be our home base. An added bonus, my sister and her husband live in Austin!
Here was my barbecue order of priority:
Franklin Barbecue, Austin
Salt Lick BBQ, Driftwood
Kreuz Marketplace, Lockhart
Black's BBQ, Lockhart
Terry Black's BBQ, Austin
Heim BBQ, Ft. Worth
1775 Texas Pit BBQ, College Station
Lockhart Smokehouse, Dallas
Franklin Barbecue
The HIGHEST priority to me was Franklin Barbecue. I love Aaron Franklin's book and read it like the Bible. The man is a smoked meat genius. Franklin Barbecue is reported to have the best brisket in the land and I couldn't wait to add my name to the list of raving fans. I had read that people line up in front of his restaurant at 6am to place their orders. Like most Texas BBQ joints, they are open for lunch and when the meat is gone...it's gone! If you're not early, you are hungry.
Fortunately, we stopped 90 minutes north of Austin in Waco, by the end of our second day of driving. #thrilled I looked up Franklin's website and found out that of all eight of my destinations, this was the only one that was not open for dine-in service. Just as I was about to cry myself to sleep for not doing my homework earlier, I discovered the silver lining in my meat storm cloud. Aaron Franklin's delicious brisket was MUCH easier to obtain. I just had to place an online order, give a specific time I would be there to pick up and they would deliver it to the trunk of our car. Easy peasy!! No waiting in line!
I ordered a ridiculous amount of food. 2lbs of brisket, 2lbs of pulled pork, 2lbs of pork ribs and 4 sausage links as well as coleslaw and beans with chopped brisket. It came with an entire loaf of Butternut bread and a container of pickles. We picked up our son and daughter-in-law and we swung by Franklin with our giant RV to pick up our order. An excellent, organized process! Giant bags of meat in hand, we got in the car, headed toward San Antonio and stopped at the first area we could find. We pulled in, took out the picnic table and chairs and dug in.
This is where I would like to show you pictures of our glorious meat haul, however, I was so excited about eating this brisket that I completely forgot to take any pictures. Instead you will have to enjoy this image of my family, poised with our forks.
My one sentence review: This brisket is so good, I actually wept (not kidding this was an emotional experience).
All of the meat was out-of-this-world delicious! The ribs were absolute perfection; that perfect melty tender yet firm enough to stay on the bone with a delicious Texas sweet sauce. The pulled pork was juicy and flavorful. The sausage had just enough spice and plenty of smoke. But ladies...that brisket....
The flavor of the rub and smoke on the brisket combined were perfectly balanced to bring out that beefy flavor. I tasted oak without being completely overwhelmed by it. The meat just fell apart, it was so tender and juicy. Franklin's side dishes, as he admits in his cookbook, are not much to brag about. His focus is 100% on the meat and it shows. A 10 out of 10 in my book. I would stand in line for hours for this barbecue!
After visiting the Alamo we drove the 8 hour trek to South Padre. After a few days with the kids, we dropped them off at the Brownsville airport so they could head back to Illinois. We trekked back to Austin for more barbecue!
My sister and her husband gave us a heads up that the weather was forecasting snow near the end of the trip. Not to worry, she assured us that in the five years she has lived in Austin, it has snowed before, then within the next day it warms up enough to melt it away. Ok.....we're from Chicago, we can handle a day or two of snow. As long as the barbecue places are open!
Kreuz Market
After setting up camp in Hudson Bend, the next day we headed southwest to Lockhart, TX to Kreuz Market. I knew about their legendary smokers; these large brick boxes with lids so heavy they have to be operated with a pulley system. The boxes are built over a pit that has a fire on one end and exhausted at the other so the heat easily moves across the approximate 20 feet of cooking space. When you enter the double doors the entire set up right behind the counter. The butcher paper is laid down, your order is loaded onto the paper, paid for and then folded up. You walk through another set of double doors into the dining room with your butcher-paper-meat-pouch and find a seat.
In the dining room you can order some sides. I highly recommend the creamed corn! As for the meat, we ordered the brisket, the pork ribs and a sausage ring.
My one sentence review: The best sausage in Texas.
Where most sausage is densely packed, Kreuz is the perfect combination of fat and meat to create a light and extremely flavorful sausage. I only needed utensils to pierce the perfectly smoked casing of that sausage for the satisfying "pop" and then ....pure pork bliss! The ribs and the brisket were good, but compared to the sausage they were second best. We topped our meal off with some homemade banana pudding. Delicious!
Salt Lick BBQ
The weather was starting to get a little dicey. We saw first hand how Texans handle icy rain. It's not pretty. Salt trucks and snow plows do not exist here. There's a reason they call it "Hill Country" and those hilly, icy roads mixed with drivers that do not navigate on slick surfaces annually is a dangerous combo. The predicted weather was a whopping 5-6" of snow in the next day or so and Texans were heading to the H.E.B. in droves.
Not us. We were heading to Driftwood for barbecue.
Salt Lick's barbecue pit is a thing of beauty. This handmade open brick pit was still covered in meat despite the smaller crowd at the restaurant. It greets you as soon as you walk in the door. The entire property is breathtaking. Expansive picnic grounds, a gazebo for a band, plenty of parking and clean washrooms at every turn had me longing for a warm day, It was incredibly easy to picture ourselves bringing a cooler and making a day of it here. Due to the ice storm and Salt Lick's out of the way location, the large indoor dining room entertained us and two other occupied tables. I want to come back to Driftwood and experience the atmosphere as it was intended.
And....the food! Here's what we ordered: brisket, pulled pork, pork ribs and sausage with coleslaw, potato salad and beans on the side. Every barbecue joint has some version of cobbler and I wasn't leaving Texas without trying some, so we ordered a 1/2 peach, 1/2 berry cobbler with ice cream (delicious!) We still had room in our ever expanding bellies so we ordered these beauties....
BEEF RIBS! If you ever want to feel like you're Fred Flintstone, I highly recommend taking a picture of yourself wearing your best leopard print toga and chomping down on a beef rib. And you should order that beef rib HERE.
All of the meat we consumed was excellent, however both the pork and beef ribs were my favorite. What absolutely blew me away was their BBQ Sauce! We really enjoyed that sauce on the pork rib, however, when the server brought the beef ribs to our table, I was convinced there was a different, sweeter sauce on those beautiful brontosaurus ribs. But no, it was the same sauce, mopped on and caramelized into sugary perfection. Not to mention the smoke ring and bark on these ribs was just breathtaking.
My one sentence review: It's ALL good, but order the beef ribs and on your way out, pick up several bottles of that BBQ sauce.
Terry Black's BBQ
Texas got a little break from the ice but was predicting 5 inches of snow the following day so we knew we needed to find something near our home base of Austin for our next BBQ stop. I had Black's Barbecue high on my list, the oldest and most legendary of the Lockhart establishments. But there was no traveling down icy, hilly backroads to Lockhart with the predicted weather. I saw that Black's had a place in Austin but when we got there with my sister and brother in law in tow, it was closed for in person dining due to the pandemic. My sister had been raving about the "other" Black's BBQ.....Terry Black's. Same family, different restaurant. So we headed a few blocks away to Terry Black's.
Terry Black's uses traditional barrel style offset cooker similar to Franklin's set up. A well organized ordering process had us picking sides first and then selecting our meat. The meat is carved in front of you and you can get as picky as you want about what and how you want the server to cut. We ordered brisket, pork ribs and beef ribs, while my sister and her husband got some sausage and pulled pork so we could sample a little. The mac and cheese, creamed corn and green beans rounded out our sides with a couple of banana puddings to top it off.
My one sentence review: The best pork ribs I ate all week and a fine selection of funny and delightfully snarky BBQ.t-shirts.
Yes indeed, get those pork ribs with a side of that delicious mac and cheese!
This is where we should be eating more barbecue.
Instead we were stuck in an RV for five days. It snowed, it snowed some more, the temperatures dropped to the single digits, there was ice, a loss of running water (we never lost electricity thankfully) and then two days of thawing. Texas was at an absolute standstill. Fortunately, we had plenty of leftover barbecue to survive on. Our campground hosts at La Hacienda RV Park in Hudson Bend we fantastic through it all. This is their home, yet they were communicative and compassionate to their customers while enduring some stressful times of their own. When the weather finally cleared and the 1,100 mile trip home was deemed safe to travel, it was time to leave the Loan Star State with my barbecue list incomplete.
I returned home with some wonderful memories, a stock pile of t-shirts, sauces and rubs and a longing to return, very soon. Despite the weather, Texas left a wonderful impression on me. Aside from the outstanding food, we enjoyed views of beautiful Lake Travis, shopping in downtown Austin, drives through the breathtaking Hill Country and good down-to-earth human beings.
Texas.....I will be back.
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