The Alchemy of Smoke and Meat

A road-trip guide to the temples of Texas barbecue.

By Travis Waddington

 When the screen door slaps closed behind you as you enter Smitty's Market, you have to pause while your senses adjust. A moment ago, you were walking through the town square of Lockhart under the blinding Texas glare. It's even hotter inside than it was out, but it's dark and smoky. As your vision recovers, you find yourself in a cavernous hallway of smoke-blackened brick lighted mostly by the flames licking up from the floor at the other end. Drawn forward by the mouthwatering aroma of smoking meat, you take your place in line next to an oak fire drafting its smoke into one of the four long brick pits.

It is hard to avoid words like "temple" and "church" when talking about a place like Smitty's, which for 113 years (99 of them as Kreuz Market) has been serving some of the best barbecue in Texas. It is the oldest meat market in a town that the state legislature in 1999 declared the "barbecue capital of Texas." Texans take being Texan seriously, and there is nothing more Texan than barbecue.

When I say barbecue I don't mean anything to do with sauces or rubs or glazes or all of the other tricks that non-Texans can associate with the word. I mean the simple alchemy of smoke and meat. In a state so big, there are many different styles of barbecue. The garlicky, chile-spiced, intensely fatty beef links of the East Texas piney woods bear little culinary relation to the salty, crisp-edged, juicy mesquite-fired pork chops of the rocky Hill Country, and both are distinct from the transcendent briskets of the blackland prairies of Central Texas, minimally spiced with nothing more than salt and pepper and transformed by smoke and time. But it is all barbecue, and Texans take it all religiously. We make pilgrimages to eat at sacred spots, and we enthusiastically debate the state of the art.

Back when I was in seventh grade, a writer in Texas Monthly (the "national magazine of Texas" is a venerable source of barbecue lore) proclaimed:

We Texans hold certain truths to be self-evident: Davy Crockett was the most fearless freedom fighter who ever lived, Buddy Holly was the greatest rock 'n' roller, the Dallas Cowboys are America's Team, and the best barbecue in the world is pit-smoked in Taylor, Lockhart, Bastrop, Elgin, and Luling, along the Central Texas Barbecue Belt.

But today I come to sing the praises of Llano, where in minutes you can get nearly every kind of barbecue available on that belt and then some. I submit that Llano, where the meat cooks directly over the fire, is the true Barbecue Capital of Central Texas and thus of the world.

Dad took a day off of work, the family bundled into the car and we drove the 220 miles from Dallas to Llano. The cabrito I got on that trip remains, 20 years later, the best goat I've ever tasted. And in case you think this is just Waddington family eccentricity, head on over to Franklin Barbecue in Austin. It's so popular that in order to be sure you'll get any brisket, you must show up by 10 a.m., an hour before they open, and stand in line in the parking lot until you are served sometime in the early afternoon. That's not just weekends. It's like that every day and has been for years.

Such zeal is the context for Daniel Vaughn's "The Prophets of Smoked Meat: A Journey Through Texas Barbecue." Mr. Vaughn's website, Full Custom Gospel BBQ, has for some years been the most reliable blog about barbecue. Just recently, Texas Monthly created the new post of "barbecue editor" for him.

The book is an account of eight epic barbecue trips. The author and a photographer-friend, Nicholas McWhirter, traverse the different regions of the state, often with specific destinations in mind but adhering to a single staggering axiom: They will stop and review every non-chain barbecue restaurant they pass. At the end of each chapter is a quick tally, and the numbers are impressive: "7 Days, 2,232 Miles, 30 BBQ Joints" reads the end of a long tour through South Texas; a shorter journey through southeast Texas numbers "2 Days, 781 Miles, 15 BBQ Joints." It all adds up to "35 Days, 10,343 Miles, 186 BBQ Joints." For reference, the radius of the earth is 3,959 miles.

Mr. Vaughn's enthusiasm for his subject matter is contagious. It is hard not to drop everything and hit the road when you read about the brisket at Zimmerhanzel's Bar-B-Que in Smithville: "The lean brisket was still moist, with a beautiful, translucent quarter-inch line of fat running along the top. The slices from the point had luscious fat running through every inch and a natural sweetness from the concentrated flavors on the darkened edges. All of it was eminently smoky and divinely tender." If that's not tantalizing enough, the book is filled with Mr. McWhirter's beautiful photographs documenting the food, the barbecue pits and Texas itself.

The reviews can sound similar, but Mr. Vaughn's aim is not poetry. He is interested in accuracy. Like a sommelier, he has a specific functional vocabulary that helps him to gauge, remember and compare the qualities of different spots' barbecue. Rib meat should not be "falling off the bone" but should "come off easily with a gentle tug." Briskets should be "well-seasoned," "tender," "moist" and ideally "buttery," with plenty of "bold smokiness" delivered by a "thick black crust" and "velvety," "well-rendered" fat. Too often, the author is confronted with briskets that are "soggy," "spongy," "chewy," "insufficiently smoky" or "dry" to the point of "crumbling."

Mr. Vaughn is an unforgiving critic, and some of his most evocative writing occurs in the negative reviews: "As it reached my nose the same natural reflex that would keep you from ingesting a lit cigar went to work." "When I pulled the slice apart, it remained intact but stretched out like an accordion. This was not a good sign, and this wasn't good brisket." "The iron-rich offal flavors coated my mouth while the visceral aroma of cow guts clogged my nostrils. More hot sauce, please."

My first free weekend after digging into "The Prophets of Smoked Meat" found me in Kyle, Texas. I had driven past the Central Texas town on the interstate more times than I can count, but I had never stopped there. Following Mr. Vaughn's footsteps, I found Milt's Pit BBQ, placed an order to go and ate it on the trunk of my car. The restaurant wasn't old or storied, but Mr. Vaughn had written of the brisket that a "line of smoke-tinged fat lined the top of every slice, and each bite nearly melted on my tongue it was so tender." He was right. It was great brisket. He was right about the ribs, too—a heavy rub had been applied, but in this case the result was quite good. I noticed something that weekend as I made the barbecue rounds through Austin and up to Taylor: I was using Mr. Vaughn's vocabulary to think about my food, and it was helping me to focus my attention on the many different aspects of the barbecue. I've been eating and paying attention to great smoked meat for most of my life, but reading this book has increased my capacity to enjoy it.

Yet while "The Prophets of Smoked Meat" will spur you to seek out particular pits, it is not a collection of reviews or a reference book. It is a narrative, intended to be read from cover to cover. What emerges from page after page of barbecue is a rich portrait of Texas as a whole. The state's history, its geology and geography, its demographics and economics, the current tension with Mexico—all of these are discussed in order better to understand barbecue. Discussing the prevalence of meat markets in Central Texas, for instance, Mr. Vaughn notes: "In the 19th century, the ports of Galveston and Indianola were major points of entry for German, Polish, and Czech immigrants. The two cities couldn't contain them all, so they made their way up to Fayetteville, La Grange, Industry, Schulenburg, Panna Maria, and Praha (the Czech pronunciation of the old capital, Prague)."

The book of which "Prophets" most reminds me is Kermit Lynch's classic account of traveling through France's wine regions searching for the best traditional winemakers: "Adventures on the Wine Route" (1988). The differences are numerous, of course. One is about France and wine, the other about Texas and meat; the prose reflects this. Mr. Lynch's book is full of individual character studies; in the space he devotes to a single winemaker, Mr. Vaughn may discuss 10 or 20 barbecue joints. But each book re-creates in the reader its author's love for his subject. When Mr. Lynch visits a favorite old winery to discover that the son has taken over and modernized the place, you can feel the knife-edge of his frustrated disgust. You rejoice with Mr. Vaughn when, after a long series of mediocre modern sausages, he stumbles by chance on a 100-year-old restaurant in Beaumont, Texas, that still serves proper beef links. And while each book focuses almost monomaniacally on a narrow culinary subject, the spirits of the respective regions emerge powerfully from the discussions.

The soul of Texas lies quietly in its back roads and rural towns and in the empty, perfectly flat plains sitting under the wide sky. Daniel Vaughn's quest for barbecue has sent him out to these far-flung places, along miles and miles of highway, and the resulting narrative evokes that soul more accurately than anything else I have ever read.

—Mr. Waddington teaches mathematics at the Texas Military Institute in San Antonio and spends too many of his weekends eating barbecue.

A version of this article appeared May 25, 2013, on page C15 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: The Alchemy of Smoke and Meat.

The book is titled:  The Prophets of Smoked Meat by Daniel Vaughn