This is not a cookbook by any means.  Anyone looking for a good Texas Barbecue cookbook should pick up The Legends of Texas Barbecue Cook Book by Robb Walsh.  He's done a good job capturing the variety of tastes Texas' best pit bosses have offered up for over a century.  The King pretty much flies by the seat of his pants when it's time to bbq.  Improvisation, not carefully measuring; simple, not overbearing so the meat and the wood speak for themselves.

Meat

Obviously the most important factor when it comes to bbq is the meat itself.  How to cook it, how long to cook it - ergo when to start cooking, what to serve with all depends on the choice of meat.  BBQ doesn't have to take 24 hours, but it can.  A smallish cut of prime rib or a chicken can finish in a couple of hours.  Buy your meat according to the time you can devote to cooking.

Big slabs of ribs take forever to get tender.

Every first time bbq'er should start with a pork butt.  Boston butt is the full name.  Don't ask me why.  It's cut from the shoulder.  Perhaps the butt of the loin?  Anyway, it's hard to screw-up and always tasty.  About 275° for eight hours should do it, you're shooting for an internal temperature of 190-200°.  Cover or wrap it if it starts to get too black for your taste, but don't be afraid to let the outside get pretty dark - there's a lot of meat that needs to get smoke flavor.

Beef brisket, pork picnic shoulders and spare ribs, and mutton are all sorry hunks of meat.  If they aren't cooked low and slow they're tough as a tire.  Flavorful if done properly, a disaster if done wrong.  Ribs especially are tricky.  It takes some practice to hit the sweet spot between tough and mushy, flavorless or oversmoked.  Small racks of ribs are best - look for full racks weighing around 3.25 pounds.  A five pound rack of ribs takes forever to cook; you've almost got to braise them (i.e. wrap them in foil) to get them tender without turning them black as coal.

Sorry cuts of meat are usually cheaper.  Brisket seems to be an exception these days.  Occasionally it's on sale for $0.79/pound, the price it should be every day, but it usually seems to hover around $1.79.  Sick.  Especially when butts go for $1.59.  Don't be afraid to engage or haggle with the butcher.  They're usually willing to cut a deal with you.

I like chopped beef brisket better than the sliced flat.  It takes patience to dig all those tasty, stringy pieces of meat out of the fat cap.  But it's the most flavorful meat with the crispy burnt ends.  A lot of restaurants just chop up the leftover flats from the day before, slather it in sauce and call it chopped beef.  There's not much of the best, real chopped beef on a brisket.  A twelve pound brisket yields about a pound of chopped beef.  That's the King's personal stash.

If twelve-plus hours of cooking time isn't feasible, the only option is to buy a nicer cut of meat.  If it's tender you can cook it faster.  A two inch sirloin steak is as flavorful as brisket and can still be served a little pink.  Pork loins and beef rib roasts will cook in less than six hours.  Beef tenderloin cooks in two hours or less, pork tenderloin can finish in an hour.  The trade off is that the best cuts of meat command the highest prices.

Rather than go to the store with my mind made up about what's going in the cooker, I wait to see what's on sale and adjust the menu accordingly.  Planning ahead is essential.  Chickens need time to brine.  Turkeys need time to thaw.  Brisket needs time to cook.  Start shopping Thursday for a weekend bbq.

Rubs

Some people think the rub makes or breaks bbq, I'm pretty ambivalent.  You have to leave it on for a day or two to get more than just some superficial flavor on thick hunks of meat.  Seems to me that otherwise it mostly runs off; even more so if you use a mop sauce.  The best is a nice salty crust.  A never fail all-purpose rub is Amore garlic paste, kosher salt, and coarse black pepper.  My dry rub recipe is here.  I like Cavender's Greek Seasoning - especially on pork, chicken, or lamb.  Jack's Burger House sells a great seasoned salt. Anything will do in a pinch.  Plain old table salt and ground black pepper work just fine for me.  The rub adds some flavor to the surface but I pay more attention to the cut of meat, how to cook it, and the wood.I can't say I've ever tried to bbq without using at least some kind of seasoning.  At the very least I'd want some salt.  

Kosher salt and fresh cracked black pepper is the best all purpose rub for my money, even better with garlic. I don't like sugar in a rub; sugar doesn't handle heat well and tastes awful when it burns (as I learned when I wasn't paying attention when reducing three cans of Coke to syrup for sauce...).  Save the sugar for your sauce.  Chili powder or any other ground up peppers - like chipotle, dried habaneros or jalapenos - are worth trying.  Cumin and paprika are good and add color.  Fresh herbs are great if you can find them, especially rosemary on lamb and chicken or oregano on a pork butt.  I've never tried curry powder for bbq, but I found some in the pantry.  What's the worst that can happen?  Bad bbq?  I'll take my chances.

Marinades

Liquid marinades are for grilling.  Fajitas and the like.  A good fajita marinade is some olive oil, soy sauce, balsamic vinegar, a little sweet white wine, garlic, an onion cut up, a couple of jalapenos cut up, and a couple dashes of cumin.  Squeeze lime juice on the meat after it's cooked; marinating for too long in a liquid that is too acidic will make the meat tough.  Cook over mesquite for best results.  Technically, putting a dry rub on the night before and refrigerating overnight could be considered marinating.  I'm not a big fan of marinating or injecting anything into hunks of meat that are going to be slow cooked.

Given the option of injecting a butt and cooking it for eight hours or a dry rub and cooking really slow for sixteen hours I'll take the slow cook every time.

Mopping is a completely different thing, altogether.  <Mopping is a completely different thing>   A mop sauce is used for sopping down meat while it cooks to help keep it moist.  Some cuts of meat - pork loin cuts, beef sirloin, lamb, chicken - can benefit from a little basting.  Particularly when cooking at higher temperatures.  Keep the mop sauce warming in a sauce pan on the stove or firebox.  Plain old oil and vinegar works just fine.  Italian dressing is easy.  An onion or two, a few jalapenos, some soy sauce, and some Coke dress up a mop sauce.

Brine

Aaarrrrrrr, so it's brine ye be seekin'

If you've never brined chickens/turkey before putting them on the grill you're really missing out.  The Royal Brine involves bringing an adequate supply of water to a boil, then stirring in salt until it will dissolve no more.  Then a bay leaf, a couple of jalapenos, an onion, whole black peppercorns, a couple of garlic cloves, and maybe a dash of soy.  Let cool before submerging the birds.  Use a heavy porcelain plate to keep the birds completely submerged and refrigerate at least 24 hours.  Pull them out of the refrigerator and let come up to room temperature before you pull them out of the brine.  Drain the the birds and dry them before seasoning.

Brining should work on pork loins or other not-so-fatty cuts of meat as well.

Theoretically, all salt is just NaCl and any should work as well as any other.  I splurge and go for sea salt.  Pickling salt works well too.  It's not iodized and has courser grains.  Course grain Kosher salt is another alternative.  It's probably a waste of money.  Salt is salt.  I'd at least use non-iodized salt for bbq or brine if I go low budget.

I like to cook poultry beer can style - an empty can filled with fruit juice, wine, onion slices, and a jalapeno inserted into the bird's cavity to help steam the bird from the inside.  There are plenty of specially designed beer can chicken racks listed on eBay.  Brined, vertically roasted, steamed and smoked.  That's good chicken.   

Brine works great even for traditional "BBQ chicken" - cooking chicken pieces over direct heat until they are the desired color, then moving to the indirect side and slathered with BBQ sauce until done.  Cooking chicken this way over wood coals is one of my favorite ways prepare chicken.

Wood

Other than the choosing the type of meat to be cooked, selecting the wood has the strongest impact on the flavor of the finished product.  To make good bbq you've got to burn wood.  In Texas, oak, pecan, hickory, and mesquite are the most common cooking woods.  Peach and pear wood is available too if you hunt for it.  Hickory smoked pork is hard to beat.  Hickory and pecan are very similar in flavor.  Oak is a staple in the King's firebox and is probably the best for beef.  Oddly, it's tough to find mesquite in Dallas.  Drive 45 minutes west and it grows like a weed, but trying to get someone to bring it to Dallas costs a fortune.

Cooking wood needs to be well cured - cut, split, and thoroughly dried.  Ideally, dried out of the elements.  My preference is two years, but it's almost impossible to find anyone that sells wood cured that well.  Green wood burns sooty and gives the meat an oily taste.  I wouldn't recommend soaking wood chips in water either.

If stuck with nothing but green wood a helper fire is the way to go.  Start a fire in the box and a fire on the ground at the same time.  By the time the box burns down enough to load the cooker there'll be plenty of coals to feed the firebox.  It's hot work shoveling coals into the firebox to keep the temperature right.  Or, if the firebox has a cooking grate you can cook a little faster this way, cowboy bbq style, grilling over the coals at 18" or so with direct heat until the meat looks the right color then moving to indirect heat until it reaches serving temperature.

Wood goes a lot faster than you think.  But more than you think you'll need.  A lot more.  Start with a cord.  It will only get better as you work your way through the pile.  Even better if you can get split cords with some combination of oak, pecan, hickory or mesquite.  Never pass up an opportunity to stockpile good cooking wood.

Foil

I feel like I'm cheating when I use foil.  When everything is perfect there should never be any need to wrap meat in foil.  Things are rarely perfect.  Heavy Duty Aluminum Foil can salvage an otherwise hopeless bbq disaster.  It's better to work toward getting all the variables worked out, but sometimes circumstances dictate wrapping the meat to keep it moist until it's done.

Stainless beer can chicken cookers, $2.86 each at Academy

Weird thing I've noticed about foil, sometimes after refrigerating meat wrapped in foil it looks like the foil has been eaten through in spots.  There's holes with oxidation around them.  So I always wrap in plastic first, then foil.  It won't work while the meat is still in the cooker; but once it's time to pull it off and let it rest wrap it in cellophane first.

Since I'm currently cooking in a smaller pit than I really need, I have to rely on foil more than I'd like.  When meat is wrapped tightly so steam doesn't escape and finished in the pit it can leach out up to a cup of moisture and leave the meat stewing in it's own juice.  Great for making sauce, but it can dry out meat and make it less tender than it could be.  A large aluminum roaster pan with a loose tent of foil over the meat lets the smoke continue to penetrate without oversmoking, while letting the meat breathe and stay tender.  A butt can essentially cook this way forever, a brisket needs to be completely wrapped when it's done and kept at holding temperature until serving.

The heavier gauge foil the better.  Don't skimp and get stuck with an oversized roll of thin, flimsy foil.

Sauce

Not that the King's bbq needs any sauce.  But when you make a sandwich with a couple of slices of Texas toast the bread can get a little dry.  Hell, beef tournedos are served with a demi-glaze.  So there's no shame in serving sauce on the side - although you've got to wonder when you get a platter of ribs swimming in sauce like I got in North Carolina.  The real vinegary mustard sauce they serve with the pulled pork in NC was pretty tasty, though.  I thought the pork kinda tasted like it was cooked in an oven, but I really liked that sauce.

Sauce starts with ketchup, mustard, vinegar, brown sugar, Tabasco, soy, and Worcestershire.  Simmer with a onion cut in half, a couple of jalapenos and garlic cloves, a bay leaf, whole peppercorns, whatever's in the kitchen and seems right.  Sweeten or heaten to taste.  Honey and real maple syrup instead of brown sugar for sweetness.  Fruit and jalapeno jellies are tasty starting points for sauce.  Reducing three cans of Coke to a syrupy consistency makes a base for a great pork sauce.

One thing that makes any sauce better even if you're using the bottled stuff from Kraft is to add meat drippings.  Make sure you carve on something which will catch all the juice that runs out when you cut up bbq.  Especially if you finish your meat wrapped in foil; there could be a cup of drippings in the foil with the meat when it's done.  Put the drippings in the refrigerator for a while and the grease will congeal on top and leave the aspic-like au jus underneath.  Simmer it into the sauce at low heat. 

Ketchup-based sweet and hot seems to be everyone's favorite kind of sauce in my neck of the woods.  Easy enough.  I try to keep it on the runny side so it coats the meat without covering it up.  So it catches the sweet receptors at the tip of the tongue and the tanginess and heat mix with the flavor of the meat.

There's no bigger drag than meat drowned in sauce.  It should compliment the bbq, not overwhelm and mask it's taste.  Less is better.

Side items

Thick slices of Texas Toast makes the best sandwiches.

The King's Million Dollar Birthday Queso

Texas' best potato salad

Texas pinto beans

The King's real Texas guacamole

Potatoes - The King says bake 'em or fry 'em.  Or make potato salad.  Sometimes you just want to serve a hot side besides beans.  Really well prepared fries are hard to beat.  And a baked potato goes with just about everything.  But it's a real pain to make fries for a large group of people and there aren't many paper plates that can stand up to a fully-loaded baked potato.  Now I know what a lot of people are thinking - mashed potatoes and gravy.  Sorry, seems like baby food to me.  I've never liked mashed potatoes.  Maybe because mom used to try and kill me with lumps in my mashed potatoes.  Give me home-cut fries and gravy.

Fries

Baked potatoes

Scalloped

Texas BBQ King Sausage Recipes

Smoked Italian Sausage

Smoked Beef Hot Links

Smoked Jalapeno Sausage

Smoked Kielbasa

Classic Texas Beef BBQ Sausage 

Smoked chorizo recipe

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