XL Food & Drink

Central Texas Barbecue Guide - Sausage

Vital links to knowing what's hot and what's hotter

By Dale Rice
AMERICAN-STATESMAN RESTAURANT CRITIC
Wednesday, June 07, 2006

It's all in the nomenclature.

"Hey, wait a minute," you protest. "This isn't rocket science; it's barbecue."

Sure, it is. You can walk into Smitty's Market in Lockhart and order sausage to go with your brisket, and they'll throw a link on the butcher paper for you. No problem.

But does that really mean you know anything?

Vocabulary is key, and barbecue knowledge is barbecue power.

It starts with the posted signs. There are prices for "hot" and "cold" on the wall, just a few feet from the flames that send the all-important smoke and heat into the pit. Just in case you thought hot referred to the level of spice, heat in this case is literal. Hot will get you a warm, cooked sausage to eat there. Cold will get you one to take home and cook yourself.

That's level one. Level two has secret code words.

If you want to step up and order at Smitty's like some longtime Lockhart resident, you have to know about "juicy" and "dry."

Juicy describes the regular sausage pulled out of the pit. Get to the table, cut that link open and the "juice" — a polite way to refer to all that liquid fat — spurts out all over the butcher paper, forming shallow pools of grease that affirm just how good the meat is.

A dry link has been left on the heat much longer. It's beginning to shrivel just a little bit on the outside, like the very beginnings of pepperoni and summer sausage casings. That's because that extra time on the heat has burned away more of the fat. Cut into it that link and you get a fraction of the grease.

There's also another change that takes place over the heat at Smitty's. The sausage, made from 85 percent beef and 15 percent pork, turns spicier and more intense — a phenomenon that the guys who operate the pit will assure you is not your imagination.

With all the health crazes to hit the world these days, no one has yet suggested to owner Nina Schmidt Sells that she alter the decades-old recipe used to make hundreds of Smitty's sausages each day.

"We haven't even thought about changing our recipe," Sells said.

"Some want it juicier, some drier," she said. All they have to do is ask. In fact, Sells said, a customer will occasionally complain if he perceives he got a dry sausage. It's clear, based on the proportions in the pit, that juicy is the more popular version.

That style, where the grease puddles on the plate or paper, is by far the most common type of sausage found in Central Texas (and I have dozens of stops to feed that impression).

However, at Zimmerhanzel's in Smithville, I cut into the all-beef sausage and no pools of grease formed. Then I made my own sausage wrap, and the white bread didn't become saturated with fat. On top of that, the link was full of flavor.

What's wrong with this picture?

It turns out that owner Bert Bunte, who makes the sausage fresh each morning, meticulously trims the fat as he's preparing the beef for grinding.

"He doesn't put as much fat in there," said wife Dana Bunte. "We don't put any fillers in that hold the grease in there. I think that may be the main difference. And it's all beef, so there's no pork fat."

Was there a special reason for making that style of sausage? No.

"That's just how he's always made them," she said.

Beyond the amount of "juice," sausages vary in texture from place to place, with most barbecue joints making a coarse-grind product while some turn out a find-grind sausage.

Smitty's, for example, delivers a tasty, coarse-textured meat in its popular link. In contrast, Pok-e-Jo's, the Austin chain with six area locations, produces a fine-textured, delicious link that is more reminiscent of a bratwurst or a hot dog.

There's also a wide variety of flavors out there, with some spots such as Meyer's in Elgin selling both the beef and the pork-garlic sausage ready-to-eat and even more flavors prepackaged at the meat counter.

Then there's the level of spice, which definitely is in the taste buds of the beholder.

The "hot" sausage from Southside Market in Elgin doesn't supply nearly the kick that its name implies. To give the sausage wider appeal a few decades back, they removed some of the red pepper.

Likewise, the spicy pork sausage at Rudy Mikeska's in Taylor is only moderately zesty.

But move next door to Louie Mueller's and you'll find two varieties to put some heat in your lunch: the all-beef jalapeño and the all-beef chipotle sausages.

That chipotle one is sneaky. On first bite, it seems to deliver medium heat, but then on the second bite, the slow burn takes over and spreads. Suddenly you realize you've set the embers glowing. It's no wonder one of the regulars calls it "the creeper."

Over at Luling Bar-B-Que, the jalapeño sausage one recent weekend put even Mueller's in the icebox. Perhaps it was just that particular batch of jalapeños that went into the links, but that all-beef jalapeño sausage lit a fire that lingered at least 10 minutes after the last bite.

But, hey, isn't that what good barbecue is all about?

drice@statesman.com; 445-3859