XL Cover Story: The eatin's just begun

In Central Texas, the smoke may never clear on the debate over whether to use barbecue sauce

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Photo by Matt Rourke/AA-S Sauce, baby, sauce. Ignacio Grimaldo mops it onto a slab of meat at the Salt Lick in Driftwood.

The year was 1839, Frank Brown recalled in his 19th-century annals, when "the capital was to be removed from Houston to the Colorado and that a public sale of lots was to be had.

"The first sale occurred early August," Brown wrote. "A barbeque dinner was partaken of near the river on the day ..."

Now, 165 years later, we're still eating meat roasted over the fire, a tradition much older than the Lone Star State itself.

But over that century and a half, two camps have emerged in Texas, with loyalties as divided as Longhorns and Aggies. This fight, though, isn't over eating a steer; it's about whether to sauce it.

It boils down to this question: Does the best-tasting barbecue in Texas get all the flavor it needs from the smoke of a fire, or does a good coat of dark liquid improve it?

"I like it plain," says Bobby Mueller, son of the legendary Louie Mueller and owner of the famed barbecue joint in Taylor. "I'd rather stick with the natural wood-smoked flavor."

"I love barbecue sauce," says Art Blondin, owner of Artz Rib House, a popular Austin spot. "I like the overall flavor of it all, especially if it has a little bit of heat. I think it adds to the barbecue experience."

A line has been drawn in the coals.

The smoky divide

Austin sits atop the geographic fault where East collides with West -- the eastern United States and West Texas, that is.

The smoke-only tradition, Blondin speculates, rises from the cowboy cooks who manned the chuck wagons of old West Texas.

"When barbecue was part of the chuck wagon," he says, "I doubt they had anything to do with sauce. Sauce would have been in the way."

"That is the right answer," says Shirley Richardson, an expert in the field. She and husband Elmer run the Bryson Trading Post in Bryson, a small town northwest of Fort Worth where they build chuck wagons.

Photo by Matt Rourke/AA-S At Kreuz Market it's the smoke that gives the sausage, ribs and brisket their flavor. Even if you want sauce, you won't find it at this Lockhart restaurant.

Although cowboys often carried tomatoes in "seal tight" cans in their saddlebags to stave off hunger and thirst if they couldn't make it back to camp for the next meal, they didn't use any form of it to flavor the meat, she says.

Coincidentally, it was around the time when chuck wagons were active in the West Texas cattle drives in the second half of the 1800s that tomatoes first began making their way into barbecue sauce.

In fact, tomatoes were Johnnies-come-lately in the barbecue sauce bowl.

The earliest reference that Steven Raichlen, author of the "The Barbecue! Bible" and "BBQ USA," could find to barbecue sauce in the United States was in the early to mid-1700s, when a recipe described how to baste roasted lamb with liquid and butter.

After that, the sauces of Virginia gained fame. Made with vinegar, hot pepper flakes, salt and pepper, that flavoring became the leading condiment of the Carolinas.

"It's not a sauce you can eat by itself; it's a mix-with-the-meat sauce," says Raichlen, the host of the "Barbecue University" cooking show on PBS.

He's also not convinced that the tradition of smoke-only meats is an outgrowth of the chuck wagons.

"Maybe it was cowboys, maybe it was butchers, maybe it's the very nature of roasting meat," he says. Regardless, the sweet tomato sauces that are popular in eastern Texas were largely an invention of the Midwest, where a sauce with liquid smoke is known as "Kansas City style," and one without the smoke is called "St. Louis."

In Central Texas alone, there are hundreds of variations on that theme, as well as ways in which restaurants use them.

Blondin makes a compromise bridge over the East-West divide. First, he smokes the meat without adding any sauce. Then, as an order is being prepared, he coats the meat lightly with sauce and tosses it on the grill to finish it, creating almost a crust of sauce.

Other places, however, go whole hog when it comes to that wet seasoning.

A Texas two-step

In Driftwood, west of Austin, Scott Roberts is keeping alive a 130-year family tradition at the Salt Lick.

His ancestors, who came from the Carolinas, Georgia and Mississippi, brought their vinegar-based saucing techniques with them when they arrived in the area in 1867.

That condiment, Roberts says, still functions in multiple ways.

Photo by Matt Rourke/AA-S Once the meat comes off the pit at the Salt Lick, add more sauce for an even tastier chunk of brisket.

It's a two-step process. In the first, the meat is lightly coated with sauce to help retain moisture. Later, the meat is slathered with sauce as it finishes cooking directly over the coals.

"If you use a proper sauce (his has plenty of sugar, but no tomatoes), you're going to get this caramelization process," Roberts says. "It's one more flavor that others don't have. It does not interfere with the smokiness; I think it enhances it."

But what does he do when he dines out?

"If I don't eat barbecue at my place, I go to Kreuz's. Kreuz's doesn't sauce, and it's wonderful. It's a matter of how good you are."

At Kreuz Market in Lockhart, it's all about the smoky goodness of a post oak fire, says Richard Schmidt, the second generation of one of the area's most well-known barbecue families. He feels so strongly, he doesn't even put any sauce on the table.

"Beef or pork -- either one tastes pretty good," he says. "I feel like if you use basic seasoning and cook with proper wood, you've got something to be pretty proud of. We go to a lot of trouble to do that. We don't want to cover it up with a lot of sauce. That's the way I was raised."

Whether it's tradition or taste, sauce or no sauce, the beef that Texas is famous for or the pork that is central elsewhere, barbecue produces passions seldom found in other food groups.

It's a Lone Star attitude voiced by Roberts:

"Barbecue -- with or without sauce -- is the best eating you can do."