That means pork chops served with a veal demi-glace fortified with apple liqueur and served with apple grits and fried apple chips, hickory-grilled lamb with wild mushroom-huitlacoche (corn smut) enchiladas and a seared fois gras corn pudding tamale with a pineapple mole and other envelope-pushing dishes starring Texas ingredients.
Drop down below the clouds and you'll hit a cousin of Tex-Mex. It's the ranch-inspired cooking best exemplified by Grady Spears, the chef who developed the Reata restaurants in Fort Worth and Alpine.
Spears recently cut his ties to the restaurants, but his urban cowboy cooking style lives on there. You see it the moment you bite into the beef tenderloin-cilantro-pecan tamales, the giant charbroiled rib-eye, the yuppified chicken-fried steak and the dessert menu's sarsaparilla float.
As the nation's leading cattle producers, Texans take their steak very, very seriously, with steakhouses as universal as the Furr's and Luby's cafeterias that seem to pop up at every turn. But where to find a true slab of Texas beef? Why not go to the source, I thought to myself, as I motored north on Main Street out of downtown Fort Worth toward the city's legendary stockyards.
Although the giant complex--it was the nation's second largest, after Chicago's--hasn't been active since the 1960s, the area is now a major historical landmark and tourist trap, and cattlemania, both real and trompe l'oeil, is everywhere. If you can't get a good steak there, I reasoned, you probably can't get one anywhere.
My suspicions were confirmed as I strolled into 53-year-old Cattlemen's Steakhouse. It was as soothingly forthright and masculine as any self-respecting Texas steakhouse should be: dark wood, brick floors, red-leather barrel chairs, an open broiler, walls covered with pictures of prize-winning bovines.
Within a few minutes I was tearing into a marvelous slab of corn-fed and finely aged Texas beef, a beautifully marbled, butter-knife tender 11-ounce rib-eye, lightly charred on the outside, pink, velvety and mouth-wateringly satisfying inside. Was it the best steak I've ever eaten? No. But for its price, $20, it was right up there.
This is a beer-drinking state, too. It's available everywhere, even at drive-ins, from the Bun 'N' Barrel in San Antonio to Keller's in Dallas.
Keller's is a hoot. Like all good drive-ins, it looks like 40 miles of bad road; a tumbleweed rolling across its parking lot would not be entirely out of place. On the day I stopped by, true to Texas, nearly every vehicle under the corrugated metal carports was an oversized pickup truck, with the exception of my rental Chevy sedan and three side-by-side, fully-loaded Cadillacs.
Keller's burgers are melt-in-your-mouth perfect, and you've got to love a place that serves Tater Tots, chili fries and cherry-chocolate malts. And beer, which explains the omnipresent "No one under 21 served" signs and the Bud, Coors and Trueto bottles on the carhop's trays.
Chicken-fried steak is served everywhere, although it seems to be the province of the down-home downtown cafes, such as Mama's Daughters', or Lulu's Jailhouse Cafe in San Antonio or Hoover's Cooking in Austin, all social melting pots where judges rub elbows with truckers and retirees share tables with dot-commers, each intent on tucking back heaping plates of cheap stick-to-your-ribs fare.
Which is exactly what chicken-fried steak is: beef cutlets, breaded and fried like chicken, then slathered in thick white gravy flecked with pepper. The diet plate it's not.
Barbecue is as sacred as church in Texas, and Texans worth their ostrich-skin Luccheses will not only have a pointed opinion on their favorite joint but will try to convert the unaffiliated to their own smoky denomination. Practicing this religion is pretty much limited to pit-smoked beef brisket, sliced thick, tender as butter, stacked on a bun and covered in onions. Unless, of course, the subject is ribs, when the meat is always pork.
Barbecued meat is smoked dry--the sauce is added tableside--and the result, if it's done right, is lushly tender meat with multiple layers of deep, richly hued smoked flavor. The best Texas barbecue is astoundingly good; it's easy to see why it's the state's pride and joy.
Recipes:
Top-Notch Tortilla Soup
Corn Griddle Cakes
Cilantro-Pecan Mash
Texas Caviar
Chicken-Fried Steak With Cracked Pepper Gravy
Cracked Pepper Gravy
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