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HOUBBQ News & Info

2024 Houston Barbecue Festival

Announcing the 2025 Houston Barbecue Festival

February 25, 2025 No Comments

Get ready, barbecue lovers! On April 6th, the Houston Barbecue Festival is back, celebrating 12 years of smoky, mouthwatering tradition. This annual event showcases the passion, dedication, and craft of Houston’s top pitmasters, drawing fans from near and far for an unforgettable culinary experience. This year’s festival is literally star-studded. Seven participating barbecue joints recently received recognition from the Michelin Guide, including the rare and prestigious one-star award granted to CorkScrew BBQ in Spring. That’s not all – Houston’s barbecue scene continues to shine with numerous additional accolades, from Texas Monthly’s Top 50 list to the Houston Chronicle’s Top 100 rankings.

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Beef rib at Killen's Barbecue

The evolution of the Texas barbecue beef rib

February 22, 2025 No Comments

The evolution of the Texas barbecue beef rib. In the beginning, there were beef back ribs. In 2010, I was on a pilgrimage to the legendary Salt Lick BBQ near Austin and sat down at an expansive picnic table to order most of the menu. All the usual suspects were on offer: brisket, pork ribs, chicken, turkey and exemplary Hill Country-inspired, German/Czech-style sausage. The menu also featured a relatively unknown item listed as a “beef ribs.” I ordered a batch and a thin slab of beef and bones covered in a mustard-vinegar sauce arrived. They were messy to eat and the effort-to-reward ratio was minimal — I really had to

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BBQ Shrimp at Gatlin's Fins & Feathers

BBQ shrimp isn’t really barbecue, but it is delicious and worth the try

February 6, 2025 No Comments

BBQ shrimp isn’t really barbecue, but it is delicious and worth the try. The Gulf Coast has a long tradition of creatively naming dishes when it comes to using the term “barbecue,” especially when it comes to seafood. If we are sticklers for nomenclature (and Texans definitely are), “barbecue” is defined as cooking and flavoring meat with heat and smoke, using an appliance (smoker) in which the fire is on the side (offset) of the cooking chamber. To be sure, other countries and cultures are not so exacting when it comes to this term. “Barbecues” around the world — think Australia — refer to direct-heat cooking, where the meat is

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Burt's Meat Market

How Houston’s Frenchtown gave rise to the ‘Barbecue Ward’

January 22, 2025 No Comments

How Houston’s Frenchtown gave rise to the ‘Barbecue Ward’. Driving through Fifth Ward — the area northeast of downtown that’s known by its residents as “The Nickel” — you can’t avoid the railroad tracks. Today, the Union Pacific tracks slash diagonally though the neighborhood exactly as they did in the 1862, when they were laid as the Texas and New Orleans Railroad. The Southern Pacific Railroad would eventually take over the route, and the Union Pacific after that. By 1880, the full route between Houston and New Orleans was complete, and many of Houston’s most important cultural traditions began to flow west from southwest Louisiana into Southeast Texas. This flow

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Cornbread & barbecue at The Brisket House

Cornbread’s connection to barbecue

January 9, 2025 No Comments

Cornbread’s connection to barbecue. On a recent visit to the Memorial-area location of The Brisket House, I found an unusual item on the menu: cornbread. Cornbread is surprisingly hard to find on Texas barbecue-joint menus. For anyone who grew up in Texas or the southern U.S., cornbread was a constant presence on the family dining table or at local restaurants. My first memory of cornbread, beyond the ubiquitous box of Jiffy cornbread mix that appeared in our kitchen every Thanksgiving, was at The Black-Eyed Pea restaurant in Beaumont where I grew up in the early ’80s. Long before it expanded to dozens of locations throughout the southern U.S. (and eventually

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Fried pork ribs at Ray's BBQ Shack

In Houston barbecue, there’s more than one way to make fried pork ribs

December 30, 2024 No Comments

In Houston barbecue, there’s more than one way to make fried pork ribs. Fried pork chops are a staple of Southern cuisine and soul food.  At its most basic, a rib cut (bone-in) pork chop is seasoned, dredged in all-purpose flour and deep fried until crispy on the outside and juicy on the inside.  There are variations. Smothered pork chops, for example, feature a crispy fried pork chop that’s covered in a savory, rich cream sauce or brown gravy and served over rice or mashed potatoes.  At the late, great Burt’s Meat Market (closed in 2021) in Houston’s Fifth Ward, you could order the fried pork chop sandwich, which featured

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