Very simply put, Texas Style Pit Barbecue is meat cooked with wood. It is an art form that requires
time, patience and understanding to master. It is hot, hard, dirty work but the results are absolutely
incredible, making it well worth the extra effort.
The first step of cooking Texas Style Pit Barbecue is the rubbing of the meat. Barbecue rubs go
from simple combinations of salt and pepper clear up through rubs that might include twenty
or more different ingredients.
Once the meat is rubbed, it is cooked in an enclosed pit, which basically a wood fired oven where
meat is enveloped in a hazy curtain of smoke while it cooks at low temperatures, usually somewhere around 200 to 250 degrees. Seasoned hardwood is used to fire these pits, with oak,
hickory and pecan being the most common. Texas Barbecue is almost always cooked well done with a few Texas “Pit Men” cooking their brisket 20 hours of more. This type of cooking not only produces extremely flavorful meat, it will also tenderize even the toughest cuts.