Dear Doc,
Something has been bothering me a long time. The owner of a near-UT campus (now closed) BBQ joint informed me that the big dog, Salt Lick BBQ in Driftwood, did not actually BBQ their brisket using wood but baked it in ovens and adding smoke flavoring. Can this be true? Ovens do seem visible when you walk from the parking lot to the restaurant. As you enter the restaurant a circular pit with meat all around it is smoking and smells delicious! An employee is slicing and dicing large amounts of meat. If you mingle around the pit you can hear customer after customer saying, “Look where they BBQ the meat!” It seems this is actually a “show pit” to display the product before slicing and nothing is actually cooked there. Can this be true and why has this not been addressed before?
– Bothered by Baked Brisket Rumors
If I may paraphrase Academy Award-winning actor and bubblegum rapper Will Smith, “Take that Salt Lick brisket out your fucking mouth!!” You don’t deserve its meaty, mouthwatering blend of smoke, special spices, and savory goodness. Now, look, it’s not a secret that back in 1969, when Stanley Kubrick was faking the moon landing on a soundstage in room 237 of the U.S. Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama, he got a serious hankering for some slow-smoked brisket. It’s also within the realm of possibility that the caterer for that pioneering deepfake film shoot could have been Salt Lick owner Thurman Roberts who, as is common knowledge, was alive at the time and already running a brisket smoking operation in southern Hays County, which is only an 878-mile drive from the U.S. Space and Rocket Center. Coincidence? I’ll let you decide, but if Kubrick could fake putting a man on the moon, isn’t it also possible that he somehow convinced Thurman Roberts that he didn’t need to spend 20-24 hours slow-smoking his brisket when he could simply cook it in an oven and then douse it with a generous coating of liquid smoke? I don’t know about you, but I can’t write that possibility off entirely because I don’t have enough information – certainly not as much information as the owner of a closed UT-area BBQ joint would.
Me? I tend to be one of those “you don’t want to know how the sausage is made” types – mainly because I know how the sausage is made and it’s pretty fucking disgusting – even the really good sausage. If, for some reason you haven’t supped on the fruit of knowledge, watching sausage get made is only palatable to the sort of people who would enjoy watching the entire Human Centipede Trilogy in one sitting – basically psychopaths. I should probably disclose here that while I have seen sausage being made, I have seen none of the Human Centipede films. I’m not a fan of the horror genre and have serious trust issues with people who are. That said, I’ve caught a few Human Centipede trailers on YouTube and I think I get the basic gist. It’s probably not as traumatizing as seeing a piston violently penetrate a cow’s skull, rendering it essentially brain dead so it can be bled, eviscerated, and carved up into choicer and choicer cuts of meat, while the remaining beef byproducts are ground up and stuffed back into the cow’s – or very likely some other cow’s – intestine. Unlike the Human Centipede however, there is ideally way less poop involved.
If you’re into eating cows, brisket is a rich man’s game. That meat comes right off the breast, which is a seemingly safe distance from all the cow’s orifices.You gotta pay extra for that. It’s usually the priciest cut on a barbecue joint’s menu. This holds true at the Salt Lick as well, unless you’re eating buffalo.
But here’s the deal: If it tastes good and doesn’t give you intestinal distress, what do you care whether it’s basted in Dr Pepper and corn syrup and fast-cooked in a microwave? Are you trying to eat the process or the product? Would you want to eat shoe leather if it was slow-smoked for two weeks? Of course not. Eat your damn brisket and stop asking questions.
This article appears in October 24 • 2025.
