Cheese returns to barbecue menus
Meat and cheese is one of the oldest culinary combinations. In ancient Roman times, shepherds famously lived for months in isolated mountain regions on a diet of salted meats and longlasting hard cheeses. To this day, canonical pasta dishes of Italian cuisine including carbonara, gricia and amatriciana are derived from this timeless marriage.
Meat and cheese are also part of Texas barbecue history. Starting in the mid-1800s, German butchers opened meat markets in Central Texas towns, often next door to small food stores. On weekends, the butchers cooked any unsold meat and sold it as barbecue to itinerant workers, who would then go next door and add ingredients such as pickles, bread and slabs of cheese to make a meal.
Some old-school barbecue joints, such as Kreuz Market in Lockhart, still sell meat by the pound on butcher paper with pickles, cheese and bread on the side. In Houston, the Brisket House serves a daily special that features a pound of meat, a slab of cheddar cheese, a whole pickle, a quarter onion and bread.
In general, though, for the past few decades, cheese hasn’t been a factor at many barbecue joints. Side dishes — beans, coleslaw and potato salad — became go-to accompaniments. If you found cheese on a menu, it was likely sprinkled on a stuffed baked potato, incorporated into jalapeño-and-cheese sausage or into macaroni.
Who moved cheese off the menu? The culprit may be a shift starting in the 1970s from leaner cuts, like shoulder clod, to fattier cuts, like brisket. Fatty meat combined with fatty cheese, though a welcome source of calories in bygone eras, didn’t quite fit the low-fat craze of recent memory.
But with the rise of artisanal ingredients and craft barbecue, everything is back on the table, including cheese.
Recently, I’ve seen some variation of smoked meats combined with rich, melty cheese on menus, specifically at barbecue pop-ups where some of Houston’s most creative dishes are being produced.
At Eddie O’s Texas Barbecue pop-up, pitmaster Eddie Ortiz features a smoked-meat version of a Mexico City favorite “costra” taco. Costra, translated as “crust,” refers to the technique of using melted and grilled cheese as the container for the taco, also referred to as a tortilla de queso.
Ortiz melts a pile of Monterrey Jack cheese on a hot griddle until it is flat and slightly crispy. He then applies a thickcut slice of peppery brisket, lets them sizzle together for a moment and then folds over the cheese so the brisket is swaddled in a blanket of crispy cheese. It’s served with a side of homemade escabeche (pickled vegetables) that can be added for an acidic balance.
Not to be outdone by the melding of cheese and smoked meats, pitmaster Brandon Allen of the MoCo Barbeque pop-up (MoCo stands for Montgomery County, where he is located) features a brisket grilled cheese sandwich that is a delicious combination of comfort-food staples.
Allen slathers melted butter onto sourdough bread slices and browns them on a griddle before adding a generous pile of shredded cheddar cheese. Slices of tomato — a traditional addition to a grilled cheese sandwich that offers a bite of acid — are briefly grilled and placed on the now melted cheese on top of the toasted sourdough. He then adds thick, fatty-cut slices of his superlative Central Texas-style, salt-and-pepper brisket and gives it a couple of final turns on the griddle.
The crispy outside of the toast, combined with a few crunchy bits of cheese that get scraped off the griddle, is a textural contrast to the oozing cheese inside the sandwich and the peppery, rich meatiness of the brisket. The tomato adds just enough acidity and brightness to bring the whole dish together.
Ortiz’s costra taco and Allen’s brisket grilled cheese sandwich are currently two of my favorite dishes in Houston barbecue. Meat and cheese — together again in Texas barbecue.