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 Release date March 6, 2012 Preorder from Amazon
“Food writer Walsh (The Tex-Mex Cookbook ; Legends of Texas Barbecue Cookbook) is a three-time James Beard Award winner and an authority on Texas culinary history. His latest is primarily organized by region, with chapters that focus on either a popular dish (e.g., Chili con Carne and Chicken-Fried Steak) or style of cuisine (e.g., Czech Texan, Vietnamese Texan, Indian Cowboys). Culinary explorers who like variety will find ten ways to serve oysters, seven kinds of hamburger, and plenty of interesting seasonings, sauces, and spice blends. Packed with history and stories, this is a great choice for homesick Texans and armchair travelers.” -Publishers’ Weekly
 Lori Dodd at the Dublin Dr Pepper plant Yesterday was the last day to buy Dublin Dr Pepper at the plant. Anyone who tells you this was amicable resolution to the lawsuit filed by Dr Pepper/Snapple against the Dublin plant needs to watch the TV interview with the tearful owners as they shut the place down.
If you are wondering what all the fuss is about, check out this story in the Houston Press about the Dublin Dr Pepper tradition, here’s an excerpt:
The flavored syrup that all Dr Pepper bottlers use is manufactured in St. Louis. Local bottlers just add the carbonated water and the sweetener, which is why it was so easy for the Dublin plant to continue to use cane sugar instead of high-fructose corn syrup. The franchise agreement that bottlers have with Dr Pepper doesn’t require them to use any particular sweetener—but it does limit the area where they can deliver products.
And the product that the bootleggers want is a retro-looking eight-ounce bottle full of cane sugar-sweetened Dublin Dr Pepper. Though the bottles look old, they are actually new disposable bottles. I drank one while we walked around the factory. There was a wonderful mouth-filling quality about the sugar sweetness that had me smacking my lips.
The disposable eight-ounce bottles are popular, but true connoisseurs have their own bottles. Although Dr Pepper discontinued reusable bottles in 1990, the Dublin Dr Pepper plant still refills old Dr Pepper bottles for loyal customers.
I looked at cases upon cases of bottles going back to the 1960s and 1970s that were waiting to be washed. It’s amazing that so many people keep these old bottles in circulation. Manager Lori Dodd told me that there are collectors with bottles dating all the way back to the 1930s — those have to be hand-filled. The factory itself maintains an inventory of over 100,000 old reusable Dr Pepper bottles.
The Dr Pepper plant is so revered in Dublin that on Monday, June 9, in an annual rite of summer, a crew of workers will drive around the city limits taking down the signs that read “Dublin” and replacing them with signs that read “Dr Pepper, Texas.”
Well so much for that 120 year-old Texas tradition. Why the corporate headquarters of Dr Pepper/Snapple found it necessary to close down the oldest Dr Pepper bottler in Texas and a living museum of their own history is baffling to anyone who respects our food culture.
From Ten Speed Press, release date March 6, 2012 Preorder from Amazon
Many thanks to Eater.com’s Spring Cookbook Preview for the kind words about the new cookbook!
The Eater Spring 2012 Cookbook and Food Book Preview
Monday, January 9, 2012, by Paula Forbes
American Regional:
Texas Eats: The New Lone Star Heritage Cookbook, with More Than 200 Recipes by Robb Walsh
Robb Walsh has long been the go-to cookbook author for Texan cuisine, but this book has the potential to be his masterwork. Gone are stuffy preconceptions of what Texas food is (cheese enchiladas!), and in their place find what Texans really eat (Czech-Tex! Viet-Tex! And, okay, some vintage Tex-Mex.) Bonus? Aaron Franklin’s nationally recognized recipe for barbecued brisket from Austin’s Franklin Barbecue.
Despite my advice to the contrary, my daughter Katie has been pursuing food writing as a career track lately. As much as I wish she would find something better to do for a living, I am very proud of her efforts. Here’s a recent blog post from her regular gig at Whisked Foodie: http://whiskedfoodie.com/chefs-rant/a-happy-birthday-pig-pickin-party/
A Happy Birthday Pig Pickin’ Party
by Katie Walsh | Jan 6, 2012
Pig Pickin
I was at my dad’s house in Houston last weekend to celebrate his birthday when he told me to come outside and bring my camera. I was intrigued.
He lifted the lid of his smoker to reveal two big ol’ hunks of beautifully barbecued meat, a whole pork shoulder, and a ham, which he’d had cooking low and slow for 26 hours.
It came off the heat and onto the cutting board, where he pulled back the skin and separated the fat from the crispy edges from the tender, fatty midlands, all of which got pulled apart and thrown into a big bowl. We all gathered round and pitched in for a regular pig pickin’ party.
read more The Acorn and the Tree »
The box of chipotle-almond chocolate bark I got from Expressions Fine Chocolate on Wilcrest may have been the best appreciated Christmas gift this year. I got it for my wife, but I am “helping” her eat it.
Judging by the front room at Expressions Fine Chocolate, it looks like the place is going out of business–there aren’t any candies in the glass display cases. The chocolatier and owner, Valerie, has got so many wholesale orders that she doesn’t bother trying to be a retailer anymore. But that doesn’t mean she won’t sell you some outstanding handmade chocolate at a great price. You just have to order them first, and then come and pick them up. Give her a call if you want to place an order.
 We took a break from blogging over the holidays while our crackerjack IT staff worked on transferring our online operations to a new server after we got hacked. Christmas was spent on Greer’s Ferry Lake in the foothills of the Ozarks with the Klaasmeyer clan. We shipped in some Totten Inlet Virginica oysters since we couldn’t get any Texas bivalves and I smoke-roasted a beef loin roast on the Weber with some hickory wood.
 The day after Christmas, O Rufus Lovett and I took off on another Zen BBQ jaunt through Georgia and Carolinas. Check the twitter hashtag #zenbbq for a list of stops. Meanwhile, back at the ranch, I’m working on some recipes for barbecued pork shoulders and hams using the techniques I learned on the road.
 The RobbWalsh.com “Texas Eats” website was down for more than a week due to technical difficulties. If you tried to find us while were out of commission, we apologize.
It seems our server got raided by interweb evil doers. We ended up with the “WordPress Pharma Hack.” Every time we tried to send a link of our site to Facebook, or anywhere else, we transmitted a message about where to buy drugs online.
Cleaning things up and moving to a new server was a little more complicated than it sounded. Our technical department (Pableaux “Bayou Dog” Johnson) had to redo all the photo links and otherwise tinker under the hood.
Thinking about people who spread Spam (not you Hormel) and hack websites makes me angry. Sometimes I daydream about what I would do if I ever got hold of one of these slimeballs. Hacking is a form of theft, right? So would a convicted hacker get his hands chopped off under Islamic law? I know a pitmaster in South Carolina named Tim Hyman who would be perfect for the job of punishing hackers–he is a sort of hacker himself.
 The reason I got a huge Lodge Chicken Fryer was to make Edna Lewis’s famous chicken recipe. It was over a year later that I actually got around to making it. The fryer didn’t gather dust. I fried a lot of chicken in it, I just never had the time for the elaborate preparations Edna’s recipe requires.
In that recipe, which was made famous by chef Scott Peacock, the cut up chicken gets 12 hours of brining followed by 12 hours of buttermilk marinating before you proceed with the seasoning and flouring. Then you hold the floured pieces of chicken on a rack for half an hour to get the crust to stick and finally you fry the chicken in a large cast iron skillet full of lard jazzed up with butter and country ham.
My wife got really tired of that raw chicken sloshing around in our refrigerator for two days. She was happy to help eat the chicken though. To tell the truth, I faithfully executed the marinating and flouring, but I substituted peanut oil for the lard. So I guess I still haven’t really made Edna Lewis’s fried chicken.
I want to say the flavor and the juiciness of the resulting chicken was worth the effort. It was awfully good. But the next time I make fried chicken, I am much more likely to use a quick recipe like the spicy Cajun fried chicken recipe below. I’ll save Edna Lewis’s famous fried chicken recipe for very special events.
read more Edna's Fried Chicken »
 What a year for radishes! A couple of months ago, I bought a mixed radish seed blend from Johnny’s Seeds called Easter Egg. I planted the seeds in mid-October and harvested this first bunch of radishes a week before Thanksgiving. I served the radishes on the relish tray and put the greens in my salad mix.
I used to think that seeds were seeds. But Jim Sherman, my gardening guru, set me straight. He told me to quit buying the seeds sold at the grocery store or home improvement center and to order a catalog from Johnny’s Seeds, an employee-owned seed company in Maine. I wasn’t sure if it was just Sherman’s fondness for hippy-dippy enterprises (I haven’t used the phrase hippy-dippy in awhile, but it seems especially apt in this case) or if there was some actual difference in quality.
After planting Johnny’s Seeds and home improvement center seeds side by side, I can testify that Johnny’s are vastly superior. In fact, I think they should change the name of the company to Johnny’s Magic Seeds. Two years ago, when Sherman helped me install my raised bed organic garden, he gave me some tips about which seeds are especially suited to Texas, and now I religiously order those varieties.
Sherman also recommended radishes as the ideal snack with beer. So following his suggestion, this Thanksgiving we served Easter Eggs with the Saint Arnold’s Christmas Ale.
 Seafood chef Denis Wilson, the name behind Denis’ Seafood and the late Jimmy Wilson’s Seafood and Chop House, is back in business in a North Houston fast casual restaurant called Louisiana Homestyle Kitchen. Only this time, instead of seafood, he is specializing in free range chicken.
The menu is a veritable Bubba Gump litany (only with chicken instead of shrimp). Offerings include: Free range fried chicken, free range rotisserie chicken, free range chicken fricasee, free range chicken chef salad, free range chicken wedge salad, free range chicken homestyle salad, free range chicken gumbo, free range chicken tortilla soup, and a free range chicken strip poor boy.
The menu also includes fried shrimp, boiled shrimp, fried crawfish tails, red beans and rice, smothered pork chops, an awesome pot roast and a couple of poor boys.
The fried chicken that I sampled was sensational and so were the butterflied fried shrimp. Wilson’s tartar sauce alone is worth the trip. I poured the intense, chocolate-brown gravy that came with the pot roast over some rice. Wow. I can’t wait to try Wilson’s roast beef poor boy.
At this writing, the restaurant isn’t open yet. Wilson said he would be open just before Thanksgiving, so keep an eye out.
Louisiana Home Kitchen
16950 Ella Blvd.
281 580 8400
 I learned about B&B Charcoal from the old-timers at the Washington Lodge of the Sons of Hermann. These guys have been barbecueing on an open pit since the 1950s and their lodge has been holding barbecues since the late 1800s, so maybe they know a thing or two.
The modern Texas barbecue smoker burns hardwood and imparts a strong smoky flavor to the meat. Old-fashioned Southern barbecue is cooked over coals and doesn’t have much of smoky taste. In the old days, barbecuers burned seasoned hardwood in a fireplace and shoveled the hot coals into the barbecue pit. But for the last 20 years or so, the barbecue crew at the Sons of Hermann Lodge in Washington has been starting their fire with lump charcoal. “But you can’t use just any charcoal,” veteran BBQ man Bubba Roese confided.
B&B Charcoal company in Weimar sells lump charcoal made from oak and brags that their curing method removes acid and resins that cause inferior charcoal to impart bad flavors to the meat. I found B&B Lump Oak Charcoal at my local HEB grocery store in Houston. You can call them at 1-855-BBQCOAL to find out where to buy their charcoal near you.
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