Texas eats more meat per capita than any other state in the U.S. The state is home to four distinct barbecue traditions and the birthplace of countless techniques.
After moving to Austin from Australia over 15 years ago, one cook fell in love with that tradition. In her new book "Prime Cuts: The Complete Guide to Choosing, Understanding, and Cooking Meat," barbecue expert Jess Pryles provides what she calls a meat encyclopedia.
Pryles joined Texas Standard to share her inspiration and what readers can expect from the book.
This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:
Texas Standard: You've been at this for over 15 years. Tell me about your journey with barbecue.
Jess Pryles: I'm from Melbourne, Australia, originally, and when you come to Texas as a tourist, because Australians are really good travelers, you know you're supposed to go and try Texas barbecue.
And I remember having my very first taste of Texas barbecue and just thinking like, oh my God, this is incredible. It was like the heavens parted and a ray of sun shone straight onto my taste buds.
So once I had that first taste — I think it was a beef rib, if I remember correctly — I just sort of became obsessed. And I kind of fell in love with Texas at the same time and kept coming back. And as I would come back, I'd learn more and more about barbecue, and I ended up kind of being a barbecue missionary back to Australia, just taking info back and forth.
And it got to the point where I just bought a charcoal grill and bought an offset smoker and taught myself to cook. And then a full-blown obsession followed from there.
And what specifically about Texas barbecue inspired you?
You know, at the time it was sort of the gold standard. So a lot of the lines have blurred right now. And I think Texas really does still lead the world in terms of, you know, the craveable barbecue.
But there were four very distinct regions at the time, Kansas City and you had the Carolinas and Memphis. But only Kansas City and Texas had beef. And brisket is the thing that just captures hearts and taste buds all over. And no one does brisket like Texas does.
So I think that there's just something about the lifestyle: smoke filtering through the oak trees during golden hour, these giant locomotive-looking offset smokers that are completely analog yet made to turn these giant hunks of meat into this succulent treat.
It's poetry. It's food poetry.
In your book, you touch on something called "meat science." I'm curious about this. How does something qualify as meat science?
Meat science generally looks at the safety and quality of meat. So they do deep dives into how muscle works, how it responds. It crosses over into animal science when we look at things like genetics.
But I did put a little bit of a blurb — I think you might be hinting at that — in my book. There's a lot of meat science in there. So it talks about why you want to cut against the grain, what makes meat a different color and why that color changes as you cook it. And a lot of stuff to help demystify and make it simple for people.
But we're also living in an environment where people are permeated by social media posts and videos from all sides. We're bombarded with it. And that has created a lot of armchair experts. And doing an experiment in your own home is not meat science. That is just having an opinion on something until you can recreate it.
So I wanted to kind of point out to people, like nearly as a guide for how to critically think your way through advice that you find online. When I started cooking, when a lot of folks I know started cooking, there wasn't much info out there. And what you had to do was just cook and get that experience and learn.
And speaking of confusing and complicated, you also get into the weeds of decoding meat labels. I'm curious what's so difficult about understanding them.
I think because some of them are marketing and some of them are regulatory, and I'll give you a great example of that.
Chicken poultry labels in the U.S. usually say "no added hormones" on them. And the problem is that that has to say "added hormones" because all animals naturally have hormones in them. But it says "no added hormones," and it makes the user feel real nice and cushy that there's no added hormones in this meat.
But legislatively you're not allowed to add any hormones to poultry. So it's stating something that is already part of the industry. And what that does is, if you write that, you suggest that some poultry does have hormones and therefore it's something to be scared of, or it's something to be wary of.
And then you have stuff that is legislated, like organic. You have to be certified to be organic.
The easiest one is actually grass-fed, grass-finished. So in the States, all beef cattle are grass-fed at some stage. When a calf is weaned from its mother, it's weaned off of milk onto grass, and from there it may then go on to a feedlot where it's fed grain.
So grass-fed doesn't necessarily mean that the animal only ate grass its whole life, but grass-finished does.
What would you say to folks who are maybe interested in getting serious with meat?
If anyone tells me they're about to get serious with meat, I'm always very excited for them. You know, that's what I tried to do with "Prime Cuts," the new book. I tried make it as excitable for people who are already kind of meat nerds and have a ton of fun information in there to satisfy your cravings.
But if you are someone who has always been like, "oh, it's in the too hard basket, like I'm interested, but I just don't know," it is also for you. It tries to demystify everything and just make it really accessible.
And at the end of the day, all the meat science aside, there's a hundred delicious recipes in there. Like, it's still a cookbook at the end of the day.
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