Texas barbecue’s oldest brick pits refuse to fade away

To most Texans, the traditions and techniques of barbecue are unchanging.

Our beloved tray of brisket, pork ribs and sausage – the Texas trinity – is cooked low and slow using some version of an offset barbecue pit in a smoky pit room by pitmasters who have honed their craft over many decades.

In a state known for its tall tales, barbecue offers Texans a comforting confirmation that myth and reality can be one and the same.

Change does come, however, sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worse.

In the 1960s, a new way of harvesting and marketing cattle known as “boxed beef” replaced the traditional cut of shoulder clod with brisket. Compared to the lean clod, brisket brought more fat and flavor just as Texans were incorporating more meat into their daily diets.

Then, in the 1970s, a headlong drive toward modernization and efficiency — undoubtedly driven by unfavorable economic conditions — brought an influx of automated barbecue pits that replaced burning wood with natural gas as a fuel source. These “gassers” sent Texas barbecue into something of a dark age, from which it only emerged in the early 2000s with the advent of the craft barbecue revolution.

Now, in the 2020s, economic and societal changes are steering Texas barbecue in new directions.

For instance, many barbecue joints are shifting from manually operated offset barrel pits to semi-automated rotisserie-style pits to address changes in labor markets and building regulations.

Though similar to the “gassers” of the past, these pits mostly burn wood and, in the hands of a skilled pitmaster, you’d be hard-pressed to tell the difference between a brisket cooked in an offset pit versus a rotisserie.

Still, some Texas barbecue traditionalists see rotisseries as a necessary evil and gravitate toward barbecue joints with offset-style pits. And for the most devoted traditionalists, the only true style of barbecue cooker is the brick pit.

Brick pits are room-sized, rectangular boxes lined with fire brick that are direct descendants of the earliest barbecue cookers in the state. Unlike steel barrel pits engineered to efficiently coax heat and smoke through the cooking chamber, brick pits are notoriously difficult to manage because their boxy design is not conducive to the fluid dynamics of swirling smoke.

These pits would seem to be perfect candidates for replacement by newer rotisserie pits. And yet the barbecue joints that still use them — including Pizzitola’s Heritage BBQ in Houston, Louie Mueller Barbecue in Taylor and most of the old-school joints in Lockhart — have no intention of replacing them.

“If we were to switch to modern pits, not only would Houston barbecue lose part of its living history, we would never be able to duplicate the flavor profile that keeps people coming here after 91 years,” says Tim Taylor, general manager at Pizzitola’s. “Brick pits require a great deal of labor. There is no ‘set it and forget it’ here.”

In other words, brick pits not only preserve tradition, they also preserve a unique flavor that cannot be achieved with other types of pits.

It’s this flavor — imparted by the way smoke flows through the chamber and by how the bricks are seasoned over decades of cooking — that is sought out by the most traditionalist barbecue fans.

Brick pits are physical embodiments of the tradition, history and myth of Texas barbecue, and for the joints that still use them, they’re not going anywhere.

Pizzitola’s Heritage BBQ
1703 Shepherd Dr.; 713-227-2283
Closed Sunday.