Where Does Beef Plate Come From
Before brisket dominated Texas barbecue, meat markets served a vast variety of smoked beef cuts. The onetime-schoolhouse meat markets of Central Texas would smoke anything left in the case too long, virtually oftentimes cuts from the forequarter, like shoulder clod or beef chuck. In the Dallas area during the forties and fifties, smoked beef typically came from a little further back on the steer, specifically beef plate, a.k.a. beef navel, a.yard.a. navel plate.
Billy McDonald runs Mac'south BBQ on Master Street in Dallas, a barbecue articulation started past his father more than than lx years ago. "Back in the fifties when I was a child sitting on the woods pile at my dad's barbecue place downwardly there at 3600 Main, y'all didn't have briskets. It was navel plate ends or clods," McDonald told me. They also didn't serve it sliced. Barbecue meant a chopped beefiness sandwich, or some other smoked meat on a bun, as McDonald recalls. "When he opened up at Main Street, he had bellybutton plate ends, he had Farmland cured canned hams, and he had Rudolph's sausage. Those are the three meats he carried."
Roland Lindsey founded the Bodacious Bar-B-Q chain in East Texas, merely before that he had a footling shop of his own in Duncanville (just south of Dallas) in the belatedly fifties. He, as well remembers cooking those giant beefiness plates. "I didn't see a brisket for years," he recalled. As for the beef plates, "We'd use a mop to put the gravy on it. We'd serve it on white breadstuff for a long fourth dimension. In about 1964 I started to utilize buns. Nosotros'd put the beefiness and gravy on in that location. At the terminate of the day information technology would all become cooked down and go existent rich. Information technology was practiced." (He referred to that gravy as "Arkansas gravy–mostly water with a piffling saccharide, common salt, a piffling Worcestershire, and a little tomato sauce.") As McDonald remembers, they didn't start off by offering white breadstuff at Mac's Bar-B-Que. "We would apply white buns or square rye staff of life." But the condiments were important. "You always had pickles, relish, and onions," simply equally McDonald–and nigh other Texas barbecue joints– offer today.
What is a beefiness plate? It comes from the center of the steer just below the ribeye. In fact, when the rib primal is separated from the carcass, the lower portion of those ribs that remains is the beefiness plate, also called the beef short plate. Information technology'due south IMPS item #121, and is rarely sold intact these days. Included in the cut is the outside skirt steak, inside brim steak, beef abdomen, and the beef plate short ribs. That'southward right, in Dallas they were eating smoked beef short ribs (albeit chopped forth with everything else) long earlier it was cool.
Gary Williams owned Gary'south Barbeque in Amarillo for decades, but worked at a few other barbecue joints before so. He started at Dub's in downtown where they cooked beefiness plates. When I interviewed him recently, I was curious how Dallas and Amarillo shared such similar barbecue traditions. He told me, "They had started in the forties. They were trained by Shoemaker's, in Dallas. There were 2 guys who learned from them and came back here. It was Dub and Bingo." Dub, of course, owned Dub'south, and the spin-offs from that included the now-shuttered Gary's Barbeque, along with Doug's Bar-B-Q and Henk's Bar-B-Que, which are both nonetheless in operation. They all cook brisket now, but dorsum then they cooked the same beef plates that Dub cooked and everything was served on a bun. They didn't serve charcoal-broil plates with options for meats and sides like they practice today. The other guy, Bingo, went off to Lubbock to help outset Tom & Bingo'due south Bar-B-Q. They cooked clods for a fourth dimension, just today, a sandwich is still all you can society at Tom & Bingo'due south. Information technology'south kinda like eating barbecue in Dallas sixty years ago.
Back then there were 4 locations of Shoemaker's Barbecue. They were all run by a family unit member, and from the addresses I found in an 1947-48 Dallas directory, information technology was hard to pass through downtown Dallas without bumping into one. Roland Lindsey said he enjoyed their barbecue when he lived in Dallas. I couldn't find much on the family, but the demolition of the R.O. Shoemaker Barbecue Stand up at 708 Commerce was news enough to warrant a mention from Texas Monthly in 1974.
James Earl Shoemaker passed abroad belatedly last year, but the Shoemaker style lives on as far away equally San Diego. The Barbecue Pit restaurant was started in 1947 by Joe and Lila Browning and Ed and Mela Jenson. They claim a strong tie to Dallas on their website, which says, "Joe came from Texas where he learned the barbecue business organisation from his footstep-father, R.T. Shoemaker. R.T. owned several barbecue restaurants in the Dallas area called 'Shoemaker'south Famous Barbecue'." Alas, there's no beef umbilicus on the menu.
Williams loved the fatty beef from the belly button, and he described how one would tackle information technology on the cutting block.
"In the morning you'd become ane on the cake and remove the big fat cap. You'd peel that off and underneath was about an inch of butter fat. Yummy, yummy. There was also a sparse membrane like elastic, then y'all'd run your pocketknife downward and become all that out of there. Then you were ready to go."
Billy McDonald also recounted the struggle of cooking a whole beef plate. "You have to understand, this piece of meat was huge. Nigh a third of it was bone. You lot had to cook information technology one mean solar day to pre-cook it. So yous'd flip information technology over and accept a paring knife and cut away the bone and strapping out before you could cease cooking it."
And flipping a whole beef plate wasn't an easy task, equally McDonald remembers. "[My dad] cooked 4 plates a day. That took up the whole pit. These things weighed probably forty or forty-five pounds."
All that waste matter went to good use back then. In Dallas there was money to be made from the Valcar Rendering Plant who would come option up the waste and pay a fee for it. McDonald remembers separate barrels for the dissimilar levels of waste. Grease was drained out of the pit into a barrel. Another butt held the bones, and a third barrel captured anything else that was left on the board. "Valcar, they would buy your grease and your os scraps. The os scraps would exist ground and made into rosebed fertilizer." Every piddling bit helped even though the beef was dirt cheap at the time. Even every bit late as 1964, there were ads for $0.17/lb umbilicus cease plates when brisket toll $0.53/lb. McDonald said there just wasn't a huge demand for information technology. "Information technology was pretty good meat, but they had no marketplace for it except for hot dogs." Merely then the prices started to raise, and brisket remained cheap. One time boneless brisket was available past the box, it replaced beef omphalos on the menu at Mac'south Bar-B-Que in the mid-sixties, and pretty chop-chop became the de facto poly peptide across the land. Beef umbilicus hasn't seen the inside of a smoker in Dallas since…2015.
Don't phone call it a comeback, but while I was researching this story, ii barbecue joints in Dallas advertised a new special on their menus. Lockhart Smokehouse in Plano and Cattleack Barbecue in Dallas were smoking beefiness belly, a cut from the beef plate just below the curt ribs. Information technology's a fat cut, but they were serving it sliced anyway. Cattleack'south version was beefy with thick ribbons of fat. I tried information technology next to slices of fatty and lean brisket, both of which I preferred to the unadorned beef belly.
At Lockhart Smokehouse the fatty cut struggled to maintain its shape in the grease soaked butcher paper. A bite of the rich beef seemed decadent. Sold by the half pound, I couldn't imagine how my gut would react if I finished a full order, simply then I remembered how it was enjoyed by so many Dallasites before me. I grabbed a couple slices of white bread and topped it with the remaining beefiness which I had chopped along with some pickles and red onions (run into photo at the top of this postal service). It was at once soft and crunchy, heavy but crisp. The acidic pickles and stout onions cut the richness of the beefiness considerably, simply the fat soaked into the bread similar melted butter. This was a sandwich to savor, and I did. It felt like I was consuming a long-forgotten piece of Dallas history, just it too made for a delicious tiffin.
Source: https://www.texasmonthly.com/bbq/bbq-anatomy-101-beef-plate/