From Texas Monthly-How to taste BBQ like a pro-

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The Texas Monthly new Top 50 list will be out at the end of May (a once every four year deal.)

"Almost exactly nine months ago, the taste testers for the 2025 Top 50 list gathered as a group for the first time, in Texas Monthly’s largest conference room, for a taste-testing tutorial hosted by barbecue editor Daniel Vaughn. The office kitchen island was packed with aluminum catering trays full of brisket, pork ribs, and sausage, totaling about forty pounds of meat, plus a few sides. Half the barbecue had been purchased from a Top 50 mainstay, and half the meat was from a . . . shall we say . . . less renowned barbecue chain. The color contrast between the two different briskets was stark, with the lower-quality ’cue looking ominously gray, but tasters gamely loaded up on samples from both joints so that Daniel could walk them through how best to compare and contrast the meats.

Over an hour-plus-long meeting, Daniel held up different bites of barbecue, pulled them apart, and popped them into his mouth as he talked through what he was evaluating. “It really does come down to as simple as: Is it juicy, and is it tender, and is it well seasoned?” he said.

★ DO IT YOURSELF

Download your own unofficial barbecue ballot to practice your taste-testing skills. When assessing a slice of brisket, he looks for a healthy balance between the meat’s flavor, the smokiness, and the seasoning’s flavor. “If it is overly smoky, tastes like an ashtray, that’s not a great thing. If it has no smoke flavor and basically tastes like roast beef, then that’s not a great thing either,” Daniel explained. “If it’s overseasoned, underseasoned, and if you don’t end up tasting that beef, then that’s a problem as well.” A slice of lean brisket should pull apart easily but shouldn’t immediately fall apart, which would be a sign of the meat being overcooked, he explained. And lean brisket was what taste testers should judge, Daniel advised, not just the more crowd-pleasing fatty brisket slices: “We’re looking for the fifty best barbecue joints in Texas. There are going to be fifty barbecue joints that make really great lean brisket that isn’t all dried out and flaky.” A great rib should be tender enough that “when I take a bite from along the bone, that meat comes cleanly off the bone,” Daniel said. “You don’t have to tug at it; you don’t have to work at it. You don’t have to scrape it off with your tooth.” And he advised taste testers to pay attention to the grind of a sausage and the snap of its casing as they took bites—a good snap is a sign of a properly made sausage.  Other advice in the tutorial was more logistical. Each taste tester had to visit, on average, a dozen joints over two and a half months, with some assignments requiring far-flung travel across Texas, and fill out a score sheet for each joint. Daniel advised them to start with whatever the most promising joint on their assignment list was—beginning with a joint that turned out to be lousy could skew a taster’s scores by making everything else seem better by comparison. For those whose travel itineraries required them to hit up multiple joints in a day, Daniel advised the tasters not to visit more than three good places in a day, to avoid inadvertent overstuffing. And the point he emphasized most of all: Drink water. So much water. “Your body is not used to the sodium intake that you’re going to go through,” he said. Keep that in mind if you schedule your own ’cue-stuffed road trip around the Top 50 list."