14 Texas Foods Outsiders Just Don’t Understand

A Texan can forgive a lot.

Bad directions. A losing season. Even rooting for the wrong team, within reason.

What they can’t forgive is you calling the sausage-like thing a kolache, or asking for beans in your chili.

Get those wrong, and you’ve outed yourself as being non-Texan before your food even cools.

Breakfast Tacos

Breakfast tacos in Texas is a weekday reflex, not a weekend treat.

Egg, bean, potato, cheese, and bacon, folded into a warm flour or corn tortilla and eaten one-handed on the way out the door.

Tourists treat them like a weekend brunch. Texans treat them like coffee.

And whatever you do, don’t wade into asking where they came from.

San Antonio and Austin have feuded over the credit for years. In 2016, it boiled over so badly that the two mayors had to meet and swap tacos to call a truce.

Chicken-Fried Steak

Newcomers to Texas read the name and freeze.

Is it chicken? Is it steak?

Why is it fried like a wing?

Chicken-fried steak is beef, pounded thin, breaded, and fried the way you’d fry chicken, then buried under peppery cream gravy.

No chicken shows up at any point.

You’ll find it at every small-town diner from Amarillo to Lockhart, usually right next to the chicken-fried chicken, which is the same idea made with actual chicken.

Brisket by the Pound

Texas barbecue isn’t a sauce situation.

Walk into Kreuz Market in Lockhart or Southside Market in Elgin, and they hand you brisket by the pound on butcher paper.

There’s no plate, no fork, sauce is optional and a little frowned upon.

That style traces back to the German and Czech meat markets that smoked their unsold beef so it wouldn’t spoil.

So, bring a roll of paper towels, and leave your ribs opinions at the door.

Kolaches and Klobasniky

This one starts arguments.

A kolache is sweet and round, with a dimple of apricot, prune, or cream cheese in the middle.

So, what do you call the sausage-stuffed pastry you grabbed at the gas station?

That’s a klobasnek.

Czech families who settled towns like West and Schulenburg will correct you on it.

West sits on I-35 between Waco and Hillsboro. The state has dubbed West the Kolache Capital of Texas, and the bakeries there don’t take the mix-up lightly.

Chile con Queso

Queso in Texas isn’t the fancy stuff.

It’s chile con queso, a warm bowl of melted cheese and chiles that anchors every Tex-Mex table in the state.

Outsiders expect something artisanal.

Then they watch a born-and-raised Texan swear by a batch made with Velveeta and a can of Rotel.

Have it as a dip, a side, a topping, or, on a rough day, dinner.

A Bowl of Red

Ask for beans in your chili and watch the table go silent.

Texas chili is a bowl of red: beef, dried chiles, and spices, with no beans and no tomatoes padding it out.

It’s been the official state dish since 1977, and the recipe goes back to the Chili Queens who sold it in San Antonio’s plazas in the 1800s.

Beans go in a separate bowl, if they’re allowed in the room at all.

Frito Pie

Frito pie looks like a mistake and tastes like home.

You split a bag of Fritos down the side, ladle chili and cheese straight into the bag, and eat it with a spoon at the football game.

The chip itself is a Texas invention, first made in San Antonio back in 1932.

Order one at a Friday night game in West Texas, and nobody blinks.

Try it once, and you’ll understand the appeal.

Whataburger

To outsiders, it's a fast-food burger.

To Texans, Whataburger is a landmark with a drive-thru.

The orange-and-white A-frame has been part of Texas' roadside since Harmon Dobson opened the first one in Corpus Christi in 1950.

You order a number one with cheese at 2 a.m., you put the spicy ketchup on everything, and you don't compare it to an out-of-state chain unless you're spoiling for a fight.

The honey butter chicken biscuit has its own following before sunrise.

Dr Pepper

Dr Pepper started in Texas, and the state has never let anyone forget it.

A pharmacist mixed the first one at a Waco drug store in 1885, a full year before Coca-Cola showed up.

There's no period after the Dr, the old ad campaign told you to drink one at 10, 2, and 4, and in some corners of the state, people still warm it up and sip it hot in winter.

Pour a tourist a mug of hot Dr Pepper and watch their face.

Big Red

Then there's the soda the color of a stop sign.

Big Red tastes like bubblegum and cream soda raised a kid together, and it was invented in Waco in 1937.

Texans pair it with barbecue and barbacoa, and San Antonio throws a whole festival around that exact combination.

Outsiders take one sip and either fall hard or never recover.

Barbacoa

On weekend mornings, South Texas runs on barbacoa.

It's beef cooked low and slow until it falls apart, traditionally from the cheek of a cow's head, scooped into corn tortillas with salsa and a squeeze of lime.

Families pick it up by the pound on Saturday and Sunday, usually with a bottle of Big Red to wash it down.

The old pit-cooked, whole-head method is so wrapped in regulations that only one spot, Vera's in Brownsville, is still cleared to sell it that way.

Beaver Nuggets

A gas station shouldn't inspire loyalty.

But Buc-ee's didn't get that memo.

The Texas chain runs travel stops the size of airports, with a cartoon beaver out front and Beaver Nuggets, which are sweet, crunchy corn puffs, flying off the shelves.

A Tennessee location now holds the title of the largest convenience store on earth.

But the whole thing started in Texas in 1982.

Outsiders plan a quick fuel stop. Forty minutes later, they walk out with brisket, fudge, and a beaver T-shirt.

Blue Bell

Texans don't buy ice cream. They buy Blue Bell.

The little creamery in Brenham has been churning it since 1907, and for decades you couldn't find it outside the South, which only made Texans love it harder.

When a recall pulled it from freezers in 2015, people tracked its return like an incoming storm.

Suggest a different brand at a Texas cookout, and you'll get a look.

Pecan Pie

Dessert in Texas means pecan pie, and the state has the trees to back it up.

Pecan orchards stretch across Central and West Texas.

The nut works its way into everything from pies to pralines to the bag of glazed pecans by the register.