Links Love Lost

Barbeque. Light of my life. Fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Bar-be-que. The tip of the tongue taking a trip down the palate to stop, on three, on the teeth. Bar. Be. Que.

Suffice it to say, I love the stuff.

From a truck, on a piece of waxed paper, Jewish style (aka pastrami), eaten with fingers, in sandwiches, served at restaurants with actual silverware, made from pigs, cows, chickens, goats or what have you. I appreciate the regional differences, but I would be hard pressed to choose between a killer Texas brisket and a dynamite Carolina pulled pork.

There are a few criteria that I do believe all good barbeque shares. And those all come from the low and slow use of heat and smoke that melts tough raw fat into an unctuous buttery goo that enriches the meat, deeply flavors the protein with a clear and well-defined pink ring of smoke, and tenderizes some of the toughest cuts to the point where the muscle can still hold a bone, but a modest pull will pull the bone cleanly from the flesh.

Barbeque isn’t health food, so when I eat it, I expect it to be good. It’s hard to find good links. But when Dinosaur Bar-B-Que opened in Troy I thought their links were among the highlights of the menu. I had been meaning to get back there for a while to enjoy a meal dedicated to this smoky delight.

Yesterday was the day, but it didn’t go quite as expected.

I went with Albany John, because I wanted to show him just how good these links were. And we ordered them two ways. They have a sausage appetizer called Sausage, Cheese & Crackers ($7.95) which is, “Our own homemade smoked ‘hot link’ sausage served with house pimento cheese and black pepper cheddar crackers & pickled onions.”

It’s a platter composed of seven cracker rounds, each stuck onto a board with a dollop  of pimento cheese. The crackers are topped with more cheese, a slice of the sausage, and crowned with pickled onions. In theory it’s a nice balance of textures and flavors, but it never really comes together. It needs more sausage and more potent onions to cut through the heaviness of the cheese and the biscuity cracker. Still, this appetizer is the best way the whet one’s appetite for the full sausage links to come.

The sausage on the appetizer was just as I’d remembered. The casing had developed a nice chew from its time spent in the smoker, and the well-textured meat inside had fully absorbed a deep smoky flavor. The interior fat had rendered, leaving the sausage itself rich and tender (but not juicy). I was eagerly looking forward to my full plate of sausage.

Oddly, the menu doesn’t provide an option for just ordering the sausage. But our waitress suggested that we could order the links a la carte for $4.50 per piece, which is exactly what I did. Two links sounded like plenty, and I felt no need to mess around with sides.

What happened next was surprising.

Cutting into the links they were clearly undercooked. More than anything else they resembled grilled sausages and not something that had spent at least three hours in a smoker. The casing didn’t have the same chewy texture, the interior fat wasn’t rendered, and most strikingly the sausages were still pink and mushy on the inside.

This is not the exterior layer of pink that comes from a deeply permeating smoke. This pink was at the center of the link, which was also speckled with chunks of white fat. Mind you, we just had their sausage minutes before, and this looked nothing like the link on the appetizer. Albany John also noticed that the undercooked links had a significantly greater girth than those we had received earlier, which would be consistent with the rest of our observations.

I had no idea how the quality control of the kitchen would have sent this out. A gentle squeeze reveals a juicy springiness that only is found in undercooked meats. Properly barbecued, a link really collapses a bit on itself as the fat renders and gets absorbed into the meaty bits.

The manager brought them back to the kitchen and confirmed that indeed they were undercooked, and the barbecue masters at Dinosaur were going to try again.

While we had the manager at the table, we confirmed that the sausage in the appetizer is identical to the one served by the piece. And we also confirmed that they do not do anything additional to the sliced sausage we were served earlier. Effectively, the kitchen takes a link just like the two we had sent back, slices it up, and puts it on the cheese and crackers to order.

This proved that not only can they still make good links, but that there must have been well-cooked links in the kitchen as well.

Of course this made it doubly stupefying that our second round of links was also undercooked. The tally for the day was one well-cooked sausage (obscured with pimento cheese and cheddar biscuits) and four undercooked sausages that went uneaten.

It’s a mystery that I hope is solvable. At the very least manager Molly Deegan was gracious through the whole affair and took the order off our bill. I really do not generally send food back, and I take no joy in relating this story. Hopefully she can help me figure out what happened today, because I’ve had good food here before, and I would like to think the chances of getting food cooked right is greater than 20%.

But until then, I regret to say, I’m in no rush to return.

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Update 4/14/2011: I got my answers, and a new respect for what goes on at the Dinosaur.