Briscuits food truck in Austin expertly combines briskets and biscuits

Oct 14, 2024

The brisket and jelly biscuit, pinwheel and brisket and cheddar biscuit are standouts at Briscuits food trailer in Austin

The biggest challenge nowadays for new barbecue joints is finding ways to stand out from a crowded field of smoked meat purveyors.

It wasn’t long ago that aspiring pitmasters could hang out their shingle and serve brisket, pork ribs and house-made sausage and become an instant favorite of Texas barbecue fandom.

The Briscuits trailer has a smoker.

Briscuits food trailer in Austin

Due to economic changes such as the price of brisket as well as staffing challenges, barbecue joints have been forced to do more with less. Creativity and specialization have become key skills.

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This was the conundrum faced by Christopher McGhee and Will Spence when they opened the Briscuits food trailer in Austin in 2021.

Spence and McGhee met while working at The Switch in Dripping Springs, a joint well-known for pushing the boundaries of creative barbecue. When they decided to branch out on their own, they knew the market had changed for smoked meats.

“I’d cooked barbecue in the city, but after we left [to go to The Switch] so many places opened in the meantime we knew we had to do something different,” says McGhee, who got his start at Freedmen’s Bar in Austin, one of the earliest purveyors of creative barbecue.

Briscuits co-owners Christopher McGhee, center, and Will Spence with Will's wife Rachael Goco, who helps out at the trailer.

McGhee is from North Carolina and Spence is from Mississippi, so southern cuisine featured prominently in their calculations. They settled on combining handmade biscuits with classic Texas barbecue.

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4204 Menchaca, Austin, TX 78704

briscuits.com

Located in the food truck park adjacent to Radio Coffee & Beer

Open for breakfast & lunch Thursday-Monday

Onsite ordering is only available online through your phone

It’s a remarkable and surprising, combination. Their signature dish, slices of smoked brisket piled on to a buttermilk biscuit and slathered with a smoked strawberry jelly, is one of the best and most creative barbecue dishes I’ve tried in a while.

The brisket is an excellent Central Texas-style, salt-and-pepper version cooked in their adjacent 250-gallon offset smoker as well as in an upright version they designed themselves. For the biscuits and jelly, Spence says it was months of recipe testing that resulted in their exemplary takes on Southern classics.

“Everything we’ve done here is to try something and then tweak it from there,” says Spence. “Just a lot of trial-and-error.”

These are “cut” or “layered”-style biscuits in which flour, butter and other ingredients are made into a dough, rolled into layers, and then a sheet of the dough is cut into blocks and baked. The key to buttery, flaky biscuits is that the dough must be kept cold through the whole process.

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And that’s a problem working in a food trailer adjacent to live fire pits in Austin in the summer. The process becomes a two-day affair; Spence first mixes the dough which is then returned to the refrigerator and then rolled out the next day.

The extra time and effort have paid off: these layered, buttery biscuits are certainly some of the best in Texas barbecue.

Then there’s the handmade, smoked strawberry jelly. They lightly smoke a batch of individual strawberries in the offset smoker, then mix those with sugar, citrus and other fresh ingredients.

The fragrant, flour-y biscuits, sweet jelly and the fatty, salt-and-pepper brisket is a combination of flavors that forges new boundaries of what Texas barbecue can be.

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They also pair smoked pork belly with an apple-and-pear jam, redolent of nutmeg and cinnamon. Breakfast sandwiches include brisket on a biscuit with cheddar cheese and scrambled eggs.

Spence and McGhee have created a distinctive and unique niche in a new world of Texas barbecue that focuses on signature dishes, specialization and creative menu items. All of which is built on a foundation of great smoked meats.