The smoked sausage link.

Beef, ground coarse, packed loosely into a natural casing and smoked over post oak until the skin goes taut. Daniel Vaughn's clearest description of the style is in a review of a Houston joint doing it well: links "practically Lockhartian with their flavorful coarse-ground beef packed loosely into taut casings". 1 It is sold by the ring or the half pound off the same counter as the brisket, and the test is the snap. At Burnt Bean Company, the state's number one joint, Vaughn wrote that the sausage snapped—you'll actually hear it!. 1

The link is the part of the tray that still belongs to the meat markets. Green's Sausage House has run a cafe, a bakery, a market case and a deer-processing room out of one building since 1960, and the case held more than twenty sausage varieties in 2017. 5 Robertson's Hams & The Choppin' Block has been Salado's counter since 1971, and everything it sells is cured and smoked on the premises. 9 L&R Old Fashioned Meat Market & Sausage Shop has cut meat on East Central Avenue since 1988 and puts it plainly: "Steaks cut to your order. Sausage smoked the right way. BBQ on the pit every day." 10 Robertson's and L&R sell off their own counters, and their own words are the only description of what they make.

Daniel Vaughn went to Mum Foods Smokehouse And Delicatessen and found Travis Crawford grinding against the town he learned from: "Instead of the coarse grind and the pockets of pooled fat you might find in a Lockhart link, Crawford's are more cohesive with a finer grind." 2 The wood is post oak at most pits and hickory, post oak and pecan at the Smokey Denmark plant, whose Jonathan Pace says of the house: "I would consider us traditionalists." 4 The casing is natural, which is what makes a snap possible at all. After the casing, the choices belong to the cook. Interstellar BBQ cases a Frito pie, and LeRoy and Lewis Barbecue has run "the Japanese currywurst, filled with beef, pork, and curry spices". 1

The sausage makers who supply the pits are one trade and the market families who smoke their own are another. Albert Smokey Denmark learned sausage and smoke at Black's in Lockhart, founded his own company in 1964 and built the East Fifth Street plant in 1970. 7 3 Dusty Miller talked his father into lending him gear and yard space from the family deer-processing business in 2008, while he was a sophomore studying accounting, and Miller's Smokehouse now runs five 1,000-gallon smokers around the clock. 6 Green's Sausage House answers the same question with its case rather than a method: more than twenty sausage varieties, six bacons and six cheeses in 2017, beside a bakery and a deer-processing room. 5

Buy it where it is made, or find the counter honest enough to say whose it is. Smokey Denmark Sausage Company sells retail off the East Fifth Street plant, and its links go out under other people's names: the Chronicle lists sales "to distributors, as well as restaurants like Stubb's, Iron Works, Rudy's, Hillside Farmacy, Walton's, and many more". 4 Rollin Smoke BBQ is the Austin counter that names the maker on its menu: "We proudly serve Smokey Denmark's sausage. A local East Austin company started in 1964." 8 On the Lockhart square, Barbs B Q runs a fajita-flavored link its own operator calls a "more Mexican-style jalapeño cheddar". 1

I have not found anything newer than the Chronicle's 2012 survey on who cases Franklin's links, and it put the coarser grind at Texas Sausage Co. 4 Buying links in is normal, and Rollin Smoke BBQ naming Smokey Denmark on its own menu is the exception rather than the shape of the trade. 8 What the markets kept is the other half of it. Green's still has a deer-processing room behind the cafe, and Miller's started as a deer-processing yard. 5 6