Texan cuisine is the food associated with the Southern U.S. state of Texas, including its native Southwestern cuisine influenced Tex-Mex foods. Texas is a large state, and its cuisine has been influenced by a wide range of cultures, including Tejano/Mexican, Native American, Creole/Cajun, African-American, German, Czech, Southern and other European American groups.
The cuisine of neighboring states also influences Texan cuisine, such as New Mexican cuisine and Louisiana Creole cuisine, as such New Mexico chile, Cayenne peppers, and Tabasco sauce are often used in Texan cooking.
Agriculture
In the 1880s, citrus growers in Texas and Florida discovered pink-fleshed seedless grapefruit mutations like the Ruby. Early varieties like the Duncan had many seeds and pale flesh.
Specialties
Barbecue
Texas barbecue was influenced by the cooking technique barbacoa, a method of slow cooking meat that has been wrapped in leaves in a covered pit.
In the 19th century, cowboys developed techniques to cook the tough beef from range cattle over coals and colonial style open pit barbecue was brought to the state when blacks arrived from the southeast, but later developed into closed pit Western-style barbecue which uses indirect heat instead of coals and imparts a smokier flavor.
Barbecue in Texas is most commonly served with white bread, spicy sauces, pickles, sliced onion, and jalapeños; sides include pinto beans, potato or rice salad, and cabbage slaw. Common desserts served with barbecue are fruit cobbler, banana pudding, and pecan pie.
Steak and beef
Texas is among a handful of states that developed an early preference for beef barbecue, alongside other states in the neighboring cuisine of the Southwestern United States and the cuisine of the Western United States. Beef brisket (slowly cooked in smoke in a wood-fired "pit") is the most common barbecue.
The influence of steak on Texas barbecue is so great that it is often highlighted in popular culture, for example the animated sitcom King of the Hill. Restaurants that serve Texan cuisine, such as The Big Texan Steak Ranch, and even national brands like Texas Roadhouse, often specialize in steak in particular.
It is illegal to defame the cattle and ranching industries, of either Texas or the Southwestern United States, within the state of Texas.
Pork
Near the end of the 19th century, immigrants from Germany and Eastern Europe introduced their distinctive culinary traditions, including sausage making, marked by bold and sometimes piquant spicing and coarser texture, which became part of Texan barbecue culture and smoked sausage remains a popular dish at Western-style barbecues. Early American traditional whole-hog barbecues and later rib barbecues were prepared with pork.
Dessert and pastry
Czech immigrants brought a tradition of pastry-making including fruit-filled kolaches and sausage-filled klobasniky, pastries. The Texas Legislature has declared West, Texas the "Home of the Official Kolache of the Texas Legislature," while Caldwell, Texas is "Kolache Capital of Texas." Strudel was brought to Texas by European immigrants.
Sopapillas are a simple fried pastry dough sweetened with sugar and cinnamon. The dish has roots in a lard-fried pastry made by the Tigua Pueblo and Franciscan friars from New Mexico in Ysleta, El Paso. This early form of the pastry dates to at least 1682, as the style originates in New Mexican cuisine, making it one of the earliest pastries known found in Texan cuisine.
Pecan pie is the official state pie of Texas. The crust for another local specialty, peanut butter pie, is made with crushed vanilla wafers and peanuts. The filling is a sweetened peanut butter pudding made with milk, sugar, peanut butter, corn starch and egg yolks.
Though the origin of the term Texas sheet cake is unknown, with some speculating it's a reference to the cake's large size or decadence, and others who believe it's because the cake includes Texas-style ingredients like buttermilk and pecans, the cake has become a popular dessert throughout the United States since the original recipe was published by The Dallas Morning News in 1957.
Peach cobbler is the official cobbler.
Hamburger
An early claim to the invention of the hamburger was Fletcher Davis of Athens, Texas, who claimed to have served it at his restaurant at a time when there were more cows than people in Texas. According to oral histories, in the 1880s, he opened a lunch counter in Athens and served a "burger" of fried ground beef patties with mustard and Bermuda onion between two slices of bread; with a pickle on the side.