BBQ Road Trip

A couple weekends ago we did a somewhat crazy thing. It's not really that crazy, especially if you know us. We, specifically Mitchums, will drive for food.  It's not unheard of for us to take a day trip to Mississippi for tamales or out to Mason, TN for bbq.

So when I saw the "I Am the Pitmaster" short film at the AM event I knew we needed to go. That weekend.  Dad, Mom and Trey were in too.

We piled into the backseat and headed towards Brownsville down I-40.  Once off the highway we wound our way through the small town of Brownsville. It actually has a cute little town square and lovely older homes. Helen's is just on the edge of those cute older home area.



Inside there are two tables and a small window to place your order. We all ordered the BBQ plate and sat down.



The meat was moist and tender. The sauce, of which I got both sweet and spicy, was a bit on the spicy side for me, but delicious. My absolute favorite thing though was the potato salad. Besides my Mimi's potato salad, it was the best I've ever had. The potatoes were almost mashed with some small chunks of boiled egg and pickles. We ordered an extra side of these to share. Although I think I ate the majority of it.

We got to talking to Helen's husband, who makes the fire for her every morning, and he invited us to come around back and see the smoke house.



It was indeed really smokey once inside. Almost instantly my eyes closed up and started watering.


My eyes are watering again just looking at it. On the right is the fire. She takes the embers and coals from the fire and moves them to the pit on the left hand side of the door.  I didn't get a picture of this side because my eyes had nearly shut and I didn't want to expose my camera to the smoke. On the pit she can put up to 12 aluminum foil raped pork shoulders.

It was a neat experience to see the video and then get to meet the people. The Turners are good people who do it the old way. We really enjoyed speaking with them and having some bbq.

We decided to take the highway back to Memphis. I think it was 70. A small two lane country road.

A ways out of Brownsville we passed Bozo's and decided to turn around and go in for some fried pies.



None of us were really hungry, but it's not every day that you go to Bozo's and it's not every day you get a fried pie.

We were all stuffed and happy afterwards and made the trek back to Memphis. All-in-all it was a fun Saturday afternoon.