Auston Hot Luck Festival

Austin – Capital city of the Independent Republic of Texas, and a very cool place.

Cowboy Cauldron Company and Butter Pat Industries were invited to the first-ever Hot-Luck Festival in that fair city; a live-fire only showcase of some of the best chefs in America.

Hosted by Aaron Franklin of Franklin’s BBQ fame, this event turned out to be quite a trip, both literally and figuratively. There was lots of fire, lots of booze, and lots of fun.

We got paired up with Steve McHugh, owner of Cured restaurant in San Antonio. Steve is a fantastic chef and one hell of a guy. Cured is a double-entendre. It references both the curing of meat, which Steve excels at, as well as the fact that Steve is a cancer survivor, and spends lots of his time doing fundraising for events in support of cancer research and victims.

His entry to the festival was pure genius – duck neck sausage made from duck meat and cased in the bird’s neck, with the head still on! This was combined with grilled peaches. If you haven’t grilled peaches on a Cauldron, you really haven’t lived yet.

He used Butter Pat Industries polished cast iron pans for finishing the sausages. If you haven’t yet seen them on the other pages of our site, be sure to check them out. They truly are the best cast iron that has ever been made.

We weren’t the only guys there. We saw lots of talent. Check out this version of spit-roasted beef. These cuts are called 109’s in the trade, and they are biblical chunks of cow. Maybe twenty inches long and weighing in at 15 pounds or so, each!!!

Also, one of my personal favorite pieces of any animal is the tongue. (Check out the tongues of the roe deer from Poland on another one of our posts. Here are maybe 70 of them, smoked to perfection, in a smoker that took one serious, big-ass truck to move!

You have probably seen references to Chef Denny as well. He is our partner and the driving force behind Butter Pat Industries. Here is a photo of us at anther area at the event, sponsored by the National Pork Board. Take a good look at three things in this photo – the incredible meat, the cold beer, and the satisfied smiles. That’s the Cauldron Lifestyle, right there, by golly….