What Really Makes Buc-Ee's Barbecue Taste So Darn Good

If you're traveling through the southern part of the country, make it a point to stop at one of Buc-ee's 49 locations, as they're practically a world unto themselves. There are so many reasons to get hyped for Buc-ees: The restrooms are as clean as a whistle, the stores are huge, and the food options are numerous. While you should certainly scoop up a few bags of gummy candy and Beaver Nuggets, peruse the jerky counter, and pick up some homemade fudge (hopefully you have a cooler to stash it in), there is no denying the allure of the rest stop chain's good — not even good-for-a-gas-station — barbecue.

Featuring a menu of chopped and sliced brisket, pulled pork, and turkey sandwiches, as well as sausage served up on a stick, Buc-ee's Texas-style barbecue is considered exemplary by some. And a lot of that is due to Randy Pauly, the energetic, cowboy hat-bedecked director of barbecue for Buc-ee's.

Despite the more theatrical aspects of Buc-ee's barbecue (each new brisket is announced at the meat chopping counter under a sign that reads Texas Round Up), this meat is serious business. The chain employs its own director of barbecue: Randy Pauly, a seasoned pitmaster who once competed in barbecue competitions across the country. Pauly won the title of world champion eight times in his storied career. He also worked as the Director of Foodservice at Holmes Smokehouse for nearly nine years before taking the job with Buc-ee's. He even competed on Food Network's "Chopped Grill Masters."

His focus is on Buc-ee's own brand of Texas barbecue, and in addition to supervising all the meats produced for Buc-ee's, Pauly makes his way to new stores to teach the employees of the Texas Round Up counter how the chain's signature sandwiches are made. By the time he's done with them, he told The Colorado Sun, "...they're gonna be champions on the knife."

Pauly is respponsible for the quality of all the meats at Buc-ee's, including its best-selling sliced and chopped brisket sandwiches. The legendary brisket for these sandwiches comes from a smokehouse in Texas, and it's delivered fresh daily to each store. Each haunch gets a salt and pepper rub-down and is smoked for 12 to 14 hours.

There is also the pulled pork sandwich, a sauce-heavy, richly flavored mound of pork between two buttery buns, as well as the turkey breast sandwich, with thick, tender slices of the smoky white meat slathered in barbecue sauce. Additionally, you can grab a smoked sausage served up on a stick (and wrapped up in a tortilla, for whatever reason), provided by New Braunfels Smokehouse, the source of some of Buc-ee's famous beef jerky.

Not for the faint of heart, there is also a triple-decker barbecue sandwich, the Three Meat sandwich, which comes loaded with three of the aforementioned meats: sausage, brisket, and turkey. This colossus, by virtue of its stacked interior, sits almost comically taller than all the other assembled and wrapped food items under the heat lamps (except, of course, for the Big Buckin Brisket sandwich).