I spent a few weeks tooling around central Texas trying eat my way out alive. After about 20 barbecue joints, I came away with a big smile, a lot of photos, and some enlightening interviews.

Check out my article on this vortex of amazing ribs, brisket, and sausage. It's very very different than anywhere else. A slightly abridged version of this article ran last month in Restaurant Hospitality magazine. Click here for the full version, complete with a map to guide you if you're heading that way.

Take an election year trip back more than 40 years to see how President Lyndon Baines Johnson used barbecue to further his career, meet Walter Jetton, his barbecue chef, and try his recipes.

Learn, as I did when I hit the stacks at the LBJ Library on the University of Texas campus in Austin, that the day Kennedy was shot he was on his way to the LBJ Ranch for a barbecue.

Here's LBJ and VP Hubert Humprey after their 1964 election victory, dressed in western suits and Stetsons, chowing on ribs. Jetton later wrote in his cookbook that Humphrey "sure gave these ribs a fit... He went at them like Clyde Beaty to cats and must have eaten them for an hour, putting away more of them than I have ever seen anybody do. So far as I could tell, they did him no harm."

Remember: No rules in the bedroom or the kitchen,