The Salad Built Like a Trail Ride
Every February, thousands of riders converge on Houston as part of the trail rides leading into the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo — a tradition with roots reaching back to Black and Hispanic cowboys who worked Texas ranches long before rodeo became a spectator sport. It's one of the city's oldest living traditions, and one Chef Pat wanted to put directly on a plate.
The Texas Trail Ride salad isn't a garden salad with protein added as an afterthought — it was built backward, starting from the idea of a meal substantial enough to fuel someone who'd been in a saddle since sunrise. Smoked chicken, candied bacon, black beans, blue cheese: every ingredient earns its place by weight, not garnish.
Chef Pat says he wanted a dish that didn't apologize for being filling — something that could stand in for a full plate at a cookout, just served cold and fast enough for a lunch break.
A salad that can't fuel a full day isn't a meal. It's a side dish pretending.
Chef Pat
The technical work here is in the candied bacon. Simply frying bacon and dusting it with sugar produces an uneven glaze that either burns in spots or never fully sets. Chef Pat bakes his bacon low and slow on a wire rack, brushing it with a brown sugar glaze partway through the cook so it has time to caramelize evenly into the fat as it renders, rather than sitting on top of it.
The BBQ vinaigrette is built to do double duty — sweet and smoky like a barbecue sauce, but thinned and acidified enough to coat greens without weighing them down the way a true sauce would. Roasted corn and cherry tomato add brightness, black beans add body, and blue cheese cuts through the sweetness with the one sharp, funky note the whole dish needs to keep from tipping into dessert territory.
L.LeSure