Marcus Webb spent four years traveling through central Texas before opening Smoke Ranch BBQ in Burbank. He ate at Snow's and Franklin's and Louie Mueller and all the roadhouses in between, not as a tourist but as a student. When he came back to Burbank, he built two offset smokers to Texas specifications and started running them the night before service days.
The brisket is the measure. Webb uses USDA Prime beef, applies a salt and pepper crust, and puts the meat in the smoker for fourteen hours over oak. The result — obtained by arriving before noon because it sells out — has a dark bark, a pronounced smoke ring, and fat that has rendered sufficiently to baste the meat from the inside. He serves it the Texas way: weighed by the pound, cut on a butcher block, placed on butcher paper.
The ribs spend three hours in the smoker before a glaze is applied for the final thirty minutes. The baby back designation at Smoke Ranch means something: smaller, more tender, and with a better meat-to-fat ratio than spare ribs when treated correctly. The jalapeño cheddar sausage — house-made with a casing that snaps audibly when you bite through it — is the companion to order alongside.
The sides are treated seriously. The mac and cheese uses house pasta and a four-cheese sauce that does not pretend to be health food. The collard greens are cooked with smoked turkey rather than pork, which makes them technically accessible to more diets while losing nothing in depth.
Smoke Ranch is the BBQ answer to a question Burbank has been quietly asking for years.
