Anderson Herald Bulletin
Sunday Business Section
(Full Front Page Coverage)

Sunday, August 13, 2000 HB photos/John P. Cleary Billy Penny, owner of Southern Yankee Bar-B-Q, waits for customers from his mobile barbecue shack on North Scatterfield Road. Here's the beef! Aroma draws Customers to Southern Yankee Bar-B-Q                            BY CINDY CARSON                                Staff Reporter If you want to know what real Texas barbecue is all about, roll down your car window, drive north along Scatterfield toward Hartman Road keeping your eyes on the east side of the road. When you smell heaven, step on the brake: You've found the Southern Yankee Bar-B-Q Smokehouse. If you think it smells good, just wait till you taste it. “The lady who lives across Scatterfield came over,” said owner, and cook Billy Penny, “She said she'd been smelling the smoke for two weeks and couldn't stand it any more without finding out whether the food tastes as good as it smells.” The man who lives behind the property where the smokehouse sits six days a week was in the middle of mowing his yard when he could no longer resist the aroma. “He drove over here on his lawnmower and bought some to try,” Penny said, grinning, his Texas accent lending charm to the comment. “Last week an ambulance pulled into our driveway at home and the guys wanted to know if they could buy some barbecue right then.” Penny trotted toward the smokehouse as customers pulled over to the side of the road and walked up the grassy incline. “I went by your house this morning when you were pulling out,” the man told Penny. “So I followed you to see where you set up.” The man studied the menu carefully before making his selection. Penny was a facilities manager for Gencorp in Marion — until the week he returned from vacation in April and learned that his position, as well as other jobs at the company, had been eliminated. “My wife, Kathy, was five months pregnant, and I decided I didn't really want to find another job in the automotive business,” Penny said. He sat at a small table shaded by an umbrella just outside the smokehouse on Wednesday. “The company moved me to Anderson. We chose this city because it's between Marion and Indianapolis. Anderson's a nice town.” He's always loved to cook. He gardens and jars his own salsa. Each Christmas he sends a case to his parents and one to his sister in Texas. His brothers and sisters are scattered throughout western states neighboring Texas. “When we found out it didn't get hot in the summer in Indiana, we knew we'd found a home,” Penny said grinning at the perspiring visitor across the table. “You folks don't know hot. The day we left Texas, it was a 115-heat index. My daughter couldn't play outside in the summer. The dogs had to come inside. I mowed the lawn once and it turned yellow and died.” He brought to Indiana the secret that has made barbecue famous in and outside of Texas. “I looked around and thought, 'What does Anderson need? It needs good barbecue,'” he said. “I told my wife that I could go back and get another job at a factory, and they tell me how much I was going to make, what days I have to work, how long I am going to work, or we could try something else.” She said, “What do you want to do?” I said, “Let's do barbecue.” He and Kathy chose a motto for their enterprise: Eat here or we'll both starve. Besides hot, Penny knows that Hoosiers, for the most part, also don't know that magic takes place when beef, pork, chicken or jalapeno peppers are smoked slowly over real burning wood. Hispanic members of the Anderson community line up to buy his smoked peppers called chipotles. “What the cowboys would do when they butcher their steer at the chuck wagon is they would cook the beef in the ground in pits. Over the years they switched to steel pits, but they still cook it the same way: low and slow. That's the only way to cook true barbecue. Low and slow with plenty real wood smoke.” “For beef you want to use hickory or oak,” he said. “For pork or chicken you want to use a fruit wood like pecan or apple.” The black cooker stands at the rear of the portable smokehouse. One end holds the fire box while the central barrel in the middle contains water in the bottom — water that keeps the meat tender and juicy — with the chamber at the other end with three shelves to smoke cheese, peppers, ham and other foods as the smoke exits the cooker. One of the best items on a simple but mouthwatering menu is the longhorn Texas beef brisket, meat from the steer's shoulder that is the toughest part of the animal. Beef brisket smoked over hickory for 14 hours is so lean and tender that you don't really need to chew. And then there are the smoked pork ribs and chicken with sides of potato salad, baked beans and rolls. Or you can get the meat on a bun the size of a dinner plate. Penny will smoke meat for parties. “They can bring the meat, and I charge a dollar a pound to smoke it. A lot of people come and have meat smoked for weekend gatherings.” He also will prepare turkeys slowly over smoked fruitwood for the same price. He learned a quick lesson his first week after opening on Father's Day weekend. He tried opening at 9 a.m. and was out of food by 2 p.m. And he quickly learned that while some Hoosiers say they like their barbecue hot, they really don't anticipate Texas hot. “When I opened, I offered hot barbecue chicken wings,” Penny said, “I told one customer my sauce was hot, and he said that was fine. He came back later and told me that after he ate the third wing, his ears filled up with sweat and he couldn't finish them. Another customer, a lady, wanted the hot sauce, and I wanted her to taste it first. Her daughter said her mom couldn't stop crying after a couple of bites. I love jalapeno peppers. We eat them every day, so I don't realize just how hot they are. I toned my barbecue sauce down, way down.” “The sauce should complement the meat, not flavor it. The flavor comes from the smoke.” His sauce is not too sweet or swamped by catsup. Using the word catsup and sauce in the same sentence earned a straight look and polite smile from Penny, but there seemed to be the whisper of a groan in the air above the table — perhaps every Texan ancestor expressing dismay. “No ma'am, I don't use catsup in my sauce,” Penny said. “I grow my own peppers and I make the sauce from scratch. No catsup.” He still offers the real Texas barbecue sauce — but — only with special warning to the customer. And the sauce for the brisket is added after it's dished up “Some of our customers are diabetic, so we let people put on the sauce,” said his wife, Kathy, who is expecting their third child in September. Near Christmas, Penny also makes his own pecan pies which will be sold, too. Or by the slice at the smokehouse every day. The taste of beef is so spectacular that after the second bite, customers find themselves studying Penny carefully. With a little luck and continued good health, Penny at 39 is a man who has found a financial bonanza. “People are always asking me if I want a partner or if I'd consider franchising,” Penny said. “I say no thanks. I want to be the only one with this barbecue.” By October, Penny will be opening a small restaurant on Broadway across from the former Payless Supermarket. “One of the most famous barbecue places in Texas is a little place called Goode's, and it's smaller than the place I've leased,” Penny said. “People stand in line to get into Goode's.” Hours at the Southern Yankee Bar-B-Q are 11 a.m. to 7p.m. Tuesday through Saturday, and 1 p.m. to 3 p.m. on Sunday. The smokehouse is closed on Mondays. For information about special orders, call 622-7961. To our readers: When this article was written the newspaper did not include it on their website. With the permission of the newspaper we are making it available for you to view. By the time the last article was written the newspaper began placing it on their website.