FORT WORTH, Texas—The Outlaw Chef has a lot of branding irons in the fire these days.

Terry Chandler is working on a couple of cookbooks, teaching the occasional cooking class at Central Market and waiting to hear whether the footage that a New York talent director filmed of him will spark enough interest to make him a TV cook.

He’ll cook you gourmet grub on the river or range for a fishing or hunting adventure, he’ll cater your wedding cowboy-style, and he’s thinking about launching an online corporate-catering venture.

Bearded and bandannaed, pigtailed and pleasingly portly, red-cheeked and usually smiling, Chandler is one of the city’s most visible characters. You’ll see him in vintage cowboy garb, cooking at fundraisers, cowboy gatherings and catered events around the region.

But he’s most likely to be found at his own joint: Fred’s Texas Cafe, the venerable little dive loved by lawyers and slackers, brokers and bikers, where Chandler turns out the likes of smoked quail with a reduction of red wine and chile de arbol along with the burgers and fries.

Fred’s is having to do without him for a few weeks. The 41-year-old Chandler recently embarked on his first extended job on a working ranch—the storied Four Sixes, established in 1870 by Samuel Burk Burnett and still running thousands of head of cattle on a quarter-million acres between Lubbock and Wichita Falls.

He has done brief guest-cooking gigs on some of the big ranches around the state, but “this is the real deal,” Chandler says. He’ll be the wagon cook for the Four Sixes cowboys when they round up and work the cattle, he says.

When the roundup’s over, Chandler figures, “I’ll have my Ph.D. in chuck-wagon cooking.”

Chandler comes from a family of cowboys who worked on Texas ranches—“the Matador, the Pitchfork, the Four Sixes, the Spur Ranch.”

“My grandma did a little bit of cooking on the Pitchfork,” he says, and one of his childhood memories is family reunions in West Texas where his uncle Guy Goen, “a renowned chuck-wagon cook, would cook for the whole family.”

“He had an International Harvester pickup with a chuck box on the back,” Chandler recalls. Goen did his cooking over a 20-yard-long ditch; “he’d build a mother fire at one end and shovel coals into the ditch and cook over it.”

But Chandler had no childhood ambitions of being a cowboy cook, or a chef of any sort. Although he started cooking young, “I just cooked because I liked to eat.”

Nor did young Terry, when his father, J.D. Chandler, became the proprietor of Fred’s 30 years ago, harbor any dreams of cooking there.

In 1986, Chandler joined the Marine Corps to get away: “I was going to go see the world and be gone,” he says. “I didn’t want to work here.”

By 1990, Chandler was back in Fort Worth, with a job in his dad’s kitchen. He kept on seeing the world, though.

“I was into traveling and eating food and bringing it back. I’d twist it and make it my own and serve it here,” he says. He started creating dinner specials, and flavors from Vietnam, Thailand or Mexico began showing up at Fred’s alongside chicken-fried steak.

Then Grady Spears came to town to open Reata, and suddenly cowboy cooking was cool.

“I said, ’Man, people are buying this,”’ Chandler recalls with a grin. “And I really know how to do this. I’m the real deal.”

Chandler began researching cowboy cooking, working on recipes. He made trips to West Texas to cook on his cousins’ chuck wagon, and he hooked up with the Ought Zero Land & Cattle Co., which owns a chuck wagon from the late 1800s. The Outlaw Chef was born.