Some folks may also wonder how a writer best known for his writing on wine ended up in Austin working with a modern barbecue master.
Besides the fact that I grew up in Austin and went to school there though I now live in San Francisco , wine and barbecue share several qualities that deserve observation. Both rely on a combination of good-quality natural ingredients and the technique and skill of an experienced practitioner. Thanks to local, natural ingredients—be they beef or pork, hickory or oak, Pinot Noir or Riesling—and the techniques that have been developed to transform them, expressive, distinctive, and regional styles have arisen in both the barbecue and the wine world.
That said, very little wine was consumed during the making of this book. And happily so. While wine is wonderful, immersion in the far-more-relaxed culture of barbecue was refreshing and inspiring though the day often starts way too early. Yes, we drank a lot of beer. So unlike most books that you may flip through a few times and then place on the shelf to display with the others, I hope this one will live a good portion of its life out in the field, be it in the kitchen or out by the smoker.
Now, this book is not a survey of barbecue traditions across the country. So, with the greatest respect to all of the other styles around the country, in this book, all I discuss is what we do. And my hope is that by being hyperdetailed and specific about my techniques, I will help you in your cooking and in your ability to develop your own style too. In the process, I sometimes discovered how to make them better or at least how to tailor them to my own needs. At least, those are my food groups.
In each chapter, I drill down into some fairly technical information with regard to how the process of barbecue works. It can get a little geeky, but I hope that in a way the geekiness keeps you engaged. I include this information because I myself love the technical details.
Understanding how something works is the first step toward successfully replicating and improving it. Chapter one is an extended telling of my own story. I really just want to show how a love for barbecue coupled with enthusiasm can equal really good- tasting smoked meat. If I can do this, you can too.
Chapter two is all about the smoker. In Texas, this piece of equipment might be called a smoker, cooker, and pit all in the same sentence, but whatever you call it, barbecue practitioners have no end of fascination with these clunky steel constructions. Everyone who designs and builds his or her own smoker does something a little bit different, always looking for that tweak that will improve its performance.
In this chapter, I talk about various kinds of smokers and various modifications you can make to improve the performance of an inexpensive off-the-rack smoker you might buy at an outdoors store. I also give a very basic template for how to build your own smoker from scratch. Chapter three is about wood. Just keep it dry. But a good fire and the fine smoke it produces are two of the most fundamental elements to producing superior Central Texas barbecue. In this chapter, I get into the nitty-gritty of what good smoke and fire mean and how to produce them in various conditions.
Chapter five is about meat. One of things I do differently from most other barbecue joints is use a higher grade of meat. Chapter six is a doozy. If you buy this book and just want to dive right in, you could start here, though I recommend going back at some time to read all of the other stuff. This is the chapter where I do things like suggest temperatures and times for your cook, even though ultimately you have to figure out the fine details of these things for your own kind of cooker, your own conditions, and ultimately your own taste.
But I do talk about other important stuff like trimming meats, rubbing, and wrapping—all the techniques that will help your meat turn out great. The bulk of this chapter is devoted to brisket and ribs, which are the two most popular meats, and cooked using the two basic methods of cooking we do. All of our other fare basically follows these methods, so to learn how to cook brisket and ribs in a smoker is to learn how to cook just about anything.
Lastly, we talk a little bit about sides, sauces, serving, drinking, and all of the stuff that goes hand in hand with enjoying the fruits of your labor.
In Central Texas, sides and sauces are always considered secondary to the meat, if indeed necessary at all. More important is brisket slicing technique, which is something I go into detail about here. So I talk a little about what I like and what I think works best with barbecue, though beer in general gets a big fat Yes. And all I can say is, Go for it!
The key to my own development—and it will be to yours—is repetition. Do, and do some more. And pay attention. I have just arrived at work and am looking everywhere for the tamper for the espresso machine. Here at Franklin Barbecue, often the very first thing new kitchen employees are trained to do is pull a good espresso shot.
Very important. We have a two-group classic La Marzocco Linea espresso machine taking up good real estate back in the kitchen, and it pulls beautiful shots. Having no luck finding the tamper, I improvise and pull the shot anyway using the bottom of a hot sauce bottle. Good enough. This happens several times a year. It can be tricky when it comes to barbecue, as dealing with the changing weather is one of the supreme challenges of cooking good, consistent meat.
Weather this cold affects temperatures, cooking times, and the way our smokers draw. We have many different shifts at Franklin Barbecue: cooking the ribs, putting the briskets on, meat and sides prep, pulling the briskets off, cutting lunch, and more.
The 2 a. Of course, I give myself a short break here or there for an espresso or, in this cold weather, an Americano, which allows for longer sipping. You can balance these coffees on the top of the firebox or on the handles of the heavy smoker doors and let the heat of the cookers keep them warm. Also by now, the line is beginning to form and stretch around the side of the restaurant.
On weekdays the first people usually show up by 8 a. On Saturdays it can be as early as 6 a. All kinds of demands will be hitting me now just about running the restaurant. I stick around for a good part of the day, putting out fires, checking food, busing tables, and greeting guests, which will be a mix of locals and people from all over the world. Briskets are pulled off the smoker to rest.
Start prepping for rib shift; trim and rub the beef ribs and build fires. Beef ribs on! Time to trim and rub the pork ribs. Pork ribs on! Continue to watch the fires. Prep turkey; set up mise en place. Turkeys on! Another espresso. Spritz and sauce the ribs; set up warmers. Wrap turkey! Start checking the line; start pulling ribs. Cook sausage. Finish beef ribs and turkeys.
Trim briskets for the next day. Do pork butts; cook potatoes; prep in kitchen; watch fires; dishes. Finish lunch service; clean; continue to trim briskets. Make sauce; tend briskets; kitchen prep.
Rinse and repeat! Or I might just go home and fall asleep for a while before dinner. But when I look back on my barbecue life, I can see that where all this came from is absolutely integral to what it eventually became.
Its evolution in me is a true expression of who I am and where I came from. Specific places, specific times of life and states of mind, and specific people all contributed greatly to what Stacy and I and our restaurant have come to be.
All I had were my own two hands, a work ethic, a positive attitude, a sense of humor, and a fine lady to help it all come together. Barbecue to me is about more than just the smoke and the meat, more than trying to cook better with more flavor and more consistency though those things are definitely important. Barbecue is also about a culture that I love.
It was a cool old place with a classic brick pit from the s, a fire on the floor in barbecue, pit is an interchangeable term for smoker or cooker and may be an actual pit or might be something that stands on legs or wheels aboveground —the kind of joint that just reeks of character and that you can still find in small towns across Texas. It did make an impression on me, but not necessarily on how I cook.
But equally important was the music store that my grandparents owned. I spent a lot of time there and worked there throughout my teenage years. I did a little bit of everything— selling instruments, setting up PA systems, giving guitar lessons, repairing guitars and amps.
I developed my passion for music there but also for something else: for taking things apart and fixing them—for tinkering, for disassembling objects and seeing firsthand how they work. You might not think that that approach to things has much application to preparing great barbecue, but it does. Understanding how things are put together and how they work is the first step toward improving them. But back then, after I graduated from high school, all I wanted to do was play music.
So I went to Austin and had a good time working odd jobs and playing in a couple of bands. I realize now that even playing music fed into my later endeavors. It may not seem like it, but there are many similarities between playing in a band at a show and putting on a barbecue. Why did I get it? I went out to get a grill for our first place together, but I bought a smoker instead. I guess if you live in Texas long enough, barbecue starts to penetrate your consciousness.
And when you get that hankering, you get a smoker, and this was what was available to me at the time. I have a love of design and architecture overall, but especially of a certain roadside style of Americana from the s, s, and s, which in my mind is really represented in barbecue culture.
Now I realize that it was about more than just the meat; it was about the character and resonance of barbecue culture.
My relationship with Stacy was one of the main reasons I gave up the touring musician lifestyle. Stacy is from Texas too Amarillo, way up in the Panhandle, to be exact. Believe it or not, a series of casual cookouts ended up being my only real training before we opened the trailer that would eventually turn into our restaurant. So each one of those backyard parties with friends remains pretty vivid in my mind, especially as they were often tied to a particular residence we had at the time.
Austin is full of funky neighborhoods and funky old rent houses, and we moved around a lot. I cooked my very first brisket in at one of those backyard cookouts. For those of you who are keeping track, we opened the Franklin Barbecue trailer in , which means, yes, I had been cooking brisket for only seven years when we first started. At the time we lived in a little three-plex. It could hold two briskets, if they were stuffed in there, with each brisket capable of serving maybe ten people.
It was prefrozen, commodity, probably Select-grade meat. Negative talent, probably. So, I went online to try to figure out how to make a brisket. My brisket was flavorless—tough and dry—but everyone was terribly nice about it. They all said it was good. Maybe they really thought that, but I knew it was not true.
Shortly after, Stacy and I moved to Bryan—College Station with the plan to save some money and eventually move to Philadelphia, a city I adore, for a while. Only, we were so miserable to be back in a small town that we found ourselves driving to Austin all the time for work, to be with our friends, and to play music.
But it was in Bryan that I did my second cook. We had a small two-bedroom wood-frame house from the s. It had a pretty nice little backyard. So we had a few people over on a Sunday, just like everyone does. I was itching pretty badly to smoke another brisket, which, again, I purchased on sale for an incredibly low price, and I cooked it on the same little cooker.
I also decided to take things to the next level by making a bunch of barbecue sauces. As a test, I also bought a bunch of crappy commercial ones. We composed a grid and asked everyone to pick their favorite sauces and to offer some tasting notes. The sauce test was pretty much the moment when I learned to stop asking for opinions and to listen to my own judgment.
People chose the worst ones as their favorites. I believe Kraft actually won. We missed our friends and our lives in Austin and were spending lots of our time there anyway. Ultimately, we gave up the Philly idea and decided to head back to Austin, where our futures clearly lay. I remember going down to H-E- B to cash in a jar full of change so I could go out and buy a little barbecue. Austin was like that back then. It was a good time and a simpler one.
You could pass on jobs to friends, just as you could houses or apartments. You could live cheaply off minimum wage and tips. It was a city full of people like me—people not doing the stereotypical thing of going to college just to get out and find a job, but trying to figure out and do something they really enjoy, like playing music for not much money. People like to say that Austin was a town full of slackers, and I guess on the surface I could have fallen under that category.
But I was never a slack worker. Stacy had a job—she waited tables. She was the breadwinner for years, though I always had something I was doing, something to bring in some money. For years, I did random stuff—more often than not, I worked for free on projects for friends. There were times when Stacy was definitely frustrated with me.
And, yes, in those years, my interest in barbecue was still percolating—it was kind of a constant buzz in the back of my mind. I did a small tour with my friend Big Jeff Keyton, a terrific local musician, and his band, and on those long drives we realized that both of us were really into barbecue.
I remember that first morsel at Louie Mueller. The place has great counter service— really nice and friendly—and the staff traditionally cuts customers a little taste of beef when they get through the line and up to the counter to order.
When I got to the front of the line, Bobby Mueller gave me one bite that turned out to be a whole end cut. My eyes must have been bulging, and I might have cried a little bit, but it was so, so good.
Sooooooo good! And it started to change me. It was maybe another year before my next cook, in This cook signaled another small step in my development, as I prepared the sides as well as the meat, and learned I could put it all together myself.
And so I cooked the briskets in the front yard of our house and took them to his house while they were resting. I had gone to Ace Mart and bought a cheap Dexter-Russell knife. Still have it. Our next residence was an incredibly dumpy house. There was no real backyard, as the house was on a quarter lot and it took up almost the whole property. We had one barbecue while we lived there.
That was the fifth cook, and the year was I had played a show somewhere that night, packed up my drums and left the show early, and got back to the house feeling very gung-ho. The prospect of cooking a brisket was just the most exhilarating thing. Months had gone by, with me trying to scrape together enough cash to put this one puny barbecue on. And, man, I was so excited.
I remember firing up that little New Braunfels cooker. I recall feeling like a badass walking out of H-E-B with a shopping cart filled with a whopping two briskets. I got home from that show probably around a. I remember just sitting in this small hammock in our tiny, foot-wide backyard, getting the fire going. Our place was at a four-way stop, and there was this streetlamp that would cast its light down into our yard. I just stared at it, thinking it was the coolest thing to see that smoke start wafting up into the night.
I was so stoked. I dozed outside on the hammock while tending the fire. By the next morning, things were going smoothly. Just when it all seemed perfect and twenty to thirty people were about to show up, go figure, the plumbing backed up. A root had cracked a pipe from the toilet, and there was sewage floating up into the yard. It was a Sunday, and I remember finding a piece of plywood and just covering up the swamp.
This is terrible! I remember not being really happy with the brisket. For one thing, I may not have realized that cooking two briskets at the same time would alter the process. Not that this was by any means a failure. Of course, what do you expect when you take months and months off in between cooks? But my sauce was fine, and everyone seemed to have a great time. The next day I fixed the pipe.
We got out of that house pretty darn quick. I worked at a van place, fitting out and customizing vans. I worked in various restaurants. But there were two jobs that ended up having the greatest impact on me: at a coffee shop called Little City, where I worked in the back making sandwiches and doing maintenance, and where I started developing my love of coffee; and the Austin barbecue joint of John Mueller, grandson of the legendary Louie Mueller.
Somewhere around that fifth cook—yes, the one with the septic disaster—I caught myself daydreaming about opening my own barbecue place. Of course, now that I have my own restaurant, bathroom disasters are an ever-looming threat! So I started applying to a bunch of Austin barbecue joints, some of them several times. I wanted to learn barbecue from the inside out; I want to live it.
I was constantly observing and soaking up whatever lessons I could. It developed a big following, but for various reasons he closed it in and disappeared from the scene for a while. He opened a new place in with his sister, but a fallout there led to him departing again.
Now he has his own place once more. He and I appeared on the cover of Texas Monthly together in But I got good at chopping cabbage and onions. I could cut 50 pounds of onions without shedding a tear.
I started rubbing briskets in the afternoons and watched how John handled the meats. I ended up getting to cut the brisket for the customers, which turned out to be a valuable skill.
Often at night, the owner would leave, and I would just be left there on my own, which was great. At those times, I would sort of treat that place with care and a friendly spirit as if it were my own.
It helped that I love cutting brisket, and I love talking to people. To this day, people who used to eat at that defunct restaurant still come into Franklin every now and then and remember me from when I was working behind the counter. Even more than I care to admit, that short-term job probably led to much of what I do now. It was because I found myself doing something I really loved. Eventually, when I could see that writing on the wall that its days were numbered, I quit.
There are barbecue joints everywhere in Central Texas, but there have always been a few places that have stood above the rest. The building itself is a must- see place that all barbecue fans should visit. So here you have a new building, but with the original name and techniques.
Mutton-chopped, soft-spoken Roy Perez is the pitmaster and a barbecue celebrity. No forks or sauce here, following the old ways. Lots of good food is on offer, but the true specialties are the smoked-to-perfection pork chop and the snappy, spicy sausage links.
Under the pitmastership yes, I just coined that term of hard hat— sporting Joe Capello, City Market is one cool spot. You enter a little smoke-filled room in the back of the restaurant where the meat is cut. Then you step back out into the dining room to find a table.
Founded as a grocery store in , with barbecue coming a few years later, the building itself is a beautiful shrine, with smoke-blackened walls and heavenly light streaming in through the fog.
Do not miss this place. Started in , this place oozes amazing tradition, much in the same way its famous Hot Guts sausages ooze deliciously meaty juices. Just a 30 minute drive from downtown Austin, this place is always worth a visit.
It was now , and I had it in my head that I wanted just a lazy little lunchtime spot that I could design, decorate, and cook for on my own. I was trying as hard as I could to figure out some way to get my hands on or make a cooker that was big enough to cook multiple briskets.
I had a dream but no real idea of how to get there except for sheer desire. More and more, I saw entertaining as practicing for the big time when I would have my own place. And I was. Sure, I was poor. How many other things can you start from nothing? You add value to the ingredients through cooking, and then do it all over again.
This restaurant has not accrued one cent of debt. You get in a van, you hit the road, and you play and play and play as much as you can to get better and earn a little money. You make something with your own two hands.
So we went with a place with a huge backyard, almost a third of an acre. I was looking at this backyard and seeing barbecues. Like a party house. It was still inexpensive, but it was a step up. Our next cook was on the Fourth of July. People would come at 5 p.
But we scheduled this Fourth of July barbecue for a Saturday instead of a Sunday because of the holiday weekend. What a mistake. People drink a lot more on Saturdays and stay too late. Still, I was feeling good about the brisket; it was definitely improving from one cook to the next.
We had dial-up Internet on one of those old clear iMac computers. I even tried to figure out a way to turn an old bathtub into a smoker real classy! Anything of substance that was free and I thought might come in handy, I considered. It was late at night. Thoughts raced in my head as I drove: Must get there as fast as possible. I remember turning onto the corner, heart pounding.
Then I saw something—just a little black dot at the end of the street. I probably started sobbing in the truck. I rolled up, turned off my headlights so as not to disturb the neighborhood, and took a look at the smoker. A New Braunfels Hondo. I can double my capacity!
But I can do four—count them, four—briskets. That doubles my capacity and thus the number of people I can feed. I had certainly come to realize that cooking briskets on these things was hard because of their thin, heat-leaking construction and other inefficiencies. So I wheeled the thing into the street. It rattled loudly, like a shopping cart on a cracked parking lot, and I loaded it up myself. It was heavy, and a full-size truck is pretty high up there.
But I got it in and drove off with what until then was my greatest- ever find. So I decided to start saving up some money in earnest. Stacy worked every Friday night waiting tables.
After procuring the new smoker, we had our next Sunday-night cook. I think we hosted seventy-five people or so, and to accommodate them all, we collected tables and chairs from Craigslist that we mixed and matched out in the yard thank you, Free and strung Christmas lights overhead. I moved an old, cheesy s-style bar from our living room outside and set it up to cut brisket on. There I was, drinking, cutting brisket in the dark. It was kind of like a block party, way bigger than we thought it was going to be.
A line of hungry people extended around the yard, and we ran out of food. Little did we know that we were really ramping up here. Big party, lots of food, major service operation. And the meat seemed to be getting a little better. I was learning how to cook multiple briskets at the same time, learning that each one required its own attention and own program. The idea that so much of this was about attention to detail was really becoming a massive part of the way I looked at barbecue.
In it was a roll of ones, fives, and maybe some tens. Throwing that cook probably cost us the equivalent of our rent. The money he raised might not have completely covered our expenses, but it helped a lot. It was like playing the best show of your life and then getting paid and realizing the venue gave you some extra and thinking, Man, we can stay in a hotel tonight!
I shut the bedroom door and sat on the bed and counted the money and thought to myself, Wow, maybe I can do this. And that was the first time it ever truly seemed real to me. It must be like when people finally run their first marathon. I was on cloud nine by the end of that last cook. This was the first time we had a barbecue where I cut everything to order and had a stack of plates on the table and could ask people if they wanted lean or fatty, just like at a real restaurant.
This is what I still do every day when I cut lunch. I honestly believe that one of the reasons our restaurant is successful is because we take the time to talk to people, to get to know them and what they want to eat—same as if we were hosting them in our own backyard.
Nevertheless, I knew I could figure it out, and I worked on that house day and night. What did I do with it? I bought a barbecue pit what we call a smoker in Texas , the one that is today known simply as Number One. How I got it is yet another story of luck, thrift, and perseverance. Number One was the very same smoker that John Mueller was cooking on when I worked for him.
It was made from a gallon tank procured from the side of the highway to put that in perspective, my New Braunfels smoker had a capacity of maybe thirty gallons. When I found out they had it, I asked them if they wanted to sell it. No way, I thought, no way. That cooker never left my mind, but I went on working my various jobs, doing my thing. And one day, as was my habit, I was searching Craigslist and saw a listing for a cooker. It was the same one. And I thought, Oh my God, another one!
I was dancing around like a new contestant on The Price Is Right, because the price was right. This thing was huge—14 feet long, solid metal, mounted on a trailer you could pull with a truck. I figured I could put twelve briskets in there—enough to serve more than a hundred people. It had three little doors; a real crappy axle; a solid piece of pipe, probably 3 inches in diameter; two plates to make a cradle for the smoke chamber to sit on; a gallon tank; and then other plates with spindles welded onto them for the legs and tires.
It had one flat tire, and its other tire was from a car. But for now, suffice it to say, when I bought it, Number One needed some work. When I got it home, I saw what a disaster it really was. Inside, undrained grease had accumulated all of the way up to the grate, about 18 inches deep. There were still crusts of burned meat stuck to the grates.
Opening the firebox, I found it was almost completely full of ash that had hardened and become as tough as concrete. At the restaurant we clean out the firebox constantly. It never had a grease drain on it, so the grease oozed into the firebox, which by then had piled up layers of ash, coals, wood chunks, and then a steady trickle of animal fat. It was all rancid and hardened, like sedimentary rock with little pockets of fossil fuels dripping out. Then I started the excavation, Shawshanking my way through that whole firebox, which is about 40 inches long.
Chipping away at this ashy concrete, I would encounter disgusting little pockets of rancid fat. Finally I got it all cleaned out. It was summertime—the sweaty months of June or July —and Stacy was at work. Treating the cooker like a cast-iron skillet, I sprayed it all over inside and out, rubbed it down with towels, and got it looking like new. That was love.
What was on sale was pork ribs, which became the first rack of ribs I ever cooked in my life. After that, Number One sat around for quite a while. I would have loved to fire it up again, but what business did I have hosting a huge barbecue when Stacy was really paying the bills? She and I were both working a lot, only she was working for money, and I was working on houses for friends with some vague faith that it would all pay off.
In the meantime, the friends I was working for were covering my expenses, and I was amassing a good collection of tools that would eventually come in handy when it came time to open my own joint.
We did smoke a couple of delicious turkeys for Thanksgiving one year. But other than that, Number One just sat in the driveway. We were working and trying to save money, because by now I was fully committed to opening a place. I spent most of my time mapping out the process of somehow opening a place someday. But money had gotten a bit tight, because apparently one guy me building a house takes a really long time.
Eventually, we took some money and really did it up. If I thought I was a badass the last time I walked out of H-E-B with two briskets, think about how I felt pushing out a cart carrying six! Total baller. We had sawhorses in the backyard that we used to support a sheet of plywood for the cutting table. We really thought out the flow of service, with everything I needed to cut the brisket easily at hand, all the sides and garnishes lined up after the brisket station, drinks in the back of a defunct Chevy truck whose bed we filled with ice.
We even made little handbills to pass out to friends with directions to our place. I stayed up all night working on the meat; making potato salad, coleslaw, and beans; and keeping the fires. I think this is going to be bigger than you expect. The other major barbecue styles in the United States are largely pork-derived. Kansas City is famous for pork ribs and burnt ends, Memphis for its wet sauced and dry rubbed pork ribs, and North Carolina for its whole hog barbecue and pulled pork.
Texas is mostly associated with beef, though we cook our share of pork too. But really, the state is notable for its diversity. Most folks who travel through Texas for the first time are surprised by what they see. But when you live here, you know that this massive state has a diverse landscape, from the lush bayou of the east, to the plains of the panhandle, to the coastal flats of the south, to the Road Runner—esque desert mountains of West Texas.
Texas barbecue is just as diverse as its terrain and, indeed, is heavily influenced by that terrain. Mesquite is one of the few trees that grow plentifully out there. East Texas is next to Arkansas and Louisiana and takes its cues from the cooking style of the Deep South, so you see more pork here, and the wood of choice is hickory and pecan. Central Texas barbecue, which is the style I mainly adhere to, is all about slow cooking in offset smokers on post oak, which grows plentifully in a large part of Central Texas.
Meats are brisket and ribs, and every restaurant tends to have its signature sausage recipe too, thanks to the large German and Czech heritage around here, which is also why we have a kolache culture in many small towns in these parts.
Which is best? It suddenly hit us that we were in big trouble, so we ran out and rented some tables and chairs. We strung lights and hung flood lamps from the huge pecan trees in our backyard. Plugged in a stereo. Made sure we had enough ice to chill the beer that people were asked to bring.
Before I knew it, there were people ambling into the backyard. I got distracted and kind of overcooked the brisket—or so I thought.
The guests all formed a line that wrapped around the backyard and down the driveway, and I was there at the cutting board cutting for each and every one of them. Something just clicked and it felt so incredibly natural, so good.
Stacy and I knew—had known for some time—that we wanted to open a barbecue restaurant of our own. The only question was how: we were still poor, still just working to get by. Then Stacy found the trailer. It was posted to Craigslist, a Aristocrat Lo-Liner. If we set up some picnic benches out front, people could enjoy their barbecue on-site.
It could be perfect. So we drove out to the property where this trailer was marooned, welded to a boat dock. The thing needed to go to the dump, but instead it was going to our house. It sat in our backyard, resting on bricks, for a long time. We were still busy, working on other things, and I was trying to decide what to do with it.
I sat in it quite a bit, drank beers in there while trying to visualize how it could eventually be configured. One of the things I was doing at the time was helping my friend Travis Kizer renovate and build out his coffee roastery.
He had this place, an old, late s—early s derelict gas station in the heart of Austin on the access road to Interstate 35, not far from the University of Texas campus, not far from where we lived. I was really into it, because Travis is one of the best people I know and because I love old gas stations.
It was thrilling to discover that this one, underneath all sorts of horrible paint and ruin, was a Texaco station from These stations, which were masterworks of art deco, were designed by Walter Dorwin Teague, who also designed some of the popular Kodak Brownie camera models. I just want to open up a barbecue truck so bad. If you ever make money, you can give me some rent.
Has the beer gotten to you? Guess what? I got a place for the trailer! Somehow, Travis offering a space was the equivalent of the light turning green for me. It had been yellow, but now it was green. I suppose I was waiting for it to happen when it was naturally meant to happen. Same thing with a little dream of opening a place: I knew it was going to happen and what it was going to look like, but it would be ready only when it was ready. I called my mom the next day. I have a place!
But we had a place! My grandmother had died recently and left my parents some money. They knew my ambitions well and decided to help me out. I was so grateful. We continued to scour Craigslist for everything we possibly could. We found a used sink, a cash register, a food warmer, a refrigerator, a little stove. Just the cheapest things I could find. Our backyard, littered with junk, looked like Sanford and Son. So, piece by piece, I started to put it all together. And the trailer was beautifully designed, if I do say so myself.
It was outfitted like the cabin of a boat or a submarine— the most ergonomic, tight-fitting, efficient use of tiny space you could imagine. Everything inside was either from Craigslist or scavenged. The backyard looked like it belonged to hoarders.
So we wired up the whole thing for electricity. I converted a little old stove to propane. Overhead and down below, I built tight, round-edged shelves for spices, plates, cups, lids, bus tubs, side dishes, bread, butcher paper.
There was a neat little pocket for a slide-in trash can I could pull out with my foot when I needed to sweep something off the cutting board. It was cold—in the mids, overcast—and I was a bundle of nerves. My stomach was in knots. It was heartening then that my first customers were Big Jeff Keyton and his wife, Sarah. There were probably twenty-five customers that day, and they were all friends.
But it was a good day. As it got busier and busier, I could see how tough it was going to be. Benji came around and helped as much as he could. At first, everything was cooked on Number One. The briskets were pretty darn good right out of the gate. The ribs were a little shaky. The pulled pork was fine. This was when I really started learning. I kind of thought I had a handle on things before I opened the trailer, but I quickly realized that I did not.
Early on, it was a real cool vibe. After I shut down, I still had the fires going. But it was pretty insane in there when it got busy. At that time, a long line was ten people. The trailer with Number One in it was positioned such that I could look out and read the gauges. Within a month or so, as we got busier, I got a guy to help out a few days a week.
Quickly, the stove inside became too small for cooking the amount of beans and sauce we needed. We outgrew that and had to start using a turkey fryer. At first, I would pick up one or two briskets every morning, but we started having them delivered instead.
We had no place to put them, however. I also needed additional space to cook more and more meat, and I had to figure out how to find enough space on the cooker for all the meats that had to be smoked. Of course, that all became ancient history the day after we got our first review. He went around Texas and the country rating barbecue joints. The review was stunning.
If I lived in Austin, I would go here every day if I could be guaranteed a bite like that one. I was drinking a coffee and the line was down the fence getting close to I And we were so exhausted, but I just remember that moment, looking at this line thinking, What have we done? This is the craziest thing ever. When is this going to stop? Lines were stretching around the corner, and the wait was longer than an hour. In June , Stacy quit her job to come work with me. First two weeks: pretty rough trying to figure out how to work together.
After that it got smoother. So we started looking for a real space. It was clearly failing, and coincidentally went out of business right about the same time we were looking for a place.
The guy who owned the business ended up quitting. The cutting board still had bits of meat on it, the knife was sitting where the previous guy had left it, and there was an apron hanging on the light switch. The utilities had been shut off for weeks, but he had chickens in the fridge. There were crumbs all over the counter from his cookies and all of the sinks were full of standing water. We signed the lease on the restaurant almost a year to the day after we opened the trailer.
It took three months to build it. Benji and I and Braun and Stacy, we gutted it all, worked our fingers to the bone, did all the carpentry ourselves. We get visitors from all over the world; if you stand in line on any given day, you might meet some kids from Japan who are in the middle of a Texas road trip, a family from Colorado who drove all through the night to get in line at 9 a.
We even got a visit from the President of the United States. In the summer of , we renovated for the first time since opening and built a smokehouse to make things run more efficiently. So far, so good. Yes, I realize that my restaurant is technically open for only about four hours a day. Between briskets and ribs, not to mention pork butts, turkeys, and sausages, the smokers are running at pretty much max capacity twenty-four hours a day.
In the summer of , we added a new smoker to the lineup, which increased our capacity slightly. But each of our smokers is incredibly heavy and over 20 feet long. After all, there are things about a dinner service that make sense. What a nice, relaxing day! But barbecue in Central Texas is traditionally a midday—or even morning—meal. So be prepared to eat barbecue for breakfast if you go out there.
Rather, they began as meat markets and grocery stores. The style takes its cue from the large number of German and Czech immigrants who came to this part of the state, as described by Robert F. They arrived in the mid to late nineteenth century and became farmers, craftsmen, and merchants, bringing with them many traditions, including butchery, sausage making, and smoking meat.
A number of these immigrants opened meat markets. In those days, meat markets were butcher shops, where vendors would break down whole animals and sell the meat. The cotton industry boomed in Central Texas in the latter part of the s, and before automated harvesting, migrant cotton pickers would swarm through the area for work.
Over time, with barbecue proving so popular and supermarkets taking over the niches of the little specialty stores, the meat markets evolved into restaurants, which they remain today, though we tend to keep some semblance of the traditional hours while we serve up this cuisine whose history in these parts goes back years.
Yet, here at Franklin Barbecue, every single person who comes back wants to know about the smokers—how long have I had them, which ones did I make myself, what are the differences among them. What is it about the barbecue smoker that inspires such curiosity and scrutiny? Thanks, thermodynamics! With so few ingredients and tools needed to make superlative Central Texas—style barbecue, each one is obviously of crucial importance.
Yet, of course, every choice you make is fraught with its own complexities. What kind of smoker to buy or build and in what dimensions are puzzling questions that make for hours of agonizing inquiry for anyone interested in barbecuing.
Although the quality of materials and construction of a smoker are indeed important to producing large quantities of great meat over a long period with high levels of consistency, many beginners will want to start off with a smaller investment in time and money. Does equipment really matter? Yes and no. In some weather conditions, one will be more consistent or provide a more thorough, even temperature and smoke, while another might cook more slowly or unevenly than usual.
I graduated to these smokers because I needed more capacity. We were having backyard barbecues for an ever-expanding bunch of guests, and I needed to be able to cook more than one or two briskets at a time. Its weaknesses were … well, it had mostly weaknesses. Its strengths were that it was cheap and that it used real wood: the first and primary requirement for making proper Texas barbecue.
Was it a great-quality smoker? Little tweaks here and there and I mean little to the design seem to have had a sizable impact, and meats on Nikki Six finish faster and just as well as on my veteran cookers like Muchacho and Rusty Shackleford. So why the offset smoker? However, a basic sailboat is a simple and primal vessel too, yet it still requires competent handling to both avoid disaster and ensure a graceful and elegant ride.
As with a sailboat, much of the expertise in handling a smoker comes in dealing with the elements. In this case, it has to do with the wood you choose, the airflow to the fire, and the weather of the day. Knowing how they work will help you use them more effectively. Basically, people will make barbecue cookers out of almost anything. To qualify as a smoker, all you need is a place to hold a fire and a place to put the meat so it cooks in the smoke rather than over direct heat.
In the sections that follow, I outline the different types of smokers, and the basic way they function. This is smoke collecting at its most basic. You could just as easily dig a hole in the ground, build a fire in it, construct a cinder-block structure next to it and a chimney at the other end, and smoke something successfully, if you could get convection to pull the heat and smoke in. All basic offset cookers are advancements of that ancient concept.
Offset smokers, like the ones at Franklin, owe their popularity to the deep connection in Texas between the oil and barbecue industries.
There are stories that in down times for the oil industry, bosses had their welders build barbecue pits to keep them busy. We take long 1,gallon propane tanks and cut four doors, each up to 3 feet long, along the length of them to make our cook chambers.
At one end, we attach a smaller tank of gallons, cut in half, for the firebox, and at the other end, we affix a tall, wide smokestack made from pipe.
However, there are many tricked- out versions of offset smokers that are available to home cooks. One example is the reverse flow smoker. I will definitely recommend this book to food and drink, cookbooks lovers. Your Rating:. Your Comment:. Read Online Download. Add a review Your Rating: Your Comment:. Hot Curses! Curtain by Agatha Christie. The Burden by Mary Westmacott.
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