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![Franklin Barbecue: A Meat-Smoking Manifesto [A Cookbook] by [Aaron Franklin, Jordan Mackay]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/61-QJsvUMeL._SX260_.jpg)
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Franklin Barbecue: A Meat-Smoking Manifesto [A Cookbook] Kindle Edition
Aaron Franklin
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Editorial Reviews
Review
—Anthony Bourdain
“I used to think Aaron Franklin was a genius: There was his rise from backyard dabbler to king of Texas pitmasters; his mind-altering brisket that made normally rational people (myself included) wait hours for the chance to eat it; and his insistence that game-changing barbecue doesn’t come from miracles but rather elbow grease. Then he wrote this book and gave all his secrets away. Now everyone—from me to you to your neighbor who can’t grill a chicken breast—will be able to make award-winning barbecue. He’s not a genius anymore; he’s a god.”
—Andrew Knowlton, restaurant and drinks editor, Bon Appétit
“The most refreshing barbecue book to come along yet. Rather than preaching about ‘one true way,’ Aaron Franklin guides you through all the wood and smoke so that you can find your own style. And instead of just listing ingredients and rattling off generic recipes, these pages tell the story of a place and a barbecue tradition steeped in history. This isn’t just a book about barbecue;
this book is Central Texas barbecue.”
—Daniel Vaughn, barbecue editor, Texas Monthly, and author of The Prophets of Smoked Meat
“Pure genius! Aaron Franklin has distilled years’ worth of barbecue knowledge into this book. In it, he exposes the sacred insights of a top pitmaster—information that can otherwise only be learned from long nights spent staring at a fire, shovel in hand, constantly prodding and pinching your meat to figure out that ‘just perfect’ point of doneness. This book is a game changer: read it, and your barbecue will improve overnight!”
—Adam Perry Lang, chef, restaurateur, and author of Serious Barbecue
“A complete meat-and brisket-cooking education from the country’s most celebrated pitmaster. More than just a recipe book, this is a master course in the fine art of meat smoking, Texas-style.”
—Library Journal
About the Author
JORDAN MACKAY is the wine and spirits critic for San Francisco magazine, and the coauthor of the James Beard Award-winning Secrets of the Sommeliers. He lives in San Francisco.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
So many people want to have a recipe, but with all of the variables in barbecue—wood, quality of fire, meat selection, type of cooker, weather, and so on—there is no “magic” recipe. It just doesn’t operate with absolutes of temperature, time, and measurement. In fact, there are no rights or wrongs in barbecue (well, that may be a stretch), no “just one way,” and certainly no simple “black and white.” You’re much better off with general knowledge of what you want and an arsenal of tricks to have up your sleeve.
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. These recipes aren’t really recipes but more of an idea of how I go about cooking barbecue and some guidelines.
Now, this book is not a survey of barbecue traditions across the country. While I’ve been all over the United States and have eaten lots of great barbecue, there’s really only one tradition that I know intimately: my own. My style is steeped in the tradition of Central Texas, but it’s also got some wrinkles that I discovered along the way.
So, with the greatest respect to all of the other styles around the country, in this book, all I discuss is what we do. Yes, I am wedded to the tradition of great Central Texas barbecue and the principles it holds—brisket, oak, open flame—but I’m also always willing to try something new or look into new designs that might make things cook faster and better. 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. At Franklin Barbecue, the only thing we’ve got is the dedication to make the best food we can and to keep it consistently the same every day (which itself is the biggest challenge). It’s that dedication that keeps us evolving as cooks and constantly thinking about new ways to do old things.
You’ll notice that there’s a serious thread of do-it-yourself running through this book. That’s because one of the words with which I’ve been known to describe myself is cheap. For large stretches of my life, I didn’t have the cash to buy things I wanted, so I often just figured out how to make them myself. In the process, I sometimes discovered how to make them better or at least how to tailor them to my own needs. However, while I participate in DIY culture and continue to build stuff all of the time, it’s by no means necessary to take this approach in order to benefit from this book. I say, use whatever equipment you’ve got on hand; ideally, the information I present here will help you make the best of it.
Most barbecue books I’ve looked at are organized around the major food groups: beef, pork, poultry, and so on. (At least, those are my food groups.) In this book, which isn’t heavily focused on recipes, I’ve taken a different approach. It’s a more elemental and theoretical breakdown of the barbecue process. 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.
The first chapter is an extended telling of my own story. I include it at this length not for the purpose of vanity, but the opposite—so that everyone can see how you don’t have to have much money, history, training, or even time to become proficient at barbecue. 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.
The second chapter 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. It’s by no means a blueprint but rather intended to give you an idea of what to think about if you undertake such a project. While smoker construction sounds—and is—fairly ambitious, I can tell you that I’ve built very heavy smokers in my backyard with a cheap welder, rope, and a tree branch to hoist pieces up.
Chapter three is about wood. Wood is our sole fuel, but it’s also arguably the most important seasoning in the food. Without wood, barbecue wouldn’t be barbecue, so we have to take the wood we use as seriously as we would any ingredient in any dish. Just as you wouldn’t sauté meats and vegetables in rancid butter, you want to use good-quality firewood in pristine condition whenever possible. In this chapter, you’ll learn all about seasoning, splitting, buying, and judging wood for barbecue. After reading it, you’ll definitely be wanting your own little woodpile in the backyard. Just keep it dry.
It’s no big leap from wood to fire and smoke, the subjects of chapter four. Most people don’t realize there are gradations of smoke and fire. 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. It’s a bit sciencey, but it also tends to be pretty interesting, so hopefully you’ll get a lot out of it.
Chapter five is about meat. One of things I do differently from most other barbecue joints is use a higher grade of meat. It makes things more expensive for everyone (including me), but I think it’s worth it not only for the quality of the end product but also for the quality of life of the humans eating it and of the noble animals that were sacrificed to bring us this food. You’ll learn here what certain grades of meat mean, where they come from on the animal, and how to go about selecting the best meat for your cooking.
Chapter six is a doozy. It’s the one where I finally get into the actual cooking of the meat. 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. So I don’t place a huge emphasis on them, even though I will admit that our beans are really good. More important is brisket slicing technique, which is something I go into detail about here. It’s hard to train people to cut brisket really well, but once you practice and repeat it, you’ll be glad to have good skill in this area, since there’s nothing worse than hacking up something you just spent a day coddling. And at last, beer, like day and night, is a fact of life for the pitmaster, and it’s something I think about a lot! 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.
Hopefully, while you read this book, you’ll find yourself chomping at the bit to get out there and throw a few racks of ribs or a big, honking brisket onto your smoker. And all I can say is, Go for it! The key to my own development—and it will be to yours—is repetition. Just as with anything, the more you do it, the better you’ll get. In barbecue that’s especially true, particularly if you pay close attention along the way to what you did during the cooking process and when you did it, and then you note the final results and think about how to make the next cook better. That’s what I did, and my barbecue improved steadily along the way. And I didn’t even have a resource like this book.
Ultimately, that’s the best advice I can give. Do, and do some more. Drink beer, but not so much that you lose track of what you’re doing. And pay attention. Sweat the details and you’ll end up producing barbecue that would make the most seasoned of pitmasters proud.
-----------------------------------
Fig Ancho Beer Barbecue sauce
I don’t serve this at the restaurant, but I do make fun sauces for some events—and this sauce combines a few of my favorite things.
Makes about 6 cups
4 ancho chiles, rehydrated in 4 1/2 cups hot water and the water reserved
12 figs, grilled, stemmed, and quartered
1/2 yellow onion, sliced
4 tablespoons butter
1 1/2 cups brown sugar
1 (12-ounce) bottle (1 1/2 cups) stout or porter beer (I prefer Left Hand Brewing’s milk stout)
1 cup ketchup
1/2 cup white vinegar
1/2 cup cider vinegar
6 tablespoons fig preserves
1 tablespoon honey
1 tablespoon kosher salt
1 teaspoon coarse black pepper
In a skillet over medium heat, sauté the chiles, figs, and onion in the butter for about 10 minutes, until the figs and chiles are tender and the onion is translucent. Transfer to a blender and add the sugar, stout, ketchup, both vinegars, the preserves, honey, salt, and pepper. Puree until smooth, adding as much of the reserved chile soaking liquid as needed to reach the desired texture. Store in an airtight container in the refrigerator for up to 2 weeks. --This text refers to the hardcover edition.
Product details
- ASIN : B00N6PFBDW
- Publisher : Ten Speed Press (April 7, 2015)
- Publication date : April 7, 2015
- Language : English
- File size : 63103 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Print length : 341 pages
- Lending : Not Enabled
-
Best Sellers Rank:
#52,896 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #7 in Outdoor Cooking (Kindle Store)
- #10 in Cooking Meats
- #18 in American South Cooking
- Customer Reviews:
Customer reviews
Top reviews from the United States
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That is just one example. He lays it all out there for you, and doesn't hold anything back. This is a simple process, but the devil is in those details, and he is adamant about them. There are a few recipes in the book, but this isn't a cook book per se. I did like the recipes on the BBQ sauces though and Ive made them all. Aaron keeps it straightforward and simple. If you don't learn anything from this book then you aren't paying attention. I read a 1 star review and the guy goes, "Yeah, I learned to use salt and pepper and post oak....lame"
If you have that sort of mentality, then this book is definitely not for you, but if you want to reach in to what BBQ is, and how it is done right, and then you actually DO what he talks about, you will never screw up a piece of meat again.
This is not about that.
What it IS about, is what Aaron Franklin has learned over the years as a pit master and has passed along his knowledge to you.
That means a wood only smoker. Simple salt & pepper rubs. Basic cuts of meats (brisket, ribs, turkey and sausage) and the stories behind it.
That’s it. Now, you CAN get some really good insight on how to smoke meats and get a good foundation, based on what he does. But he doesn’t veer off what to do with different woods, recipes or techniques he doesn’t use.
So, if you want a book that helps you specifically with your Big Green Egg or pellet/electric smoker, this isn’t your book to get.
But...if you want a book with good stories. A good foundation of the science behind smoking meats. A few recipes. And what he does now and how he came to that way of doing things, then this is the book for you. It’s good, entertaining and chock full-o-wisdom and experience a pit master would usually not reveal to the average backyard smoker.
Top reviews from other countries

A lot of subject matter is about the author and his restaurant interspersed with some information a beginner may find useful. The specific details seem lacking in many areas as if the author is more interested in protecting and plugging his business. It isn't until page 134 that the reader is finally provided with some recipes. These are written in a good level of detail but are provided in short supply - I counted 4 meat recipes, a smattering of sides and sauces yet other sections go into great detail about smokers and how to make one. The logic one would apply would be if I am buying and reading a book about bbq smoking I am not likely to have the experience that I am at the semi pro stage of fabricating my own smoker from scratch!
If you are new to bbq smoking (such as many over here in the UK) this is not the book for you.
If this is a serious hobby for you and you want to take your abilities to new levels then read this book.

BBQ is not about "put this rub on, cook for this long", it's about feel, about care and attention to all the variables: smoker, wood, fire, meat, rub and time. Franklin shares his insight hard won through years of perfecting his craft and encourages you to find your own way of getting that perfect brisket.
And got to say cooked the best brisket I've done yet, 203 is indeed magic.

In The UK barbeque is cooking directly over a heat source outside - in texas they call this grilling, and in England we call Texas barbeque smoking.
OK now that’s cleared up let’s get to the book. Franklin has a restaurant in Austin Texas that has lines of people up the street every day. He is famous for the quality of his smoked brisket and ribs. He is thought of as a genius who has some black art secrets to making his food so good. In this book he shares those secrets. In fact more than that, he tells you “How to” from making a smoker from scratch right through purchasing meat, preparing, cooking, cutting serving, cooking accompaniments. The whole deal. So theoretically if you read and execute everything in this book your food will be as good and identical to his. Now I can’t claim to have achieved quite that, but his guidance certainly corrected many basic errors I was making.

Half the book I used to learn ALOT about smokers, wood and fires and the other half is a 'go to' reference point for when I'm cooking!

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