BBQ With Franklin - Lets Talk About Fire

foreign let's have some fire talk one of the more frequent questions I get is about fire management been saying it for years people ask at the restaurant if I'm an event somebody always comes to be like hey having a hard time with my cooker but I've never really addressed it much on a barbecue pit this size at the restaurant we use these huge cookers and we have huge pieces of firewood but it would stand to reason that if you're using a smaller cooker you're also going to use smaller firewood soap the size for these pieces it's kind of warm out here today and so I'm kind of going with smaller lighter pieces if it was cold I would be going through more firewood I would probably use denser bigger pieces but about 10 inch length you know just about yay big this will burn very quick and get a cold bed this one will last a little bit longer it's obviously a little bit bigger but the idea of it is is that you always want to burn just enough wood to burn cleanly efficiently but also give you coal bed if you don't have a coal bed it's going to be really hard to maintain that temperature so I've got a couple little small pieces right here they're pretty light so if you look in there I've got two pieces of wood and a little bit of a trench of coals as the firewood burns down I always want to figure out what that Cadence is I want to have the right wood the right density the right size to burn down and create coals so I can Rake The Coals towards the back that's a lot more important when it's cold outside and then I always have just barely enough fire to get the temperature that I want idea is that you're gonna put another piece of wood there so I'm going to use a slightly bigger one I'm shooting for about 275 here just for context I'm going to put that right about there so what's going to happen is you're going to get air right here and it's going to start to go back so when you stack up logs you want to think about it like a fire would think about it because the fire is a living breathing thing turns out so when you put a piece of wood there you want to think about where the air is going to go if you put these pieces of wood together there's no way that air can get through them and fire can get through them so you want to space them out if you put them too far they're not really going to work efficiently either so about an inch or maybe just a little bit more so and take the next piece and actually as I'm putting it in I've got my finger sticking out like that so I can feel how much room is back there so I'm just going to put three little pieces right there this may go a little bit too hot but I also need a coal bed and I don't have anything on this one quite yet I'm just kind of getting it ready to cook give it a little puff if your Wood's really really dry like if You Buck Kiln dried wood you had it shipped this stuff will light really really fast but that's kind of part of the art of it you want to figure out the Cadence of this stuff kind of learn your timing get a feel for the wood get a feel for how much burn time you're going to get and I put a heavier one on top right here because it's going to take longer to catch but once these burn out they're going to implode and that heavy one's going to drop right in the middle and then you can take your tongs and kind of move the coals around break the coals and then start a new stack and this is why you want to use smaller pieces for a smaller cooker because you get five degrees 10 degrees if you put a huge log in here that big log is going to cool off the fire because it takes x amount of energy to combust that big log you've got to work through a lot of moisture a lot of stuff going on there but once it catches it's going to go way too hot and then you're freaking out you're like I got to get it out it's because your Wood's the wrong size so you can build a bigger fire with smaller pieces but it's really hard to build a small fire with a big piece of wood so we're going to kind of maybe give this a couple puffs I think it needs three oh I got it in two darn I was wrong you got to think about a fire in a barbecue pit is like another tool so it's not just a set and forget it kind of thing especially with this you you really only get out of it what you put into it and it takes a lot so it's definitely you're gonna be hunkered down here for a good while I'm gonna be hunkered down too what's that I hear uh the sound of a good fire you can hear the the snap crackle pop music to my ears we're staring at this for a little bit but before I shut the door I want to play around with this fire a little bit notice that the Flames are going through here they're really kind of poking up between so just kind of experiment a little bit let's push these logs a little closer together so we push these together we kind of Choke off the air that's going between the sideways logs right so if you were cooking and you needed to cool it down maybe like a couple degrees or something like that you could push those logs together and choke off the air a little bit but the opposite is also true that if you're cooking like that and you need just a little bit of heat you can go in there and you could spread them out and you'll probably get a good few degrees extra so you kind of push and moderate the airflow a little bit this is kind of why cooking like this is pretty nice because we've got these coals down here this wood is going to create more coals it's going to keep our coal bed going but we can also kind of control this it's kind of like a air conditioner vent in your car you kind of bring down the flaps a little bit if it's too cold open it up if you need a little bit more but you can guide where this heat is going a little bit like if we want to put that over here we can maximize the burn of this larger log on top by placing it more on the left side because there's not much going on over here but if we wanted to cool it off a little bit we could put it over there and affect the fire we could slow the burn rate of this one so I think it's kind of neat just to spend a little bit of time poking her out at a fire watch the gauge get a feel for it you don't want to get into a cook and just kind of have to figure it out on the spot so anyway this thing's looking really good I'm gonna go prep some food and get ready to cook [Music]

Channel: BBQwithFranklin

Views: 176,471

Keywords: Bbq with franklin, BBQ, franklinbbq, aaronfranklin, pit master, fire master, Fire, firewood, fire bbq pit, fire bbq essentials, fire management, bbq, aaron franklin, franklin bbq, snap, crackle, pot, fire starter for bbq, fire cooking, coal bed, coal

Id: tf9iiv5Itc4

Length: 5min 44sec (344 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 27 2023