BBQ with Franklin: The Cook

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Good Guy Aaron Franklin: Makes amazing BBQ. Teaches you how to do it.

👍︎︎ 4 👤︎︎ u/mermaidrampage 📅︎︎ Dec 08 2012 🗫︎ replies
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(upbeat music) - [Aaron] So I'm putting the brisket on right now. We've got a fire box on this side, cook chamber, smoke stack. This is a real tiny smoker so the way I'm putting this one on is I've got the fat on the top side. There are two types of people in this world. One is fat side up, the other half is fat side down. I like it fat side up. I always put the point towards the fire because it's got more fat, it's got a little bit more insulation right there. So the fire is going to come up here, it's going to come across here, underneath, on top, swirl around, do all kinds of stuff then go out the smoke stack. I've got the flat, it's by the smoke stack. There's going to be a high concentrated heat right here so I'm going to have to be really careful not to burn that. One thing there's a big fire and it's a small cook chamber. I'm going to put a water pan in here. That's going to keep a lot of moisture in the cooking chamber, it's going to help it not burn quite so easily. We've got fat on top, point towards the fire, flat towards the smoke stack, water pan in there to keep it moist. Shut the lid and watch it fire for a long time. (upbeat music) So how long is a long time? Well long enough to drink a beer. Long enough to need a koozie for it too. (upbeat music) And talk about brisket. A good rule of thumb to go by for how long a brisket is going to cook is generally about an hour to an hour and 15 minutes per pound. For this brisket, I always kind of calculate about 12 hours. If I'm going to serve it at 5:00 PM, I'm going to start it at 5:00 AM. The smoker I'm using for this one is really, really small in comparison to what I normally cook on. I'm going to try to keep it pretty low, about 250 degrees. I'm going to keep it really, really steady and I'm really going to watch the fires and make sure that they stay clean. If you were cooking a lot of brisket or a lot of meat on a big cooker, it's going to take longer. The more meat you cook, it takes longer, there's no way around it. There's a little term people throw around, it's called if you're looking, you ain't cooking and that's very much true. If the lid's open, you're losing heat, you're losing smoke. It's going to take a certain amount of time to recover that heat, and that really gets people in trouble a lot of times. When they're getting impatient and meat's not cooking on time, dinner's about to get served, people are showing up to the house and it's just not ready yet. You keep on checking it, you keep on checking it, but the truth is you're just shooting yourself in the foot. At the end of the day, it's going to take as long as it's going to take and you can't rush it. Good barbecue just takes a while and just got to be patient. That being said, there's a balance between spritzing and mopping, and actually opening up the lid. If you've got to check it, do it as little as possible, and when the brisket starts looking a little bit dry on the surface, you can hit it with a squirt bottle and you can mop it or whatever. But you really want to try to avoid opening up the lid really, really often. The biggest key to having a good brisket, or a good rack of ribs, or a good chicken, or good anything you're cooking on a barbecue is fire management. The last thing you want to do is have fluctuating fire. You don't want it to get too hot, you don't want it to go low, it's going to add a lot of cook time. I guarantee that if you keep a good, steady temperature it's going to cook way faster and more consistently across the board. One of the things to fire management, you don't want a dirty fire, when you burn a dirty fire that means that you're choking off the oxygen supply to it and it's going to create a lot of creosote. It's going to get bitter, it's going to be over-smoked. If you look at your smoke stack and you see that it's just pouring out just gross looking smoke, you need to open it up, you need to maybe think about what kind of wood you're using. Different woods burn differently. You don't want to use green wood necessarily for certain types, you don't want to use overly cured wood for certain types. You really want to be able to look a the smoke stack and see clean heat coming out of it, not a lot of smoke, especially with an offset cooker too, when you shut off the air supply, you're shutting off the air flow to the cooker and you need a certain balance of radiant heat versus convective heat and all that kind of stuff. That really comes into your cooker and just knowing how well it cooks, knowing where the hot spots are, knowing how to manage your fire and all that stuff. So that's a lot of experience that will eventually go into that. But those are some pretty good guidelines to go by. There's a lot of different ways to retain moisture in a brisket or anything else you're cooking. One way that I really like is to have a water pan in there, I always keep a water pan unless the humidity is really high, and sometimes it gets like that here in Texas. But elsewhere it may not, always keep a water pan. Other ways are spritzing, mopping are the two main ones. Spritzing generally means that you've got some type of thin liquid in a squirt bottle, like a little squirty spray bottle, I like that. It could be water, it could be apple juice, you could put hot sauce in there, you could do apple cider vinegar, white vinegar. Anything you want, the world is yours. A lot of people think it adds a lot of flavor. I use it more to keep meat moist and to keep stuff from burning. Another method is mopping and that essentially is just some type of liquid, it could have onions, garlic, oil, butter, all kinds of stuff. It literally means a mop. You've got a pot, it's staying hot, you stick a mop in there and you mop the top of the meat. I don't like to do it, I think it's messy, you've got to clean a pot, you've got to clean a mop, and it just makes a huge mess in the cooker. I'm not really cooking that kind of barbecue so it's not my thing. So to wrap or not to wrap? A lot of people claim to wrap briskets, a lot of people claim to not wrap briskets. I really try not to wrap but sometimes you just have to. What that accomplishes is it retains moisture, it's going to help it cook a little bit faster. If your meat is getting a little too smoky, you're going to want to wrap it or if it's also getting too dark and certain woods tend to get dark a lot faster than other woods. So you could either burn a really clean fire and not wrap it, you could use butcher paper, or you could use foil. Here in Texas using foil is called a Texas crutch. I don't like to use it but it's going to retain a lot of moisture in there, it's going to steam itself, and you could really cook a lot faster. If you were getting in trouble and maybe your brisket wasn't going to get done on time, you could wrap it in foil and really accelerate the cook time. It really comes down to taste, if you want it smoky, if you want it dark, if you want it moist. It's kind of a trial and error kind of balance. So if you think to wrap, go for it and see what happens. (upbeat music) Another thing to be mindful of is a little thing called the stall and that really messes up a lot of people that are trying to cook brisket. But if you know it's coming, it's really not that big of a deal. The hotter you're cooking, the less it's going to affect you, the lower you're cooking, the more it's going to take to get passed that hump. The brisket is going to be cooking, it's going to be going up, and when it hits about 160 to 170 it's going to stop, and that's where the stall happens. It's tightening up, it's squeezing out the moisture. Along with that moisture is going the heat. That's the stall and then it's going to keep going up and you've got to think of it kind of like a train. It builds up so much momentum, depends on how hot you're cooking and how quickly it's cooking. But if you're going hot enough and fast enough, if your fires are steady, it's going to be like a train, it's going to have momentum, it's going to hit the stall, and it's going to plow right through it and keep going. That's how I like to think of it. That being said, when the stall has to happen, it's going to be a while before it's done. Don't pull it off yet, it may look pretty, but it's not ready.
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Channel: BBQwithFranklin
Views: 4,239,863
Rating: 4.863493 out of 5
Keywords: BRISKET, BBQ with Franklin, KLRU, PBS, Franklin BBQ, Smoking, smoker, meat, temperature, fire management, wrapping, stall, texas, bbq
Id: pGZ39yYxeBk
Channel Id: undefined
Length: 6min 58sec (418 seconds)
Published: Fri Dec 07 2012
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