Franklin BBQ Pit - The First Cook | Mad Scientist BBQ

hey guys welcome to mad scientist barbecue i'm jeremy yoder and today we have our first cook on the franklin barbecue pit and we're going to be cooking some st louis spare ribs so for the maiden voyage on this smoker today we're going to be cooking pork ribs and we're going to do that for two reasons number one it'll give us a really good sense of what kind of color the smoker puts on meat and then number two it will be a relatively short cook so that we can learn exactly how the smoker works it's idiosyncrasies and so when we do a longer cook we can have it dialed in from the beginning so we're doing st louis spare ribs today and the reason i like the st louis cut is because they do a lot of the trimming for you so our trimming process is going to be really easy basically all i'm going to do is any little bits of meat that are hanging off i'm going to cut those off and then right here where the meat gets really thin where the bones are small i'm going to kind of round that off to keep the meat thick enough that it doesn't dry out while cooking now one other trimming issue is what are we going to do with the membrane now i've tried leaving the membranes intact i've tried scoring the membranes i've tried removing the membranes and for me you get just as much value from scoring the membrane as you do from actually removing it so i'm just going to score the back it's fast it's easy and it works just as well and then finally we're going to season with just salt and pepper because i need to know what kind of smoke flavor this smoker puts out [Music] so [Music] so i'm going to put these in on the half of the smoker that's closest to the stack and then i'm going to put the thicker part of the ribs toward the back so away from the door because it seems to be a little bit hotter than right next to the door [Music] perfect fit [Music] it's been a couple of hours now and we're going to check in on these ribs so what we're looking for is we're looking for color because we want a nice deep dark red color and then i'm also looking to see if it's starting to render the fat and right now i've been cooking at 275 rock solid on some smokers that are backyard size 275 is like you know a jet engine and will char and crisp everything on other smokers 275 you can smoke that way all the time and it's actually perfect so we're not going to know until we open up the store and see what's inside all right so these are looking really good the smoke has been really clean during this cook but we still have really good color so you don't need a bunch of gross dirty smoke to have great color on your barbecue also i'm looking at this and i'm noticing i'm starting to see the top of these ribs dry out just a little bit and that means that i'm going to have to start spraying i'm going to use apple cider vinegar and then one thing that i'm really happy about is it looks like this fat is starting to render starting to liquefy there and that's what you want for really juicy ribs look at the back side we can see that this membrane has gotten kind of a golden color which is exactly what i want and we can see these marks where i scored the membrane the fat underneath is rendering really well it's super juicy and it's soft like i just poke it and it just gives way all of these are really really good sounds now this industrial sprayer is a little bit overkill for one rack of ribs but it works really well so that's what we're going to use now when i'm doing this i want to get the outside completely covered because i want to moisten all of those exterior surfaces but i don't want to get this thing so close that it sprays off the pepper that's in the rub and i want to keep everything on the outside looking the same because it's part of its visual appeal when you're [Music] done [Music] [Music] and yes for any of you who are wondering i did put the handle on backwards when we unbox this thing but i have corrected my mistake even though the instructions are really good it is not beyond user error all right it's four hours in and i think it's time to wrap let's take these ribs out and see this is exactly what i'm looking for deep red color from the smoke and the fat has started to yellow and it's starting to give which tells me it's rendering properly all this looks great nothing is burned so i just need to get these things tender a lot of people don't know what i'm talking about when i talk about rendered fat on ribs and so let me show you right here i have a bunch of fat and what i'm looking for is when i poke it it just gives way and it's soft and it's kind of yellowed underneath that is perfectly rendered fat a lot of times people will add apple cider vinegar or sauce or margarine or any kinds of other things to the wrap because they want to have liquid in there there's enough water left in these ribs though that i don't have to add any extra liquid for there to be liquid in the wrap and to soften up anything that might be a little hard on the outside so i'm just going to wrap them in the foil put them back on the smoker and cook them until they're tender [Music] back on for probably another 60 minutes or so but we're only going to know when they're tender now that these ribs are wrapped we're going to still keep cooking at 275 exactly like we were and we're going to check back in probably about 45 minutes to see how tender let's talk about my first impressions of cooking on the smoker first thing is this stack makes a big difference it turns the cook chamber almost into a wind tunnel it is just pulling air through there like crazy so even though say my old country brazos has you know a bigger stack in terms of diameter this one pulls through more air so that's one big plus the second thing is i had to work a while to figure out what size pieces of wood work well in this thing so if you put on a big piece well maybe the temperature might spike too high or if you put on small pieces you get little jumps in temperature but it falls off quickly and so kind of what i worked at at least initially is that about this size so looks like maybe six or eight inches long and two inches in diameter or so would be a good size for this pit now i have to dial this in and figure out exactly what works best but this seems to work well right now so in the owner's manual it says specifically that bags of kiln-dried wood don't cut it don't do that so i've been taking wood off the wood pile here that i have and chopping it down cutting it into sizes that might work so far this seems the best also when it comes to putting good color on the meat this thing does incredibly well so you build color very very quickly so on these ribs within the first hour i had a deep deep red color that is often really hard to achieve on other kinds of smokers and even on offset smokers it can be difficult in terms of the ideal temperature i think probably 275 is going to be the ideal temperature which is strange for a backyard sized smoker most backyard sized smokers require you to dial the temperature down to maybe 250 between 225 and 250 even to get the same kind of results that you could get at 275 with a large offset this one seems to behave a lot more like a large offset than most backyard smokers one other thing that i'm trying to get used to is there's one thermometer and it's placed at great level but right next to the stack so the other smokers that i have they're never putting thermometers right next to the stack so i didn't know exactly how to interpret the temperature i started at 250 and it looked like you could use a little bit more heat i dialed it up to 275 right after that and it seemed like everything just locked into place the cook went really well i started rendering fat properly nothing was burning so it seemed like 275 is the winning temperature on this thing there are a lot of other things that i could say about the workmanship and other details about this smoker but i need to do some longer cooks and really get well acquainted with this before i give you a review i think it would be irresponsible of me to give you a review before i spend a lot of hours with this thing because let's face it this thing's not cheap and before i tell you go get one i want to make sure that i take the time to really get to know it well and then give you honest good feedback about how it works but i think these ribs are done so let's check on them looking pretty good starting to break right there which is what we want to see and nice and moist on the outside smell is incredible all kinds of juiciness coming out of there we didn't have to add any liquid [Music] all right i put these back in the foil we're going to take them inside i'm going to put them on the cutting board and let them rest until they're cool enough to touch with a bare hand oh man this smells good visually inspecting these ribs i see a lot of things i really like first of all the whole top side of the ribs is glistening and that's because there's lots of moisture so maybe the built-in water pan in the franklin smoker really helped this retain moisture in addition to retaining moisture i have phenomenal deep dark red color so in my head when i think of the color that i want ribs to be it's going to be this color right here and on top of the color and on top of the moisture we have the speckled look of the black pepper that's going to affect the flavor so between the smoke and the black pepper i think we should have lots and lots of flavor in these ribs but we're not going to know until we cut one out and give it a taste but one thing i did differently than i usually do is usually i take them out of the foil and i glaze it with a sauce and i set the sauce on the smoker for about 20 or 30 minutes just until it gets thick but because i really want to taste what kind of quality of smoke that smoker makes i didn't put any glaze on that because i don't want to cover up any of that flavor looking at these i see another group of things i really like i have a good smoke ring now smoke ring doesn't really affect flavor but it tells you that this has been exposed to some smoke so that's really good the fat underneath has rendered really well because it's just kind of breaking off when you poke it so that's a good sign there's no chewy fat that's not rendered properly and it looks nice and moist so i'm gonna give this a bite and see how it turned out wow that's good i usually take one bite and stop but this is making me keep going that's really good stuff all right so let me give you my thoughts on this rib usually on a backyard offset you get a little hint of dirty smoke i mean it's not bad or anything it's just you know okay this is cooked on a backyard offset versus a big time you know 500 or 1000 gallon pit the reason is because on most backyard offsets the fire doesn't burn as hot as you would get on say a 500 or a thousand gallon pit because the coal bed isn't big enough and it just kind of smolders a little bit more than you would like it to with this smoker i'm not getting even the slightest hint of dirty smoke so at no time was this pit creating smoke that was you know less than perfectly clean so that's really impressive also the fats rendered really well that's something that's often hard to achieve on ribs so as a trial run i am very very happy with how this turned out i think the only thing that these ribs need is some sauce and i think i have some franklin barbecue sauce in the fridge so i'm gonna pop that open and give it a shot with that all right here we go so these ribs i cooked to have a little bit more texture than i usually like them because in texas when i was there every single rib had texture none of them were fall off the bone it's you bite into it and you have a chunk of meat but it's all cooked well enough that the bone comes off clean so that's what i was going for and i'm pretty happy with how this turned out let's check out the sauce that's pretty darn good that's really good wow wow there's a reason why people love ribs this is why people love ribs okay so you have the sweet of the sauce complementing kind of the savory smoky flavor of the ribs just a beautiful match together man this is good you know brisket a lot of times is you know kind of the king of barbecue but if you make some killer ribs those are pretty darn hard to beat i don't care what other kind of meat you're barbecuing my thoughts on this pit are very very promising a lot of times if i'm doing just one brisket i'll put it on my 500 gallon smoker just because it cooks better than my backyard size smoker you know it uses more wood it's less efficient of course it's more of a hassle to deal with but if i can get that kind of quality of flavor on a backyard size pit i think i found a real winner if these ribs are any indication of what this pit can do i am really looking forward to some of the longer cooks where i can develop even deeper and richer flavor so we're talking beef short ribs pork butts and ultimately we've got to do some brisket on this thing and see if it can turn out the kind of brisket that i had at franklin bbq if you guys enjoyed this cook with the franklin bbq pit please stick around hit the like button subscribe to the channel and you can also follow me on instagram and twitter at mad scientist barbecue i'll see you guys next time

Channel: Mad Scientist BBQ

Views: 266,366

Rating: 4.9490337 out of 5

Keywords: bbq, barbecue, ribs, offset smoker, smoker, pork ribs, texas bbq, franklin barbecue, aaron franklin, aaron franklin bbq, jeremy yoder, firewood, austin, bbq pit, barbecue pit, offset pit, barbecue fire

Id: hqHJyV6oXB0

Length: 14min 26sec (866 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 16 2021