Engineering the Perfect Wood Fire Smoker Pit with Aaron Franklin

Chef and Owner at Austin’s Franklin BBQ is also an Engineering and Fabrication Wiz – Watch him design and build a new BBQ Pit!

Normally, in the CADENAS PARTsolutions “crazy cool” series we take a look at all of the amazing things high-tech engineers and industrial designers come up with. Lasers, quad-copters, rocket-bikes and so on. You get the idea. Sometimes you gotta dial it back a notch though, and admire some elegantly low-tech engineering.

Now that’s it’s summer, we’re in the peak season for us cavemen (and cave women) to cook food over an open flame. Aside from cooking meat on a stick over a campfire, the purest form of open-flame cooking is a wood fired BBQ smoker.

You may not know it, but there is a crazy amount of science and engineering to create the perfect smoker. You need to consider size, shape, convection / airflow, insulation, ergonomics and cooking surface. Who better to show the science behind the perfect engineered smoker than Aaron Franklin of Austin’s Franklin BBQ.

Think you’re up to a 24 hour shift at Franklin BBQ?

About Aaron Franklin:

Aaron Franklin is the host of BBQ with Franklin and owner and chief firestarter at Austin’s Franklin Barbecue, widely regarded as one of the most influential pitmasters in the U.S. He received the James Beard Foundation Award for Best Chef: Southwest in 2015.

Aaron Franklin’s interest in BBQ started with the backyard cookouts that he and wife, Stacy, would throw. When they opened up a small barbecue trailer on the side of an Austin, Texas, interstate in 2009, they had no idea what they’d gotten themselves into. Today, Franklin Barbecue has grown into the most popular, critically lauded and obsessed-over barbecue joint in the country (if not the world) — and Franklin is the winner of every major barbecue award there is, including Texas Monthly’s coveted Best Barbecue Joint in Texas award and Bon Appétit’s Best Barbecue Joint in America. Six days a week, crowds stand in line for hours for a taste of his mouth-watering brisket. Franklin’s barbecue has been celebrated by everyone from Jimmy Kimmel to Anthony Bourdain to President Obama.