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"Barbecue"!! The word derives from the word "barabicu", which to the Taíno people in
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the Caribbean islands meant "sacred fire pit".
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We are definitely on sacred ground today. If we can get in.
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I'm here to learn a little about the science of BBQ, so I came to a man who knows a little
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bit about that, Aaron Franklin...
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Well that's debatable. How's it going?
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So what is BBQ?
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I think BBQ is something that's cooked over a live fire, so that could encompass grilling,
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slow offset cooking, cooking in the ground, cooking whole hogs over coals, any of those
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kinds of things I call BBQ, but for me on a personal level, it's a German/Czech style,
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offset cooking."
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I experiment all the time, at the end of the day feel trumps black and white number or
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equation you could possibly have. If something's not tender, it's just not tender, if something's
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dry, it's just too dry. BUT, the science behind these things how wood burns, how airflow works,
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if you start thinking about fluid dynamics inside of a cooker, then science has a pretty
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huge part of it. I think good BBQ is a balance between science and natural gut instinct.
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Cooking is really just thermodynamics and chemistry, but tastier. Inside the smoker,
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air molecules are moving around really rapidly thanks to that fire, they're vibrating all
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crazy, and when they smack into the brisket, they transfer that energy to the meat, either
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contributing chemical reactions or raising the temperature.
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Meat browns when it cooks, whether it's direct heat like a steak or slow like BBQ. Heat breaks
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proteins down into amino acids, which then react with sugars to create molecular deliciousness,
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which happens to be brown. It's not caramelization, it's something called the Maillard reaction.
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King of BBQ here in Texas is brisket. It started out with whole animals, you would sell what
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you could and then whatever was left, as a method of preservation, you would BBQ stuff
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on Sundays
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For us to fully understand the science of BBQ, we need to know a little about the hunk
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of meat we're cooking. Meat in general is muscle, which is primarily protein, fat, some
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vitamins and minerals, and whole lot of water.
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Brisket comes from across chest area of cow, right here, and since cattle don't have collarbones
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like us, this muscle has to support more than half their body weight. That means it's got
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a lot of three things: hard-working muscle, fat, and connective tissue. It's basically
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the opposite of filet mignon. But if we apply the right kind of science, those three things
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can come together like Voltron to make something very tasty.
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So at the end of the day you want it to be tender, juicy, good bark, with good fat render.
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Some of you might not want to hear this, but making good BBQ is like making Jell-O. Ribs,
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brisket, pork shoulder, all cuts of meat that have tons of connective tissue, the molecular
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glue that supports all those muscle fibers. Collagen, one of the proteins in connective
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tissue, can make up a quarter of all the protein in a mammal's body.
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Cook 'em fast, and those proteins snap up tight like rubber bands, they have the texture
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of them too. If you cook them slow, they melt. When collagen is heated slowly and held there
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for hours (and hours), its long protein chains break down and water works its way in. That
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collagen turns to gelatin, exactly the same stuff that's in this box. That's what makes
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good BBQ so tender inside. It's meat Jell-O.
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BBQ cuts also have a good amount of fat. Animal fats are made of triglycerides which have
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mostly saturated fatty acids. These have much higher melting points than unsaturated fats
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like, say, vegetable or olive oil you have in your kitchen, because those straight triglyceride
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tails are stable, packed nice and close. As we heat these saturated fats up, slowly, we
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can disrupt those hydrogen bonds and turn to liquid, called rendering. Which is delicious.
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Together, melting collagen to gelatin and liquefying fat make the meat OH SO TENDER.
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You need no teeth to eat dis beef.
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What's fun about an oven? There's nothing fun about ovens. Did they have ovens back
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in the early days, coming up through Mexico? No you dug a hole in the ground, you buried
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a head, on coals, you cooked on a fire. And that's where I'm coming from more on the traditional
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side of it. I'm not gonna use electricity, not gonna use gas no assisted heat source
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of any kind.We have light bulbs, and I don't even like that so much.
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And it tastes good. That gets into a whole other thing too, how you're using wood, green
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wood, dry wood, post oak, hickory, mesquite, pecan, any of these different kinds of woods
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they all taste different, they all cook different.
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The hardwoods used in BBQ smoke have lots of cellulose and lignin. When burnt slowly,
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cellulose caramelizes into sugar molecules that flavor the meat. And lignin is converted
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into all kinds of aromatic chemicals that flavor the meat, and can even act as chemical
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preservatives. You just can't have brisket, or any BBQ, without
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that beautiful smoke ring. Now THIS is some cool chemistry! Or hot chemistry. Meat starts
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out pink because it's full of oxygen-carrying molecule called myoglobin. That iron-containing
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myoglobin starts out red, but as it heats up the iron in its heme group oxidizes and
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it turns this brown color.
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So why is the ring still red? Well, BBQ smoke contains gases like carbon monoxide and nitric
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oxide, made by burning wood. That gas diffuse into the edges of the meat, bind to the myoglobin
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in place of oxygen. And those nitric oxide-myoglobin compounds just so happen to be pink. The edge
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stays nice and red while the interior gets brown like normal.
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Kinda the art of working a fire is to control those things and get certain flavors out of
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a piece of wood.
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It's not just heat, it's not just the temperature on a gauge, it's how the smoke is coming out
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of the smokestack, it's how a piece of wood if it flames up and dies out real quick, it's
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about a heat curve, how long is it gonna last, are you forcing a piece of wood to do something
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it doesn't want to do?
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You can't really make a piece of meat do what you want it to do, you can only guide it to
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do what you think you want it to do. So, kind of go with that, it's all about trial and
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error, don't give up, keep working on it. And if you really wanted to you could watch
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the BBQ With Franklin videos.
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Out here we might have beer cans and aprons instead of test tubes and lab coats, but BBQ
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is SCIENCE, y'all. It's chemistry, it's physics, and the best part is you get to eat your experiments.
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Stay curious. And hungry. I'm gonna go get some food.
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Special thanks to Aaron Franklin and the whole crew at Franklin BBQ. If you're ever in Austin,
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Texas, line up early, because this is the best BBQ joint in the US. Seriously, you can
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look it up.