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