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Cooking by Ingredient
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Franklin Smoke: Wood. Fire. Food. [A Cookbook]
The ultimate guide to live-fire grilling and smoking at home, with recipes that will have you cooking up meat, vegetables, fish, and more like a true Texas fire wrangler-from the James Beard Award–winning team behind the New York Times bestseller Franklin Barbecue.
Aaron Franklin, bestselling author and proprietor of Austin hotspot Franklin Barbecue, turns to backyard live-fire grilling and smoking in Franklin Smoke. Along with award-winning food writer Jordan Mackay, Franklin addresses the mysterious area where smoker and grill intersect, describing when and how to best combine the two. This complete resource, which features inspiring and helpful photographs, proves that lighting a backyard fire is no big deal on a weeknight-and that you can (and should!) cook this way for fuller flavors and a deeper engagement with the elements.
The trick is in treating fire as an ingredient, not a medium. Franklin and Mackay detail strategies for executing meals over the full lifespan of a fire, employing low- and high-heat techniques as well as indirect cooking and smoking. Whether you're an old pro looking for new tips or have just purchased your first grill or smoker, the book shares expert techniques designed for any type of backyard grill, from inexpensive kettle-style grills, Big Green Eggs, offset cookers, and hand-built fire pits.
Featuring detailed chapters on tools, techniques, and methods of grilling and smoking a variety of ingredients, Franklin Smoke answers all of your burning questions-from "How do I smoke a whole turkey?" to "What kind of wood should I use?"-while offering delicious new ways to incorporate both fire and smoke into your everyday cooking.
Aaron Franklin, bestselling author and proprietor of Austin hotspot Franklin Barbecue, turns to backyard live-fire grilling and smoking in Franklin Smoke. Along with award-winning food writer Jordan Mackay, Franklin addresses the mysterious area where smoker and grill intersect, describing when and how to best combine the two. This complete resource, which features inspiring and helpful photographs, proves that lighting a backyard fire is no big deal on a weeknight-and that you can (and should!) cook this way for fuller flavors and a deeper engagement with the elements.
The trick is in treating fire as an ingredient, not a medium. Franklin and Mackay detail strategies for executing meals over the full lifespan of a fire, employing low- and high-heat techniques as well as indirect cooking and smoking. Whether you're an old pro looking for new tips or have just purchased your first grill or smoker, the book shares expert techniques designed for any type of backyard grill, from inexpensive kettle-style grills, Big Green Eggs, offset cookers, and hand-built fire pits.
Featuring detailed chapters on tools, techniques, and methods of grilling and smoking a variety of ingredients, Franklin Smoke answers all of your burning questions-from "How do I smoke a whole turkey?" to "What kind of wood should I use?"-while offering delicious new ways to incorporate both fire and smoke into your everyday cooking.
Readers Top Reviews
DinoChef_pelonapa
Book is 100% for cooking with solid wood (if you don’t use it, don’t buy the book). There are great photos, a few basic recipes and intro knowledge given for smoking with wood. There is a clear bias shown over 5 continuous pages of why his branded smoker is better than any form of smoker on the market. He provided info on the thought process, but didn’t feel it belonged.
Camron CookDinoCh
No book has shaped my outdoor cooking more than Franklin's BBQ book. His second book on steak was good and informative but just didn't provide anything groundbreaking for me. This book delivers on everything, the science, the "secrets" , and how use different cookers to achieve the best results from equipment you already own. It also includes more exact temperatures and methods not included in previous books.
Short Excerpt Teaser
1
Out of the Ashes
Smokehouses, Storms, and Sauces
When it rains, it burns. Is that a saying? Maybe not, but I feel that I can say it after the time I've had since I last reported from the pages of Franklin Barbecue and Franklin Steak. While I've enjoyed my share of laughs and fun, now that I reflect on it, I've also had a stretch of struggles, just as you-and the country as a whole-surely have.
My wife, Stacy, and I are very lucky to have an incredible staff and loyal, loving customers who help to sustain us during challenging times. Nevertheless, I can easily imagine watching a zany Netflix series (like the oh so many we've binge-watched lately) based on the totally unpredictable developments that have occurred at Franklin Barbecue over the last seven years or so, including a fire in the middle of a rainstorm and the storm that is the pandemic. Cue a trailer featuring the high jinks surrounding a popular barbecue joint in never-a-dull-moment Texas. (I do wonder who the director would get to play Stacy.)
In many ways, this book has emerged out of the ashes, so to speak, after everyone's normal way of life broke down during the pandemic. Like many of you may have experienced, I found myself with more time at home than I'd had since I was a child. At first, when none of us knew how long the pandemic was going to last, I headed into the backyard where my grills, smokers, and firepits live and started cooking for my family. I'm lucky to be able to say that this strange situation turned out to be positive for a number of reasons: it was a reminder of what I love doing, an outlet for my creativity, and a good excuse to spend time outdoors. Soon enough, I found myself on Zoom meetings, doing video cooking demos, and generally shifting to a distanced online world. When I checked in with my coauthor, Jordan, he was going through a lot of the same stuff: tons of cooking and sort of reveling in the free time and space we suddenly had while trying not to worry too much about what was going to happen to life as we knew it.
But before we go there, let's rewind a few years so I can catch you up.
In 2017, we had a fire-a big fire. In what could be described as almost biblical circumstances-a driving wind and rainstorm powered by a massive hurricane hundreds of miles away-our smokehouse went up in flames. If the last thing you read about us was in Franklin Barbecue, you might have in mind the cowboy-like romance of how I cooked barbecue under the stars, espresso in hand, eyeglasses reflecting the flickering of a half-dozen roaring wood fires.
Well, that situation didn't last for more than a few years. In fact, the cover of Franklin Barbecue was photographed on the freshly poured concrete slab of what would become our new smokehouse. The main reason for building the smokehouse was both practical and legal. We didn't own the vacant dirt lot on which we had been cooking. We rented it. But our operation was spread between two separate properties, which, it turns out, isn't technically very legal. We had to combine operations into one property, a shift we had tried to make countless times. In the end, that wasn't possible.
So, we built the smokehouse. Its unusual design-a two-story addition to the existing restaurant, with an industrial elevator to haul firewood and meats from ground-floor storage to a second-floor room packed with crackling barbecue pits- reflected the necessities of our unique property. It is built into a surprisingly steep hillside on the edge of a commercial block and is the only smokehouse I've ever seen located on the second floor of a building. On paper, I admit, this is a terrible idea. But up in the air was the only place to put it.
Property lines were not the sole reason to build it, however. The smokehouse was also an attempt to make life easier for me and the other cooks. This was all part of our effort to step up and act like a real, sustainable business versus a collection of pieces jury-rigged together. You see, when we first opened the brick-and-mortar restaurant, we cooked out of the back lot by necessity. The setup was very rustic, making it feel as if we were still part food truck. While the restaurant that we took over had been a barbecue joint, the owner hadn't been cooking on offsets over live fire. Rather, he had two Southern Pride ovens, one he took and one he left behind. We had to cut out the back wall of the restaurant and get a slide truck in there to move that old oven out.
Late one night a few days before we were set ...
Out of the Ashes
Smokehouses, Storms, and Sauces
When it rains, it burns. Is that a saying? Maybe not, but I feel that I can say it after the time I've had since I last reported from the pages of Franklin Barbecue and Franklin Steak. While I've enjoyed my share of laughs and fun, now that I reflect on it, I've also had a stretch of struggles, just as you-and the country as a whole-surely have.
My wife, Stacy, and I are very lucky to have an incredible staff and loyal, loving customers who help to sustain us during challenging times. Nevertheless, I can easily imagine watching a zany Netflix series (like the oh so many we've binge-watched lately) based on the totally unpredictable developments that have occurred at Franklin Barbecue over the last seven years or so, including a fire in the middle of a rainstorm and the storm that is the pandemic. Cue a trailer featuring the high jinks surrounding a popular barbecue joint in never-a-dull-moment Texas. (I do wonder who the director would get to play Stacy.)
In many ways, this book has emerged out of the ashes, so to speak, after everyone's normal way of life broke down during the pandemic. Like many of you may have experienced, I found myself with more time at home than I'd had since I was a child. At first, when none of us knew how long the pandemic was going to last, I headed into the backyard where my grills, smokers, and firepits live and started cooking for my family. I'm lucky to be able to say that this strange situation turned out to be positive for a number of reasons: it was a reminder of what I love doing, an outlet for my creativity, and a good excuse to spend time outdoors. Soon enough, I found myself on Zoom meetings, doing video cooking demos, and generally shifting to a distanced online world. When I checked in with my coauthor, Jordan, he was going through a lot of the same stuff: tons of cooking and sort of reveling in the free time and space we suddenly had while trying not to worry too much about what was going to happen to life as we knew it.
But before we go there, let's rewind a few years so I can catch you up.
In 2017, we had a fire-a big fire. In what could be described as almost biblical circumstances-a driving wind and rainstorm powered by a massive hurricane hundreds of miles away-our smokehouse went up in flames. If the last thing you read about us was in Franklin Barbecue, you might have in mind the cowboy-like romance of how I cooked barbecue under the stars, espresso in hand, eyeglasses reflecting the flickering of a half-dozen roaring wood fires.
Well, that situation didn't last for more than a few years. In fact, the cover of Franklin Barbecue was photographed on the freshly poured concrete slab of what would become our new smokehouse. The main reason for building the smokehouse was both practical and legal. We didn't own the vacant dirt lot on which we had been cooking. We rented it. But our operation was spread between two separate properties, which, it turns out, isn't technically very legal. We had to combine operations into one property, a shift we had tried to make countless times. In the end, that wasn't possible.
So, we built the smokehouse. Its unusual design-a two-story addition to the existing restaurant, with an industrial elevator to haul firewood and meats from ground-floor storage to a second-floor room packed with crackling barbecue pits- reflected the necessities of our unique property. It is built into a surprisingly steep hillside on the edge of a commercial block and is the only smokehouse I've ever seen located on the second floor of a building. On paper, I admit, this is a terrible idea. But up in the air was the only place to put it.
Property lines were not the sole reason to build it, however. The smokehouse was also an attempt to make life easier for me and the other cooks. This was all part of our effort to step up and act like a real, sustainable business versus a collection of pieces jury-rigged together. You see, when we first opened the brick-and-mortar restaurant, we cooked out of the back lot by necessity. The setup was very rustic, making it feel as if we were still part food truck. While the restaurant that we took over had been a barbecue joint, the owner hadn't been cooking on offsets over live fire. Rather, he had two Southern Pride ovens, one he took and one he left behind. We had to cut out the back wall of the restaurant and get a slide truck in there to move that old oven out.
Late one night a few days before we were set ...
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