Franklin Barbecue A meat-smoking manifesto

Ask anyone what makes a cookbook a success and you're bound to get a range of answers. Some of us require the full escapist experience we'd expect of a novel, a cover-to-cover immersion in another food lover's world. Some call it a win if the book offers a single recipe to add to the Forever Repertoire. Others ask: Will it offer techniques and inspiration to apply elsewhere? Will it romanticize the food we grew up with? Or have us sprinting to the nearest farmers' market to exorcise the food demons of our past? By any of these measures, this spring's new cookbooks deliver. FOOD52 GENIUS RECIPES: 100 Recipes That Will Change the Way You Cook (Ten Speed, $35), based on Kirsten Miglore's popular column at the recipe-sharing website Food52, is the hands-down winner of the dog-eared page contest - because it instantly dismisses what might be the most important question asked by a cook confronting a new recipe. Namely, will this work? Of course it will. How do we know? Because the dishes in this collection are genius, here defined as legacy recipes "handed down by luminaries of the food world." Anyone who has ever disregarded the advice to "cook what you know" for a dinner party, and then spent the evening fretting about salmonella, will appreciate the comfort and confidence that come from making something thousands have made before you with great success. David Chang's revolution-igniting brussels sprouts tossed with fish sauce vinaigrette are here. So are Nigella Lawson's famously puddinglike chocolate loaf and Marcella Hazan's three-ingredient tomato sauce (tomatoes, a halved onion, a slab of butter). But indie stars also abound, like ABC Kitchen's roasted carrot and avocado salad and Diane Kochilas's pasta with yogurt and caramelized onions. Indeed, the genius here might lie in the book's wide appeal. For beginners, it's like a "Dummies' Guide to the Most Famous Recipes of All Time." For those deep into the food world, it's more like a litmus test: How many of these dishes have you made? "When asked just how I got to where I am," Christina Tosi writes in the introduction to MILK BAR LIFE: Recipes & Stories (Clarkson Potter, $35), "I know the answer is pretty simple: I. Have. No. Clue." Where is she exactly? In an 11,000-square-foot Williamsburg commissary churning out her signature crack pies and compost cookies for Momofuku's Milk Bar bakery; she's raking in product endorsements and joining Fox TV's "Master Chef" franchise; and if you are to believe this book, she's having a ball. It's impossible not to be charmed by the chatty Tosi and her hot pink and bubble-letter-filled never-never land, where family meals with the staff happen "on the regs" and all she wants when she gets home from work "around midnight" is a SpaghettiO's Sammy. (That would be a sandwich of Spaghetti O's, an egg, breakfast sausage and maple syrup, with a handful of chips - she recommends Doritos.) Unlike Tosi's first book, "Momofuku Milk Bar," this new one, written with Courtney McBroom, doesn't have you chasing down glucose to make birthday cake frosting. "The best stuff," Tosi makes clear in a chapter called "Hand-Me-Downs," is quick and frugal and hails from "in-laws, old friends, new friends, church folk, firehouse cookbooks, PTA potluck dinners and eccentric neighbors." To that end, we get a tour of Tosi's World of Fun: a fellow chef's grilled cheese made with Kewpie mayonnaise, food projects Tosi likes to do with friends on sleepovers ("jam and jelly sesh"!) and her grandmother's cocktail meatballs, for anyone "who has a Crock-Pot or a heart." It also means we get her Ritz Cracker ice box cake (ingredients: Ritz crackers, grape jelly, Cool Whip) and other nostalgia-glazed supermarket concoctions that seem designed expressly for the "lowbrow brilliant" quadrant of New York magazine's Approval Matrix - but it's the celebration of nostalgia that wins you over. Anyone who's ever engaged in a full-on stare-down with a package of chicken parts - that's pretty much everyone I know - will find solace, as well as 120 inspired dinner ideas, in Diana Henry's A BIRD IN THE HAND: Chicken Recipes for Every Day and Every Mood (Mitchell Beazley, $29.99). Why a book like this hasn't been written before could go down as one of life's great mysteries. Sure, there are poultry books aplenty, but Henry, the longtime food columnist at Britain's Sunday Telegraph, travels the world to give our M.V.P. protein the royal treatment. She skewers thighs with scallions for Japanese yakitori, roasts legs with red peppers and chiles for Portuguese piri piri, shapes ground chicken into Thai chicken burgers. Even the lowly chicken breast, oft maligned for its flavorlessness and propensity to dry out, is revivified: doused in creamy tarragon dressing, along with cherries and watercress, or poached with brisket for bollito misto. The book, as poetically written and photographed as it is titled, is studded with helpful little essays. In one called "Chicken Loves Booze," Henry recommends having an arsenal of vermouth, dry Marsala, hard cider, sherry and Calvados for easy upgrading. Luckily, she also offers a host of weeknight quickies, when you don't have time for the ingredient-laden chicken with Shaoxing wine, crisp radishes and pickled ginger. Amid the onslaught of whole-food, plant-based spring cookbooks, most of which carry the whiff of paleo (if not the word itself right there in the title), three earn their real estate on the cookbook shelf. Mostly because they're selling you virtuousness right along with the chia seed pudding, and will have you one-clicking chestnut flour and $13-a-jar coconut butter while pondering questions like "What's so great about a cheeseburger anyway?" Anna Jones's A MODERN WAY TO EAT: 200+ Satisfying Vegetarian Recipes (That Will Make You Feel Amazing) (Ten Speed, $35) draws on her experience as a food stylist and restaurant chef (she was one of the originals in Jamie Oliver's apprentice kitchen, Fifteen), and evidence of her professional chops is everywhere: In the keeperworthy, multilayered dal soup with crispy sweet potatoes and quick coconut chutney; in the way she has you roll crushed hazelnuts into the spelt flour dough for the sweet red onion and hazelnut pizzette. Jones often asks a lot of the home cook, but we're talking serious centerpiece food here, and even if you don't feel like whirling cashews into a creamy dressing for a Thai-inspired slaw on a regular old Tuesday night, you'd be relieved to have her book when charged with the now common task of cooking for your paleo-gluten-free-vegan-vegetarianyou-name-it dinner guests. For those Tuesday nights, though, there's THE SPROUTED KITCHEN BOWL & SPOON: Simple and Inspired Whole Foods Recipes to Savor and Share (Ten Speed, $25), by Sara Forte. Not for nothing, the book opens with a series of dreamy images shot by Forte's husband, Hugh, who also does the photography for her blog. There's Sara, through an ivy-framed window, cooking in her breezy kitchen. There's Sara spooning something leafy-greeny into her toddler's mouth. Fans of her popular blog and first book (both called "The Sprouted Kitchen") will recognize the familiar pull of Forte's golden Southern California world, filled with life-altering miso-tahini-dressed tofu bowls and, it seems, eternal sunshine. Though not classically trained, Forte has worked as a personal chef and interned at a cooking school in Italy, and her authority stems from "feeding people and paying attention." This bodes well for the home cook who's interested in a more gradual on-ramp to the world of real food. (Like Tosi, Forte was raised on supermarket staples like "blue box mac and cheese with hot dogs," but unlike Tosi she's not exactly romanticizing it.) Her pages are populated with "bowl foods," a term Hugh uses to describe his wife's magically nestled combos of lean proteins, grains and vegetables. Think ahi poke bowls or slivered veggie and soba salad with mapled tofu. It works. THE BRITISH BLOGGING PHENOM Ella Woodward (picture a blue-eyed Christy Turlington with more than 56,000 Twitter followers) learned how to cook only when she was told she had postural tachycardia syndrome, a rare disease of the nervous system that left her in constant pain and with crippling fatigue. A one-time "sugar monster" whose diet revolved around processed foods, Woodward converted to a dairy-free, gluten-free plant-based diet and, as the story goes in DELICIOUSLY ELLA: 100+ Easy, Healthy, and Delicious Plant-Based, Gluten-Free Recipes (Scribner, paper, $19.99), she found herself healed. Her brand of veganism is more save-your-life than way-of-life, and although her evangelism can veer toward the schoolgirlish (nut butters: "one of the best creations ever"; roasted potatoes: "kind of like an edible hug!"), you get over it when you start cooking. Coconut milk porridge, baked beans, lentil Bolognese - these kinds of recipes aren't intimidating, but with the inclusion of umami-upgraders like date syrup and miso paste, they aren't pedestrian either. Will her three-ingredient raw brownies (medjool dates, pecans, cacao powder) win over gluten-eating nonvegans? No. But that's not really the point. Plants are very much the point in two boldface chef books out this spring. Neither ROOT TO LEAF: A Southern Chef Cooks Through the Seasons (Harper Wave, $45) by Steven Satterfield nor April Bloomfield's A girl and her GREENS: Hearty Meals From the Garden (Ecco, $34.99) has any interest in upending your lifestyle or convincing you the answer to all your problems lies inside a bag of gluten-free almond flour. Their mission is pretty simple: to share their pure, unadulterated adoration for in-season produce. (And if meat happens to be there too, so be it.) Satterfield, the much-lauded chef at Atlanta's Miller Union restaurant, believes that if you show up at the farmers' market "with an open mind and some empty bags, rather than a shopping list, you can respond to what is available." That takes some practice for most of us, but in the meantime, we get to see the market through his eyes, which will work just fine and give us the likes of whiskeyed peach shortcakes, spring onion pizza and julienne snow pea salad with spring herbs. Like a lot of chef cookbooks, many of the dishes here contain sub-recipes that ask you to turn to another page to, say, make the homemade mayonnaise before you proceed with the green goddess dressing; but once you buy into Satterfield's world, this is motivating, not crushing. "My motivation is more about passion than scruples," Bloomfield declares. Raised in Birmingham, England, on frozen vegetables and overcooked brussels sprouts, she fell hard for her greens by way of London's River Café and Berkeley's Chez Panisse. The nose-to-tail chef, who made a name for herself with burgers and trotters around Manhattan, wants to set the record straight. Though lamb shoulders and suckling pigs are "like action films, with lots of explosions and excitement," what gets her "chuffed," she'd like us to know, are spring peas. Particularly when mashed with mint and served with aged pecorino, or braised with little gem lettuces and young onions. Unlike Satterfield, Bloomfield and her co-author JJ Goode don't include many sub-recipes, and even if you don't end up falling for, say, the ramps with fried eggs or the polenta whirled with kale purée, you'll fall for the relatable, readable Bloomfield, who encourages fussiness only when picking the few fresh ingredients she asks you to seek out. To borrow a word from her, the whole package is "moreish." Translation for Yanks: You just want more. In SOUL FOOD LOVE: Healthy Recipes Inspired by One Hundred Years of Cooking in a Black Family (Clarkson Potter, $30), by Alice Randall and Caroline Randall Williams, the mother-daughter team tackle four generations of culinary history in a family where it was practically law that "matriarchs grew large." These women were the wives of entrepreneurs and state senators, members of multiple social clubs, hostesses for college communities, and in their kitchens they collectively cooked up a "black bourgeois bubble where black worth was celebrated and tasted." Theirs is a story of fine mousses and custards, of grand layer cakes. But those aren't the recipes offered up here. For Alice Randall, author of the 2001 novel "The Wind Done Gone," who announced on the New York Times Op-Ed page in 2012 that she was going to be "the last fat black woman in my family," this is a book about redefining soul food for the future, not romanticizing its often calorie-laden past. Alice wants her daughter to inherit a different kind of kitchen, one with "health as well as history on the table," so the pair gives us "sinless" sweet potato pie, broccoli soup (hold the cream and cheese) and salmon fillets instead of hulking hams. There are two notable entries in the "it started with a food truck" genre. Whatever you do, don't mistake Aaron Franklin and Jordan Mackay's FRANKLIN BARBECUE: A Meat-Smoking Manifesto (Ten Speed, $29.99) for the obligatory tongs-and-testosterone grill book that comes down the pike just in time for Father's Day. Franklin, the famously exacting proprietor behind the Austin-based barbecue shop, is offering a manifesto for hard-core pit enthusiasts who want to drill deep on subjects like reverse flow smokers and the science of wood drying - to give you an idea, no actual cooking happens until Chapter 6, out of a total of 7. But for a certain kind of reader, the book is what you might call a category killer. In the good-times, yearbook-themed BIG GAY ICE CREAM: Saucy Stories and Frozen Treats: Going All the Way With Ice Cream (Clarkson Potter, $25), Bryan Petroff and Douglas Quint (aided by Rebecca Flint Marx) share the recipes that made their downtown New York ice cream truck a phenomenon. Die-hards will be happy to see their signature bacon and chocolate ice cream sandwich, the "Choinkwich," as well as "The Bea Arthur," so named for its swirls of "Golden-Girl"-ish-hued dulce de leche and Nilla wafers. Both books offer real roll-up-your-sleeves technique, but they also do something else, something better, maybe even by accident. They offer a blueprint for the food truck dreamer, a strategy not rooted in spreadsheets and profitand-loss reports but in enthusiasm and obsessiveness. For Petroff and Quint's about-to-be-national chain (which all began when a friend posted "ice cream truck drivers wanted!" on Facebook) the business plan amounted to not much more than: Why the hell not? Likewise, Franklin's back story shows how far a little scrappiness can go if you want something badly enough. He essentially built an empire by hosting backyard cookouts (making a point to learn from each one) and scouring the free section of Craigslist. Most of this happened when money was so tight that he and his wife were often writing the rent check before her waitress pay came through, and, as he puts it, "hoping it works out." All you have to do is look at Franklin's clientele (President Obama, among others, visited last summer) and its legendary lines to know how that story ends. ONLINE Don't mind the heat and can't bear to get out of the kitchen? For a quick look at 20 more cookbooks, visit nytimes..com/books. JENNY ROSENSTRACH is the author of "Dinner: A Love Story," a book inspired by her blog of the same name, and "Dinner: The Playbook."

In the introduction to this "meat-smoking manifesto," Franklin, the proprietor of Franklin Barbecue in Austin, Tex., writes that barbecue "doesn't operate with absolutes of temperature, time and measurement." Indeed, he spends most of the book exploring the general mechanics and intangibles behind creating a delicious brisket. As the opening chapter on his early days points out, one important ingredient for success is the love of a good woman. His wife is beside him in times of poverty and septic disasters. Chapter two provides a comprehensive exploration of smokers and includes instructions on how to build your own, and also how to modify a cheap store-bought smoker. Franklin discusses these contraptions with the geeky joy of an auto mechanic talking engine repair and even dedicates a page to showing off the homemade cookers he currently uses in Texas, each named like a pet. Chapter three covers wood; chapter four covers what happens to the wood when you set it on fire, or, more specifically, how to discern good smoke from bad smoke. When, finally, the brisket recipe is proffered, late in the book, it's a 13-page affair, complete with step-by-step instructions and photos. As Franklin reminds us, "Brisket is a big, dumb piece of meat." (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

The notion of putting everything I know about barbecue into a book is a daunting one. Not because I know so much--I'm still learning--but because of the nature of barbecue itself. It's because the printed word--definitive, exacting, permanent--is in many ways antithetical to the process of cooking barbecue, which is, for lack of a better word, loosey-goosey. So many people want to have a recipe, but with all of the variables in barbecue--wood, quality of fire, meat selection, type of cooker, weather, and so on--there is no "magic" recipe. It just doesn't operate with absolutes of temperature, time, and measurement. In fact, there are no rights or wrongs in barbecue (well, that may be a stretch), no "just one way," and certainly no simple "black and white." You're much better off with general knowledge of what you want and an arsenal of tricks to have up your sleeve. So unlike most books that you may flip through a few times and then place on the shelf to display with the others, I hope this one will live a good portion of its life out in the field, be it in the kitchen or out by the smoker. These recipes aren't really recipes but more of an idea of how I go about cooking barbecue and some guidelines. Now, this book is not a survey of barbecue traditions across the country. While I've been all over the United States and have eaten lots of great barbecue, there's really only one tradition that I know intimately: my own. My style is steeped in the tradition of Central Texas, but it's also got some wrinkles that I discovered along the way. So, with the greatest respect to all of the other styles around the country, in this book, all I discuss is what we do. Yes, I am wedded to the tradition of great Central Texas barbecue and the principles it holds--brisket, oak, open flame--but I'm also always willing to try something new or look into new designs that might make things cook faster and better. And my hope is that by being hyperdetailed and specific about my techniques, I will help you in your cooking and in your ability to develop your own style too. At Franklin Barbecue, the only thing we've got is the dedication to make the best food we can and to keep it consistently the same every day (which itself is the biggest challenge). It's that dedication that keeps us evolving as cooks and constantly thinking about new ways to do old things. You'll notice that there's a serious thread of do-it-yourself running through this book. That's because one of the words with which I've been known to describe myself is cheap . For large stretches of my life, I didn't have the cash to buy things I wanted, so I often just figured out how to make them myself. In the process, I sometimes discovered how to make them better or at least how to tailor them to my own needs. However, while I participate in DIY culture and continue to build stuff all of the time, it's by no means necessary to take this approach in order to benefit from this book. I say, use whatever equipment you've got on hand; ideally, the information I present here will help you make the best of it. Most barbecue books I've looked at are organized around the major food groups: beef, pork, poultry, and so on. (At least, those are my food groups.) In this book, which isn't heavily focused on recipes, I've taken a different approach. It's a more elemental and theoretical breakdown of the barbecue process. In each chapter, I drill down into some fairly technical information with regard to how the process of barbecue works. It can get a little geeky, but I hope that in a way the geekiness keeps you engaged. I include this information because I myself love the technical details. Understanding how something works is the first step toward successfully replicating and improving it. The first chapter is an extended telling of my own story. I include it at this length not for the purpose of vanity, but the opposite--so that everyone can see how you don't have to have much money, history, training, or even time to become proficient at barbecue. I really just want to show how a love for barbecue coupled with enthusiasm can equal really good-tasting smoked meat. If I can do this, you can too. The second chapter is all about the smoker. In Texas, this piece of equipment might be called a smoker, cooker, and pit all in the same sentence, but whatever you call it, barbecue practitioners have no end of fascination with these clunky steel constructions. Everyone who designs and builds his or her own smoker does something a little bit different, always looking for that tweak that will improve its performance. In this chapter, I talk about various kinds of smokers and various modifications you can make to improve the performance of an inexpensive off-the-rack smoker you might buy at an outdoors store. I also give a very basic template for how to build your own smoker from scratch. It's by no means a blueprint but rather intended to give you an idea of what to think about if you undertake such a project. While smoker construction sounds--and is--fairly ambitious, I can tell you that I've built very heavy smokers in my backyard with a cheap welder, rope, and a tree branch to hoist pieces up. Chapter three is about wood. Wood is our sole fuel, but it's also arguably the most important seasoning in the food. Without wood, barbecue wouldn't be barbecue, so we have to take the wood we use as seriously as we would any ingredient in any dish. Just as you wouldn't sauté meats and vegetables in rancid butter, you want to use good-quality firewood in pristine condition whenever possible. In this chapter, you'll learn all about seasoning, splitting, buying, and judging wood for barbecue. After reading it, you'll definitely be wanting your own little woodpile in the backyard. Just keep it dry. It's no big leap from wood to fire and smoke, the subjects of chapter four. Most people don't realize there are gradations of smoke and fire. But a good fire and the fine smoke it produces are two of the most fundamental elements to producing superior Central Texas barbecue. In this chapter, I get into the nitty-gritty of what good smoke and fire mean and how to produce them in various conditions. It's a bit sciencey, but it also tends to be pretty interesting, so hopefully you'll get a lot out of it. Chapter five is about meat. One of things I do differently from most other barbecue joints is use a higher grade of meat. It makes things more expensive for everyone (including me), but I think it's worth it not only for the quality of the end product but also for the quality of life of the humans eating it and of the noble animals that were sacrificed to bring us this food. You'll learn here what certain grades of meat mean, where they come from on the animal, and how to go about selecting the best meat for your cooking. Chapter six is a doozy. It's the one where I finally get into the actual cooking of the meat. If you buy this book and just want to dive right in, you could start here, though I recommend going back at some time to read all of the other stuff. This is the chapter where I do things like suggest temperatures and times for your cook, even though ultimately you have to figure out the fine details of these things for your own kind of cooker, your own conditions, and ultimately your own taste. But I do talk about other important stuff like trimming meats, rubbing, and wrapping--all the techniques that will help your meat turn out great. The bulk of this chapter is devoted to brisket and ribs, which are the two most popular meats, and cooked using the two basic methods of cooking we do. All of our other fare basically follows these methods, so to learn how to cook brisket and ribs in a smoker is to learn how to cook just about anything. Lastly, we talk a little bit about sides, sauces, serving, drinking, and all of the stuff that goes hand in hand with enjoying the fruits of your labor. In Central Texas, sides and sauces are always considered secondary to the meat, if indeed necessary at all. So I don't place a huge emphasis on them, even though I will admit that our beans are really good. More important is brisket slicing technique, which is something I go into detail about here. It's hard to train people to cut brisket really well, but once you practice and repeat it, you'll be glad to have good skill in this area, since there's nothing worse than hacking up something you just spent a day coddling. And at last, beer, like day and night, is a fact of life for the pitmaster, and it's something I think about a lot! So I talk a little about what I like and what I think works best with barbecue, though beer in general gets a big fat Yes . Hopefully, while you read this book, you'll find yourself chomping at the bit to get out there and throw a few racks of ribs or a big, honking brisket onto your smoker. And all I can say is, Go for it! The key to my own development--and it will be to yours--is repetition. Just as with anything, the more you do it, the better you'll get. In barbecue that's especially true, particularly if you pay close attention along the way to what you did during the cooking process and when you did it, and then you note the final results and think about how to make the next cook better. That's what I did, and my barbecue improved steadily along the way. And I didn't even have a resource like this book. Ultimately, that's the best advice I can give. Do, and do some more. Drink beer, but not so much that you lose track of what you're doing. And pay attention. Sweat the details and you'll end up producing barbecue that would make the most seasoned of pitmasters proud. ----------------------------------- Fig Ancho Beer Barbecue sauce I don't serve this at the restaurant, but I do make fun sauces for some events--and this sauce combines a few of my favorite things. Makes about 6 cups 4 ancho chiles, rehydrated in 41/2 cups hot water and the water reserved 12 figs, grilled, stemmed, and quartered 1/2 yellow onion, sliced 4 tablespoons butter 11/2 cups brown sugar 1 (12-ounce) bottle (11/2 cups) stout or porter beer (I prefer Left Hand Brewing's milk stout) 1 cup ketchup 1/2 cup white vinegar 1/2 cup cider vinegar 6 tablespoons fig preserves 1 tablespoon honey 1 tablespoon kosher salt 1 teaspoon coarse black pepper In a skillet over medium heat, sauté the chiles, figs, and onion in the butter for about 10 minutes, until the figs and chiles are tender and the onion is translucent. Transfer to a blender and add the sugar, stout, ketchup, both vinegars, the preserves, honey, salt, and pepper. Puree until smooth, adding as much of the reserved chile soaking liquid as needed to reach the desired texture. Store in an airtight container in the refrigerator for up to 2 weeks. Excerpted from Franklin Barbecue: A Meat-Smoking Manifesto by Aaron Franklin, Jordan Mackay All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.