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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 COVID-19 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 to open, the inconvenient fact became clear that there was no place to put a couple of multi-thousand-pound barbecue pits. The only way we could set them up was to wheel the trailers right over. But that was tricky because you can’t have a door on one property, cross over to make food on a different property, and then cross back over to the original property to serve the hot food. Or at least you couldn’t with our permits. That meant cooking in the back lot was a necessity. (And we rented that spot for $200 a month in, ahh, the old Austin of 2010.)

Two days before we opened, I cut a back door in the restaurant with a Sawzall to allow access to the vacant lot from our restaurant kitchen. Cutting through the metal on the side of the building was so dang loud. It was late at night, so Stacy was outside the wall with blankets trying to muffle the noise. Of course, at the time, most of the people sleeping in that neighborhood were the homeless or prostitutes and drug dealers—but we didn’t want to wake them either!

There were no steps in the back lot, only gravel and dirt on the hillside—and it was slippery. When we had to add a new cooker to meet growing demand, I got railroad ties to terrace the hillside in order to fit more equipment. I’d be landscaping while cooking ribs. (Good thing a shovel is a multiuse tool.)

When we needed an office in our little shantytown, we added a trailer, which we still have. But, more important, we couldn’t get a truck to unload firewood where we needed it, so it had to be hauled in. And there was no place to roll dollies, so briskets got dropped off on the front porch every day, and I had to pick them up and carry each box to the refrigerator. It was hard on the body and took a lot of time. I did the work because it was our business, but you can’t expect to hire people for heavy loading when it’s dark, dangerous, sometimes muddy or slippery, and completely brutal, physical labor.

I also hoped having a smokehouse that got us out of the rain, the wind, and the cold in winter would make our cooking more consistent. On the road to achieving that, though, the smokehouse made some aspects of our process more difficult. When I was cooking in the backyard, there was a little picnic table nearby where I could sit with my espresso. All the cookers were arranged so I could watch them at the same time—five or six at once. It was really convenient. Not so in the smokehouse. There was no vantage point from which you could see all the fires, so they had to be checked constantly. It took about a year, but we finally got our habits dialed in.

Back when I used to cook ribs, three degrees of temperature variability was my target. I might have one cooker at 278°F and the other at 275°F, burning really clean. That’s not easy to do, and I was at the top of my game. When we moved into the smokehouse, I had to relearn everything because all the radiant heat from the cookers got trapped in the room, making the ambient temperature hotter than it ever gets outside, even in the dog days of summer. And, of course, we had to extend the smokestacks enough to stick through the rooftop, which changed the dynamics of their draw. Plus, it was flippin’ hot inside, just brutal—in the summer and in the winter.

Logistically, the smokehouse worked out great, and I was really happy with it, even if it slightly took away from the art of it all—but that’s just me liking things as basic and as simple as possible. Altogether, it was a good thing. It made work less hard for people, which was the goal. (But the unintended consequence of that was that people didn’t work as hard. Go figure.)

Now, the concept of building a wooden structure to hold several roaring fires might seem a little dubious. And, looking back, sure enough, it was.

The fire happened at around 5:00 a.m. on August 26. We close for about ten days every year in August to do maintenance and cleaning, and had saved up some money to put this amazing epoxy—the same stuff NASA uses—on the kitchen floor. I stayed at the closed restaurant while all the employees went on vacation. Then once we reopened, Stacy, our daughter, Vivian, and I took our vacation—the first time we had ever taken leave while the restaurant was open. I remember saying to the staff, “Alright, y’all, you got this! Don’t mess it up. And don’t call me unless the place is on fire.” Talk about the dumbest thing I could possibly say.

Escaping Texas, we flew to Vermont, rented a car, drove to Montreal, and then headed down the Maine coast. We had a great time. On the night of the 25th, we were flying home from Portland, Maine. Hurricane Harvey, due to land that night on the Texas coast, was dominating the news. We were anxiously watching the TV, which was urgently broadcasting the news: “Texas Coast Braces for Harvey.” Amazingly, our flight didn’t get delayed. Nevertheless, with the reach of the coastal hurricane stretching all the way into Central Texas, we were warned that our flight might be a little dicey. Our approach was super-bumpy, and through the window I felt the clouds were blowing past at unnaturally fast rates. But we landed at 11:00 p.m. And after stopping for late-night tacos (of course!), we got home at midnight and poured ourselves into bed.

At 5:28 a.m., my phone started vibrating. The voice on the other end said, “Hey, the building’s on fire!” I didn’t freak out. I just said, “Okay, I’ll be right there.”

The fact is, I’d sorta been planning for this for a while. Like most kitchen people, I’m a prepper and had gamed a fire situation out in my mind. It seemed bound to happen one day. Hopefully it won’t, I told myself, but if it does, I should definitely have my ducks in a row and not be caught off guard. So, I sat at the end of the bed for a second and collected my thoughts, then grabbed my shoes and slowly put them on, taking a deep breath. We’d been home for only six hours.

As I raced to the car, the weather was awful. The wind was howling, and sheets of rain were lashing the sides of my truck as I hit the highway in the pitch black of early morning. I got stuck at the interminable light at Twelfth Street with no other cars on the road, and I remember thinking, “Should I just run this?” Of course, I didn’t, but from there I could already see the blue and red lights of the fire trucks reflecting off the clouds. Six or seven firehouses serviced the call, and the cops had arrived almost instantly. Everyone got there so fast. It makes me a little emotional just thinking about it.

At first, I didn’t think it was going to be that bad—maybe just a wall or something. But when I arrived and found the whole street blocked off, cops and fire trucks everywhere, news vans already camped outside, the magnitude hit me. The cop at the roadblock just looked at me through my window, his expression downcast as he flagged me through saying, “Jeez, man, I’m so sorry.” Everyone had their eyes on me as I walked up, eyeglasses dripping with rain. The devastation was shocking—walls burned out to the frames, ceilings crashed in, everything black and sooty. You wouldn’t think that something could burn so heavy in a rainstorm. I went into the crowd and hugged the employees who were there. We were pretty shaken. Soon more employees, having seen the reports on the news, showed up.

Turns out the fire burned for just twenty-eight minutes, but, man, it did a lot of damage in that time. It started from Bethesda, the big, wood-burning rotisserie I had built. Due to the hurricane, that night had been really windy—windier than ever before. The smokehouse had screened-in windows but no storm covers. The wind came up from the ground floor, underneath the wood cage, and blew up through the elevator shaft to hit Bethesda’s six-foot-long firebox. Our rib cook hadn’t noticed that an ember had blown out of the firebox and tucked under a wall. It probably smoldered there for a few hours and, when more wind came through, the whole wall went up in flames all at once. Of course, at that point, the cook noticed and called 911. I’d installed some insulated heat shields and other things, but the wood in the walls had been heat-drying for a couple of years, making it extremely flammable. Later on, the firefighters told me it had gotten up to 1500ºF in there.

In the end, we got real lucky because the outreach from our community was amazing. So many people called, texted, and emailed—we were flabbergasted. Someone from Europe saw the news on CNN and wrote in, completely worried and freaked out. Our restaurant burning down made international news? We couldn’t believe it!

But, crucially, on that same day, the architect who’d helped design the smokehouse called, the framers reached out, the plumber checked in—everybody who had worked on the building. They said, “Hey, let us know when we can get started again.” The general contractor said, “Tell me when, so I can clear my schedule.” The city reached out almost immediately, and the permit guy that I’d dealt with on the first smokehouse said, “I can get this through pretty quick if you don’t change much. I can resubmit the same plans and have a permit in your hand by the end of the week.” It was like the plot of The Blues Brothers—we were getting the band back together!

The closure gave us a chance to make some improvements and take a much-needed break. Today, people note the unusual canted wall that juts out from the building at an angle far greater than 90 degrees. While, yes, that look does fit with my love of early modernist 1950s design, the reason for it is more practical. Let’s just say that the smokehouse is something like 999.5 square feet. To go over a certain size would have pushed the project into an entirely different class of restaurant permitting, which would have been very difficult to navigate. The angled wall allowed us to fit in one more pit—a huge win for brisket capacity and for our ability to serve all our customers—with enough room for a cook to stand there and open the cooker door. We added steel window shutters so we can completely block the wind in case of another big storm. And we also changed the roofline—six feet on one side, four feet on another—and built a vent that allows the airflow to suck the radiant heat right out of the room.

To our great fortune, everything worked out. We maxed out every insurance policy—they all refused to renew our policies anyway—and began the rebuild. Construction lasted six months, but we were only closed for about three. When we first reopened, we were back to cooking outside. I had all new trailers built. We moved two of the cookers that we didn’t like much from the smokehouse to use outside while we built two better replacements. Welcome, Mork and Mindy. Adios, Ciccone and MC5.

We reopened for business on the Tuesday of Thanksgiving week—a day that has mucho significance for us. It just happens that a lot of the same families come to the restaurant on that day every year. The amount of tears shed and number of hugs given as we walked up and down the line greeting people—talk about an emotional day. Who’d a thunk that barbecue could get people so worked up? That’s when it dawned on me how much the restaurant means to so many people. And that’s why we work so hard at what we do.

• • •

Lots of other stuff has happened in our little barbecue world since last I wrote. For a while, we had extra trailers in the parking lot to serve espresso and tacos. That was really cool. The coffee was primarily to cater to the people waiting in line for the restaurant, but people from all over the neighborhood ended up coming by too. And, not surprisingly, I drank my fair share. The taco truck was especially awesome because tacos are probably some of my favorite food. It was like a dream for me. We used brisket scraps, made our own delicious sauces, and even had eggs (which I don’t like). The salsa was made with parsley (because I hate cilantro, a difficult situation down here in taco land). And the tacos were delicious. I loved it, and the truck was holding its own but, unfortunately, the pandemic shut it all down, and it didn’t make the cut once we returned.

That said, today we have an awesome to-go trailer, which has been amazing for our business and our workflow. In true Franklin style, I bought a blank trailer and we customized it at the shop, adding prep and cutting stations, storage for to-go paraphernalia, a window, and so on. This operation is partly an evolution of a strategy to deal with the giant orders that often come from the head of the line. You see, the people who get in line early at the restaurant often come to place a huge order. But fulfilling those massive orders takes so much time, and it is agonizing to watch the faces of the rest of the folks who have been waiting almost as long and still have to sit by while we cut an insane amount of meat for just a handful of orders. So, we started diverting those big orders through the to-go trailer, which also services take-out orders and briskets for shipping. Right now, about half of our business goes through that trailer.

Having experience doing a solid to-go business and the fact that barbecue holds well for this kind of service were a real boon when the pandemic struck. As I said, I’m a prepper and don’t like to be caught unaware. But the pandemic really caught me off guard! I don’t keep up with the world of virology, and so I hadn’t thought of this as a real possibility, much less gamed out situations if it did strike. Luckily, we had a leg up because we’d already started doing the to-go operation, which allowed us to transition quickly to pandemic conditions.

It was a Sunday in mid-March 2020. The South by Southwest conference had just been canceled, and an ominous feeling was settling over the world. No one was wearing masks in Austin yet, and it had become impossible to get people in our line to observe six feet of social distancing. So, Stacy and I just looked at each other and decided to close for dining and pivot to curbside service only. I don’t know how Stacy did it, but within twenty-four hours, she had reconfigured the entire restaurant. We took out all the chairs and dining tables and moved in prep tables, coolers, and slicing stations. We brought in two computers, moved the telephone into the dining room, and figured out what we were going to offer, starting with minimum orders of three pounds. Stacy remade the website, figured out an ordering system, and photographed every item. By Monday, we had switched to curbside service. This was just a few days before the whole city shut down. Stacy has a photo of our sad, little darkened restaurant on a gray day in March with a sign out front reading

 

Dining Room Closed.

Curbside orders only. Franklinbbq.com.

 

We had no idea what to expect, but from the get-go, the curbside scene was busy. While Stacy, the brains of the operation, was inside directing the operation, I was outside managing traffic. Waiting cars started to back up, with the line stretching down the block. It was just like our usual lineup, only a car takes up a lot more space. Soon enough, the line was snaking down two blocks, curling around onto an arterial road, and even stretching onto the I-35 access road.

The city had to temporarily relocate a bus stop. I remember running around on foot, talking to people in cars on the access road, sounding ridiculous.

 

“Are you driving through or are you here for Franklin Barbecue?”

“I’m here for barbecue.”

“Okay, head into this lane and just follow the car in front of you.”

“Cool man. Hey, can I get a selfie with you?”

 

The pandemic was tough for everyone but it hit restaurants particularly hard. Yet, as things sort of stabilized, we realized that we could keep doing full to-go service, which kept us afloat during the long year and a half when we were closed for in-person dining. This allowed us to keep our heads above water, our workers employed, and our suppliers busy.

We even developed a healthy preorder business. Orders open six weeks in advance, exactly at midnight. You don’t always have to plan that far ahead but should if it’s Superbowl Sunday or Thanksgiving—all our orders sell out in about five minutes. However, if it’s a Tuesday in the middle of winter, there’s a good chance you could place an order only four days out. You still must order at least three days in advance so we can manage our quantities. After all, briskets take a half day to cook. And if people don’t order it, we don’t cook it.

We reopened the dining room to the public in the second year of the pandemic on, you guessed it, the Tuesday before Thanksgiving 2021. And, once again, just as when we opened after the fire in 2017, we saw many of the same people who make it a tradition to come on that day. Needless to say, it was another jubilant and emotional day.

• • •

I should also give y’all a heads-up about our new businesses. Some have been in the works for years, while others came about during the pandemic as ways of keeping us busy and challenged.

Over time, we had been getting tons of requests to ship our food, but due to capacity we were never able to satisfy that demand. During the pandemic, we were cooking less and were able to set some briskets aside to be chilled, shrink-wrapped, and shipped cross-country by Goldbelly or taken home by people who preordered them.

We’re now starting to sell our sauces in bottles. I think our sauces are good, and we worked hard on them, but the idea of bottling occurred organically. It’s not something we ever planned. And, indeed, it’s been a very long process that Stacy has primarily directed.

We had been thinking about selling our bottled sauces, but the practicality it provided to our growing number of to-go customers made it a no-brainer. Once we began selling a ton of chilled, vacuum-sealed briskets—that people want to take on a plane or mail to friends—inserting an open pint of barbecue sauce became, well, messy. It sounds like a simple enough idea, but it suddenly became complex in execution. You can’t just make sauce at a restaurant and put it into bottles. You have to use a certified manufacturer. And then once you get the sauce into a container, it must be shelf-stable and last for a certain amount of time. It also has to taste exactly the same as it does at the restaurant and live up to our standards of quality. That meant that the entire recipe had to be reformulated to account for all of this as well as increased production volume.

After many years of development in which we went through scores of recipe variations and tastings to ensure the bottled sauces tasted the same as the fresh ones, we were finally satisfied. (In fact, the new sauces are so good that we’re using them in the restaurant now.) Then we had to figure out who was going to distribute the sauces, sell them, and where. Suddenly, a little idea that helped people who want to travel with a brisket became a brand-new business with a separate staff. Hopefully, these sauces will be coming to a store near you real soon because we’re very proud of them and they taste good with any barbecue—not just ours. (By the way, we don’t bottle our espresso sauce; it is only available at the restaurant. After years of trying, it turns out espresso is just too ephemeral to maintain consistency through bottling. Also, during the pandemic, as we honed our bottled sauces, I invented a new one: Spicy BBQ Sauce.)

We got rolling on another few businesses as well—charcoal, barbecue pits, rubs—which you can read about later in this book. These are items that we really wanted to have for ourselves and our friends and families and then thought maybe other people out there might also like to have them.

Well, that’s a heck of an update. We’re all breathing a little bit easier at Franklin Barbecue now. Who knows what the future will bring? No doubt its own share of calamity. But in the meantime, we have ever-greater confidence in our own abilities to cope and come through doing what we do best. And that’s standing outside, tending a fire, and cooking up something good to eat, which is what the rest of this book is devoted to.

• • •

Franklin Smoke is a collection of ideas and recipes for using fire and smoke to cook everyday meals as well as a repository of dishes beyond barbecue that I’ve been preparing for years at special events and for family. A lot of what you’ll find here is the kind of cooking Jordan and I do for ourselves and eat every day (surprise, it’s not brisket!). We focus on getting the most out of a fire—in terms of process, flavor, and efficiency—over the entire life span of the coals, treating it not merely as a heat source but as an essential ingredient. We talk about smoking—and the offset cooker that I designed to get just the right touch of smoke flavor—and I detail my evolving thinking on smoking briskets. We break down some of the conceptual barriers that separate smoking and grilling, looking at the two as flip sides of the same coin: fire cooking. We offer techniques oriented toward the range of major cookers that most people have in their backyard. And we go deep into managing coal beds for different temperatures and durations to embrace a greater range of ingredients. As a result, I also include techniques for cooking some things that weren’t included in my previous books, like vegetables, birds, fish and shellfish, and beef ribs. And, of course, meat plays a large role.

Along the way, you’ll find ideas and some recipes for sides, sauces, and preparations and, as is expected, a detailed look at tools and equipment and serious talk about ideal setups. There is a bunch of recipes in here, too, but as usual, I don’t distinguish between technique and recipe. I am way more into the former than the latter. I think if you figure out how to do something well—aka, learn the technique—then infinite recipes become available to you based on that knowledge. So, as always, do as I do and consider these recipes to be guidelines or formats to help you really learn the techniques.