Franklin Barbecue

Friday Find: Aaron Franklin interview on the Eater Upsell Podcast

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https://soundcloud.com/eaterupsell/ep-61-how-smoked-brisket

Why Franklin will never open a second barbecue restaurant:

“There aren’t enough cows,” Franklin says. It takes 53 cows per day to keep up with current operations, and these are a special kind of cow. “I even struggle now to get enough [brisket],” he adds. The market is so small that when fast-food chain Arby’s hopped on the brisket trend, it drove up the cost of brisket for Franklin by $2. “We don’t use commodity brisket at all,” he explains. “But once the commodity supply runs out, then people start trying to upgrade, and that’s where we got into trouble.”

Additionally, this podcast was the first I had heard about the way that Franklin is branching out – and that’s in the custom-built barbecue pits for the backyard barbecue enthusiast. He has hired 2 fulltime welders in Austin (and may be hiring up to 2 more as of the time this podcast was recorded) who are helping to fabricate the pits made of high quality steel and weighing in the range of about 600 pounds. Right now you can sign up for the newsletter at franklinbbqpits.com and they will go on sale next Spring/Summer.

Read more on the conversation and podcast here

Linkdown: 8/23/17

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– Ringer’s Danny Chau visits Lewis Barbecue and Rodney Scott’s BBQ in Charleston and sees the future of barbecue

– First We Feast: “8 Common BBQ Myths, Debunked”

– Seoul Food Meat Co and Mac’s Speed Shop is on Charlotte Five’s list of where to eat and drink in Southend while the original Midwood Smokehouse is on the list for Plaza Midwood

– Some great photos behind the scenes at the world’s largest free barbecue at the XIT Rodeo and Reunion in Dalhart, TX

– Thoughts and prayers are with the Brooks family as the original owner and father of the current brother owners passed away last week at the age of 90

– Kathleen Purvis on the cuisine of Charlotte for newcomers:

Take our barbecue style: We’re close to Lexington, N.C., where “barbecue” means a pork shoulder, slowly cooked over wood coals, chopped and mixed with a vinegar-based sauce with a little tomato in it. The origins are probably German, from all the German immigrants who started in Pennsylvania and ended up here. But you’ll also find Eastern North Carolina style, which involves a whole pig and no tomato in the vinegar sauce. That’s descended from an old English style, and we like that too.

Or you can find newer, fancier barbecue that involves Texas brisket or Memphis ribs, and we embrace that because it tastes good. But if you invite someone over for “a barbecue” and serve them grilled hot dogs? They’ll be nice about it, but they won’t be happy. (See “pop,” above.)

– A recently-closed bistro in Durham will reopen as Maverick’s Smokehouse and Taproom, which will have an an international house of barbecue menu

– 2M Smokehouse in San Antonio: the next great Texas barbecue joint?

– David Chang’s last meal on earth (which is more of a transcontinental progressive dinner) includes a stopover in Austin for brisket at Franklin Barbecue

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYbL8d3g5f4

Linkdown: 8/16/17

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– Way to go, Ace Biscuit & Barbecue: owner Brian Ashworth kicks Nazis out of his restaurant in Charlottesville

– Jamie Foxx made a stop at Stamey’s last week while in town for a Global Entrepreneurs convention at the Greensboro Coliseum across the street

– Carrboro’s got a new upscale yuppie-que joint called CrossTies Barbecue, which is housed in a vintage refurbished railroad car

– As we North Carolinians have known for centuries, barbecue needs acid not sugar

– Tasting Table: American Barbecue Is the Next Big International Food Trend

– Aaron Franklin has no plans to ever open a second location; there just aren’t enough cows

It takes 53 cows per day to keep up with current operations, and these are a special kind of cow. “I even struggle now to get enough [brisket],” he adds. The market is so small that when fast-food chain Arby’s hopped on the brisket trend, it drove up the cost of brisket for Franklin by $2. “We don’t use commodity brisket at all,” he explains. “But once the commodity supply runs out, then people start trying to upgrade, and that’s where we got into trouble.”

– Eater Nashville has a preview of Pat Martin’s new fast food burger and barbecue restaurant, Hugh Baby’s BBQ and Burger Shop opening in late August

– Marie takes over for Grant on their visit to some old favorite joints in Athens, GA

– The “metro Greenville, NC” area (LOL) get’s a shoutout in SI’s Andy Staples and his “America’s Best College Town Meals” column; there are also a few other barbecue spots highlighted for other college towns

If you want to really do it right, spoon some of that pork between two pieces of cornbread. The bread lives somewhere between loaf and cake, and a bite that mixes that bread, that pork and those delectable cracklins is about as close to heaven as we can get here on Earth.

Linkdown: 7/5/17

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– The Battleground Ave location of Stamey’s will reopen in the next few weeks after a fire last summer and has even added a drive-thru

– A visit to Keaton’s Barbecue in Cleveland, NC near Statesville, known for their spicy chicken

– Keaton’s also gets a write up in this month’s Our State

– The Fayetteville Observer reviews Buddy’s Bar-B-Q, an eastern NC joint which opened 72 years ago in 1945

– Eater jumps on the “Charleston as a barbecue hotspot bandwagon”

– Stick with me here: Tim Carman of The Washington Post says that the brisket at Hill Country, which just recently switched off the gas assist on their Ole Hickory smoker, is “as good or better than Franklin’s”

– Austin 360’s Matthew Odam then takes exception to that statement

Look, I’ve never been to Hill Country barbecue in D.C., or the flagship in Manhattan opened by a man with Texas roots who modeled his restaurant on Kreuz Market in his family’s hometown of Lockhart. But I don’t need to to know that the brisket there, or anywhere in D.C., can’t touch that at Franklin Barbecue.

– The Washington Post then responds back immediately, calling Odam’s take “food chauvinism”

– Scott Moore, the pitmaster at Tejas Chocolate, writes about the experience After Texas Monthly, or ATM, when they were named a top 10 joint

– The Christian Science Monitor takes a macro view of barbecue today, starting from its roots up through this year’s Memphis in May competition

Barbecuing, of course, has always been bound up in the politics and race of the nation. Six years before colonists dumped tea in Boston Harbor to protest British tariffs, the royalist governor of North Carolina, William Tryon, tried to appease local militiamen by roasting a whole ox. The men responded by tossing the roast in the river, an act of affirmed loyalties hence referred to as the Wilmington Barbecue.

– Barbecue the film is available next week