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When Nerds Do BBQ
Rick Zeman writes: On this 4th of July, the day when Americans flock to their grills and smokers, Wired has a fascinating article on a computerized smoker designed by Harvard engineering students. They say, "In prototype form, the smoker looks like a combination of a giant pepper mill, a tandoori oven, and V.I.N.CENT from The Black Hole. It weighs 300 pounds. It has a refueling chute built into the side of it. And it uses a proportional-integral-derivative controller, a Raspberry Pi, and fans to regulate its own temperature, automatically producing an ideal slow-and-low burn."
After cooking >200 lbs of brisket while fine-tuning the design, the students concluded, "Old-school pitmasters are like, 'I cook mine in a garbage can,' and there's a point of pride in that. A lot of the cutting edge is when you take an art form and drag it back onto scientific turf and turn it into an algorithm. I don't think we've diluted the artistic component with this."
After cooking >200 lbs of brisket while fine-tuning the design, the students concluded, "Old-school pitmasters are like, 'I cook mine in a garbage can,' and there's a point of pride in that. A lot of the cutting edge is when you take an art form and drag it back onto scientific turf and turn it into an algorithm. I don't think we've diluted the artistic component with this."
If you even work with Liquid Hydrogen you can actually condense Liquid Oxygen out of the air. If it drips onto asphalt it can light it on fire just from the impact.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
Just to name a few:
1. The water pan is there to keep the brisket moist, which not only helps keep the meat from drying out, which also aids in smoke penetration (which is where the flavor comes from). It's not there to catch drippings. In the case of an egg smoker, it's also there to reduce the impact of different burns.
2. Offset smokers seem to be preferred by most "pitmasters"; direct heat really means you're grilling, not smoking, and that means you're mostly cooking over coals, rather than producing consistent smoke with an open-flame fire for the duration of the burn, and that means you're not getting enough flavor.
3. The "fuel" - given rather short shrift here - is one of the more important parts of bbq, and very hard to automate. Green wood, seasoned, large chunks or small, each has an impact on the immediate heat, the curve that the heat follows as it burns, and of course, the flavor via the smoke.
4. 220 lbs of brisket is decent, but good brisket places do 2000 lbs a day. If you're looking for something of quality instead of, well, acceptable, you're going to need to spend more time experimenting to figure out how to make a good brisket.
5. In order to have a chance to regulate the temperature well - and not keep cycling through blasts of heat and cooling - they'll need multiple temp probes, and an awareness of the outside temp and humidity as well, since ceramic insulation or no, the external environment will play a huge factor.
6. If the flat - the lean part of the brisket - is falling apart when you pick it up, the brisket has been overcooked. It means the point is going to have the consistency of pudding - or it's been destroyed entirely and is completely dry. It's harder to avoid this in a direct-heat smoker rather than an offset.
It should probably look like this. I remember seeing that shot in Franklin's book, Franklin Barbecue: A Meat Smoking Manifesto ... which yes, sounds pretentious, but since he's lauded as the best BBQer in texas several times over, and that book is #1 in BBQ & Grilling books on Amazon, maybe he's allowed to be a bit pretentious. Go get that book if you're at all interested. Apparently fact checked by Harold McGee.
There's more things I could pick apart too. I know, I'm sounding like a BBQ snob, but the fact is that I'm not very good at cooking it, and I haven't had a lot of experience. However, like any geek, I did my research. I read around. I checked things up on the internet. I talked to cooks. I volunteered at some cookoffs. I think I have just barely enough experience to recognize when someone else is doing it poorly. Anyone who's done this at all isn't going to be very worried about this invention, since, well, the parts that you can automate are the parts that are least likely to affect whether your brisket is going to taste good. You may as well have just stuck it in an oven with a few blocks of aromatic wood in a water pan underneath at 275 for an hour and a half per lb.