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posted by Fnord666 on Saturday October 26 2019, @10:06AM   Printer-friendly
from the gotta-love-a-good-smoked-brisket dept.

Submitted via IRC for soylent_brown

How a Harvard class project changed barbecue

"A hundred inches of snow that winter, it was really quite terrible."

There are several factors to overcome when trying to cook a 14-pound slab of brisket during the winter. Not only do you have to contend with freezing temperatures but you also have to keep your grill or smoker from getting too wet with moisture from the snow. On top of that, you have to keep the fire going for several hours, or you've just wasted a pricey cut of beef.

Desora co-founder and CTO, Yinka Ogunbiyi, knows first-hand the challenges of "low-and-slow" barbecue in the dead of winter. Along with CEO, Michel Maalouly, Ogunbiyi spent hours in the cold every weekend attempting to perfect a grill design as part of an engineering course at Harvard in 2015. The goal was to outperform what many consider to be the pinnacle of backyard grilling and smoking machinery: The Big Green Egg.

"We were amateurs, smoking a brisket every week in the cold Boston snow," Ogunbiyi said.

There was another wrinkle to the assignment, though. Professor Kevin "Kit" Parker had arranged for the class to have a real client, and it was a legit one: popular kitchen retailer Williams-Sonoma. This meant there was potential for the final designs to become an actual product if they could offer something better than the grills available at the time could muster.

"Boston's worst winter on record made quick work of showing the faults and shortcomings of existing products," Maalouly explained. "We had been using the industry-leading smokers at the time and found the cooking experience to be severely lacking." The pair needed a way to maximize heat coverage, accelerate the process and enhance flavor if they were going to beat the Egg.


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  • (Score: 3, Disagree) by bradley13 on Saturday October 26 2019, @05:21PM (1 child)

    by bradley13 (3053) on Saturday October 26 2019, @05:21PM (#912129) Homepage Journal

    They claim they can do a proper brisket in an hour. Sure, sugar. The whole point of slow-cooking brisket (or, indeed, any other cheap cut of meat) is to give the connective tissue time to dissolve. That is not going to happen in an hour.

    Proper BBQ is rare here, so I used to put on a Texas BBQ once a month (for paying clientele). Eight hours in the classic 2-chamber smoker, followed by 12 hours covered, in the oven at 90C.

    Big green egg? Forget it, the heat is too direct, and there is too little smoke/air flow. Wrong tool for the job, imho.

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  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by hka on Saturday October 26 2019, @07:10PM

    by hka (1828) on Saturday October 26 2019, @07:10PM (#912159)

    They only claim that they can simulate cooking a brisket in an hour.