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posted by CoolHand on Saturday May 09 2015, @11:13AM   Printer-friendly
from the nothin-beats-perfect-bbq dept.

Carolyn Y. Johnson reports at the Boston Globe that a 16-person team at Harvard has solved one of the toughest problems in the field of food preparation: How to build a foolproof smoker that can repeatedly produce the perfect brisket, to be judged on texture, taste, and appearance. Tested by countless computer simulations of virtual brisket smoking, nearly two dozen weekend smoking sessions — often in snow or sub-zero temperatures — and 220 pounds of meat, the smoker is a rigorous, data-driven tool for making a feast. Making a perfectly smoked piece of meat may seem to be as far as you can get from an engineering conundrum, but engineering professor Kevin Kit Parker saw it as a problem that required a deep understanding of chemistry, heat transfer, materials science, prototyping, and solving problems. According to Parker, Barbecue has been a veritable Wild West in which pit masters build mishmash setups that incorporate garbage cans, cinder blocks, a giant rotisserie. “They are the biggest contraptions and pieces of junk you’ve ever seen,” says Parker. “Everyone had their own little mojo they brought to the problem.”

In the end, the secret was to precisely control the temperature both in the smoker and in the meat over the “low and slow” smoke. They had to keep the meat below 120 degrees long enough to let the enzymes in the meat break down the collagen and make it tender; they wanted the smoker’s shape to cause “cyclonic airflow,” meaning the smoke would circulate down toward the brisket. While the wood would burn at 700 degrees, the meat would gradually rise over a 15-hour period to about 190 degrees. The class settled on a material — ceramic — and a shape that resembles a cooling tower at a power plant. The design solved one of the big problems with the commercial smoker they used, by eliminating hot spots where the meat might cook too quickly and dry out. They built an app that would allow cooks to monitor the conditions inside the smoker and share their experiences through social media. How to measure success? "They look for perfectly cooked brisket to take on a mahogany hue," says Johnson. "When sliced, there should be a slightly pink section around the edge, called the smoke ring. The meat must be tender, but not falling apart." “They’ve gone from basic science," says Patrick Connolly, chief strategy officer for Williams-Sonoma, who plans to bring the design back to the company’s leaders, "to really understanding how you optimize for flavor and texture."

 
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  • (Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Saturday May 09 2015, @11:44PM

    by hemocyanin (186) on Saturday May 09 2015, @11:44PM (#180908) Journal

    Not trolling, but I've seen those Big Green Eggs at the fishing store I frequent, and they're very very expensive. Are the results so substantially better that the price is warranted, at least with chicken or fish (I don't eat mammals so I don't care how well it does brisket)?

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