Franklin Barbecue

I'm doing something I almost never do: post about a restaurant the day I visit it.  In most cases, it's days or weeks or months (ahem) after I visit, but this was really good and there is at least one cute baby picture involved, so that's motivation enough.

I'm not a huge fan of barbecue, but everyone else is, including Colby.  Two years ago, when it was Colby's birthday, we tried to go to the Franklin trailer, but I was about to fly out to Boston for a work trip the next day and we didn't have time to stand in line.  Colby's maybe only a little bit bitter about that still.  I found out from a friend this year that we could pre-order and pick up if we got our order in early and were willing to buy 5 lbs of meat.  Challenge accepted.

Colby sent an email 5 days before his birthday this year and the earliest availability they had was 11 days later, so this morning we picked up 3 lbs of brisket, 1 lb of pulled pork, and 1 lb of ribs along with a pint of beans.  It comes with three kinds of sauce, bread, and pickles+onions.  Let me preface this by saying that I don't really like barbecue.

We've been to Rudy's a lot, Sam's once (you know, pants meat), Iron Works, Bill Miller Barbecue, places in Lockhart and Elgin, the Salt Lick, and several other barbecue joints and trailers around Austin that I'm sure I'm forgetting.  They run the gamut from should-have-known-better to nationally renown.  From all of those places we've visited, these are my favorite things: Salt Lick's potato salad, getting the hell out of Bill Miller's, Rudy's ice.  Yes, Rudy's used to have crushed ice, which is the best ice and I enjoyed that more than any of the food.  Franklin Barbecue is hands down the best barbecue I've ever had.  This is nothing new.  Everyone thinks this, but let me just say, that as someone who just doesn't like barbecue that I thought this was good, great even.  And not "good for barbecue", just plain good.

beans - $4.50/pint

When I saw the order Colby put in, I questioned why he would get beans, but he said that the reviews said that the beans were excellent.  I no longer question these people.  The beans were magnificent, though it's probably a misnomer to call them beans.  There was a lot of meat in the beans, but I'm not complaining here.  Their hot sauce isn't incredibly hot and it's on the acidic side, but a splash of hot sauce on the beans?  Perfection.

ribs - $14/lb

I really really liked the ribs.  They were fall-off-the-bone good.

pulled pork - $13/lb

The pulled pork comes unsauced and is dry enough to warrant some.  The three sauces were the aforementioned hot sauce, a more traditional barbecue sauce that has espresso in it, and one that reminded me of the tamarind chutney that gets served with samosas at Indian restaurants.  I definitely liked the tamarind sauce with the pulled pork the most.

meatucopia - $16/lb

From all of my friends' exclamations, the brisket is the reason to come to Franklin Barbecue.  It was definitely delicious.  When we put the 3 lbs of brisket on the table to photograph, it looked like a cornucopia filled with meat.  A meatucopia, if you will.  And this bounty of meat lived up to the hype.

take in the meaty abundance
 

Kimchi was about to keel over with excitement

Kimchi, no surprise, wanted in on the action.  She got a few bites. :)

brisket - $16/lb

Eating this with the loaf of Mrs. Baird's bread is a mistake.  I made a sandwich with pickles and the espresso sauce and the bread brought the meal down, as the juxtaposition of carefully crafted meat with chemically-preserved white bread is strange.  Perhaps a loaf of homemade white bread would have been better.

baby's first barbecue - priceless

We also decided that this was probably the best opportunity to introduce Ramona to brisket.  She really liked it too, although now she's probably ruined forever, since no other barbecue that we get on the regular can really match this.


Will we ever go there "for real", with the lines?  Unlikely.  My barbecue apathy combined with my extreme aversion to waiting will prevent me from ever getting up at the crack of dawn to wait for hours for meat; however, I'm already looking into pre-ordering again.

Hatch Season!

It's hatch green chile season once again and there's a glut of them at the local grocery stores. I'm pretty sure that if there's a state that I am spiritually from besides Michigan, it's definitely New Mexico. I definitely go hatch crazy! Anaheim peppers are similar, but not grown in the designated county, so these are special peppers. Being that I've been on a hummus kick, I decided that roasted hatch "hummus" would be a really great end-of-summer snack.

Hummus is very basically garbanzo beans + tahini + lemon juice + olive oil. A lot of other ingredients are often added including roasted red pepper. In fact, I have roasted red pepper hummus sitting in my fridge, but I couldn't resist making this reformulated version for a light dinner tonight. In the version, black beans replace the garbanzo, lime juice replaces lemon, and avocado replaces tahini. Tahini is roasted ground sesame seeds and has a high fat content, so something that was similarly fatty needed to replace it to help maintain a similar texture.

Hatch "hummus"

2 roasted hatch peppers, seeded and skinned
1 14-15 oz can black beans, rinsed
1/4 c avocado, diced
1/4 c olive oil
2 cloves garlic, grated
2-3 Tbs lime juice
salt to taste

Roast the hatch peppers any way you like. Since we have an electric stove as well as a grill ban at our apartment, I coated the peppers in vegetable oil since it has a higher smoke point than olive oil and then put them under the broiler until the skins blistered. The time will vary based on your oven, peppers, etc. so keep an eye on them. It probably took 3-4 minutes on each side for me. After roasting, place in a sealable plastic bag and leave sealed until they're at least cool enough to handle. This makes taking the skin off super easy.

Add the peppers, black beans, avocado, 2 T lime juice, and garlic to a food processor. I usually just grate the garlic over the other ingredients. Pulse a few times to break down the beans, peppers, and avocado. Taste to see if you want more lime juice and add if desired. Turn the food processor back on and drizzle in the olive oil.

The peppers add some water to help thin out the mixture. If the texture isn't to your liking, add in water, about a tablespoon at a time.

Beer Beer Good for Your Heart...

They* say that beer was the impetus for civilization. Nomadic people along the Nile found that puddles of water that had fermented grains in them to be safer to drink than "pure" water because the mild alcoholic content of the fermented water killed potentially disease-causing microbes. Finding this non-lethal liquid source to be a good thing, they settled around areas where they could cultivate the grain and produce what is essentially a primitive beer. Whether or not this is true, beer is the impetus for my latest avoidance behavior: beans. Well, maybe beans aren't an avoidance behavior, but playing with them certainly is.

Every Friday the astro grad students take advantage of happy hour at the Crown and Anchor, one of several dirty bars located around the campus of UT. The big plus is that they have Live Oak Hefeweizen, which consistently ranks well on Beer Advocate. They also have these incredible nachos that have black beans, jalepen$^~$os, and cheese. Finding this to be a simple recipe, I started buying cans of black beans in hopes of recreating the nummy snacks of my favorite dive bar.

So several cans of black beans later, Colby and I found ourselves in Costco because he was convinced that we would save money there. In order to justify the fifty dollar membership fee, we started buying random items including beef kielbasa, bagels, aluminium foil (yes, ALUMINIUM, not TIN!), and (dun dun dun) a case of black beans. I used half of a can for nachos, but realized that I needed to find uses for 11.5 other cans.

Much to my delight, thedeliciouslife updated, not once, but twice. The former inspired me to make a go at my own hummus.

1 clove garlic
1 can garbanzo beans, drained
juice of 1/2 lemon
<1/2 tsp salt, kosher
spices

So basically I put the clove of garlic in the blender, grind grind, and then added the beans+lemon juice and some spices and then drizzled in the olive oil as it ran. It sort of worked, but I had to stop a few times to push everything down which kind of sucked. I really need a food processor, but I'm going to hold out until the wedding to get one. My real hope, though, is to get a KitchenAid stand mixer. ANYWHO... It turned out alright. I used too much salt and paprika, but it was still okay. Part of the problem with the blender is that some of it gets really super smooth and then sometimes you just have whole beans left over, but in trying the super smooth parts, it reminded me a lot of mayonnnaise... It makes me want to use chickpea+olive oil puree as a mayonnaise substitute. It seems to me that it's the same concept: unsaturated fat+protein emulsion. It would also be a vegan approximation of mayonnaise. Have other people tried this, or am I just terribly sleep-deprived?

Anywho, I needed something else to do with the black beans (and something else to do. I have important masters thesis things due on Tuesday morning at 8:00 AM, so I need something to procrastinate with, right?)... so I cleaned out the blender and added the following:

1/8 onion, chopped
1 large clove garlic
1.5 cans black beans, drained
5 "shots" of hot sauce
1/2 tsp cumin
s+p to taste
juice of the other half of a lemon

grind grind. then I added in fresh (uncooked) corn kernels. The dip worked surprisingly well even though it's not particularly pretty to look at (think little pieces of corn floating in a grey mushy sea), but it tasted alright. It seemed to lack something, which Colby pointed out was cilantro and I think that's exactly on point. The corn + onion + garlic combination is screaming for cilantro, but we all know that cilantro is gross and don't put it in our food. :) I think next time I'll try flat leaf parsley.

*By "they" I mean Crosby Washburne, my 12th grade European history teacher, which means that this is more of a "story" than fact.