The Franklin Barbecue Collection Review

The Franklin Barbecue Collection: The Definitive Guide to Perfectly Cooked Meat

It's time to fire up your grill with the Franklin Barbecue Collection.

From brisket to steak, here's everything you need to know about meat. This deluxe boxed set from the revered pitmaster and New York Times bestselling author behind Austin's Franklin Barbecue features exclusive paperback editions of his already iconic books: Franklin Barbecue and Franklin Steak.

From America's foremost barbecue authority and bestselling author Aaron Franklin comes this collection of two essential books for anyone interested in cooking meat to perfection. Franklin and James Beard Award-winning coauthor Jordan Mackay unlock the secrets behind truly great barbecue and mind-blowing steak, sharing years' worth of hard-won knowledge.

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Franklin Barbecue: A Meat-Smoking Manifesto

When Franklin and his wife, Stacy, opened up a small barbecue trailer on the side of an Austin, Texas, interstate in 2009, they had no idea what they’d gotten themselves into. Today, Franklin Barbecue has grown into the most popular, critically lauded, and obsessed-over barbecue joint in the country (if not the world) - and Franklin is the winner of every major barbecue award there is.

Franklin Barbecue is a definitive resource for the backyard pitmaster, with chapters dedicated to building or customizing your own smoker; finding and curing the right wood; creating and tending perfect fires; sourcing top-quality meat; and of course, cooking mind-blowing, ridiculously delicious barbecue, better than you ever thought possible.

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Franklin Steak: Dry-Aged. Live-Fired. Pure Beef.

Franklin Steak is not a typical cookbook and it’s is very different from Franklin Barbecue: A Meat-Smoking Manifesto. In this book, information and knowledge is the most important thing. In fact, it's difficult to find a recipe in its first 175 pages. Instead, the book presents you information on breeds, cuts, marbling, color, fiber, dry-aging, methods of cooking, fuel, thickness, anything, and everything.

The book is divided into three main sections: sourcing the meat, prepping the meat, and then cooking the meat. Part one is about beef history and industry. A chapter about cattle breeding and upbringing, steak cuts, and the science behind the perfect steak. The second section goes into dry-aging, the mechanics and machinery involved in grills, fuel, and wood. Also, in this chapter is one of our favorite parts of the book, a section on how to build your own grill. The last part and our favorite is about actually cooking the steaks and how to achieve different end results, plus how to make fun additional items like sides (fries, garlic mushrooms), sauces (salsa verde, jalapeno-anchovy compound butter), and alcoholic pairing suggestions.

In the end, Franklin Steak is an indispensable guide to cooking the perfect steak, buying top-notch beef, seasoning to perfection, and finding or building the ideal cooking vessel. For any meat lover, backyard grill master, or fan of Franklin's fun yet authoritative approach, this book is a must-have.

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Final Thoughts

The Franklin Barbecue Collection is much more than a collection of recipes. Here you'll learn everything you need to know to cook meat to perfection.

The old adage about giving someone a fish and feeding them for a day versus teaching someone to fish seems appropriate here. If you're looking for recipes or a step-by-step guide, this collection might not be for you. If you've been bbq'ing with some success and some failure, you're likely going to appreciate these books as they will likely give you a much better idea why you failed, and why you succeeded.