Harvard Engineering Students Devise Ultimate BBQ Smoker

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[quote=http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2015/0 ... story.html]Many products have been refined by cycles of science and engineering. Barbecue, however, has been a veritable Wild West in which pit masters build mishmash setups that incorporate garbage cans, cinder blocks, a giant rotisserie. There seemed to be little in the way of deep understanding of how — or why — one smoker was better than another, Parker said.

“They are the biggest contraptions and pieces of junk you’ve ever seen,” he said. “Everyone had their own little mojo they brought to the problem.”

He thought science and smart engineering could turn the art of barbecue from something that skilled practitioners do with secretive, homespun rigs to something more accessible. So for his engineering design class back in the confines of Harvard Yard, he assigned a team of novices one of the toughest problems in the field: build a foolproof smoker that can repeatedly produce the perfect brisket, to be judged on texture, taste, and appearance.

Making a perfectly smoked piece of meat may seem to be as far as you can get from an engineering conundrum, but Parker saw it as a beast of a problem that required a deep understanding of chemistry, heat transfer, materials science, prototyping, and solving problems.

On a hike up Camelback Mountain in Arizona, he pitched the idea to executives from Williams-Sonoma, who agreed to be the client for his class. The high-end kitchen and housewares company set the general design specifications, and sent the Harvard team aprons, cooking tools, and a seemingly unending supply of brisket. [/quote]