It's April 2020, and at the time of writing this review, we're all in Quarantine and locked down at our homes due to the ongoing Coronavirus pandemic. Now that we have got nothing too productive to do apart from the usual "Work from home" projects assigned to us by our offices, we have a lot of spare time in our hands to practice our hobbies pursue and learn something new.
My sister, for instance, is crazy about cooking and has always keenly followed MasterChef seasons to learn how to cook new amazing delicacies. She is a big fan of veteran chefs like Gordon Ramsay, Aaron Franklin, Thomas Keller, Vikas Khanna, Kunal Kapoor, and more.
She has experimented a lot in cooking but has always wanted to learn and master the art of cooking on Barbeque (BBQ). That's when introduced her to the Texan BBQ expert Aaron Franklin's masterclass, and she has since been an ideal, obedient sister to me. You too can grab a piece of the cake and learn how to cook succulent, and extremely delicious, richly flavored meats on the barbeque, while quarantined at home from the expert himself. Check our in-depth MasterClass review here:
Every Masterclass is known for its authenticity and "To-the-point" approach on the art, making it one of the best places on the internet to learn what you love from the people whom you look up to. So, let's dig deeper into Aaron Franklin's masterclass and see what all a cooking fanatic can learn from him.
Aaron Franklin MasterClass Review 2020: The BBQ Wizard??
Aaron Franklin MatserClass Review
To be honest, I'm not very keen on cooking and am barely able to manage myself around the kitchen. So naturally, I didn't even really know who Aaron Franklin was until I read about his Masterclass. Before informing my sis about him, I surfed the web about him and learned how famous he is in America and is considered one of the most respectable and well-known barbeque cooking experts in the country. Now that little sissy knows, she is all gaga overtaking his masterclass.
Aaron Franklin is a world-renowned chef and an expert in the art of cooking up delicacies on the BBQ grill. He is the co-owner of the well-known BBQ restaurant called Franklin Barbecue Restaurant. The restaurant is operational every day and caters to hundreds of customers daily who queue up for hours to get in and enjoy the delicacies from his kitchen. So, it would not be a surprise to know that people across the world who follow him, would want to learn a thing or two about barbecue cooking from the expert himself. This particularly includes one of his favorites, the Texan way of barbecuing and grilling so many different kinds of meats.
Aaron's Masterclass is a genuine crowd puller because he resorts to a no-nonsense approach to help you focus on nothing but the most essential aspects of BBQ cooking, so you can create some wonderful, tasty barbecued ribs, brisket, and more for your loved ones waiting at the table! So, keeping that in mind, he was very much happy to oblige his fans by sharing his art, skills, and secrets through his very own Masterclass!
Aaron Franklin MasterClass: Fire up your own Texan BBQ!
Mastering the BBQ is all about handling the heat for the meat! Perhaps the first and foremost thing any chef always emphasizes developing an essential skill-building a fire and maintaining it, such that it can produce clean, flavor-filled smoke. Your meat will certainly not taste the way you want it to if you don't exactly know how to do that. It is indeed a difficult and one of tricky skill to learn!
This lesson turned out to be great for my sister, since cooking on BBQ is something very different from conventional cooking, and the way Aaron teaches it, makes it look a lot more sorted. Aaron begins the masterclass by giving valuable tips about using cooking oil and paper was quite simple, interesting, and very effective.
Your BBQ requires the right wood!
As important as an element fire is for BBQ, natural wood also plays an important role in the cooking process. In this section, Aaron Franklin makes you understand how selecting the right kind of wood can improve the quality of your BBQ dish. He clearly emphasizes on key parameters like the wood you use your cooking must have some moisture in it. Choosing the right variety of trees is also equally important. This is because different types of wood create different amounts of heat and smoke when burnt which affects the flavor of your dish. Using the best quality wood allows you to create the right kind of smoke that can gently flavor your food!
Aaron has curated his own workbook for his Masterclass that has a section solely focusing on wood selection, which has in-depth information. The workbook can easily help you buy the right wood for your BBQ, nicely laying down the necessary dos and don'ts of selecting the wood. Aaron even gives you suggestions on where you can find the ideal type of wood you need for barbecuing.
Time to control your fire!
As mentioned during the introduction of this review, Aaron Franklin has a no-nonsense approach towards his art and prefers not to complicate things. He is in-depth and to-the-point about the things as he quickly explains the meaning of the different kinds of smells and smoke colors. This kind of precise knowledge certainly helped my sister learn how to identify the issues and take fix them correctly.
Another important aspect he touches upon is how you can also cook in unsuitable or imperfect weather conditions. This involves being able to control the flow of air, flame height, temperatures, and more.
Selecting and trimming the right meat?
Whenever you think "BBQ", you instantly think "Meat". Nicely charred, smoking hot meat! But to have that picture-perfect meat for your BBQ involves first selecting the right meat. In this section, Aaron shows here how to buy beef of good quality essential for your BBQ. He also emphasizes on the fact that a lot of the techniques and principles demonstrated in this video are easily applicable to almost every kind of meat you can possibly cook on the grill!
If you are not down with that, there is still his workbook, where he shares more detail, explaining each and every USDA quality standards and where each joint comes from. This section Aaron further explains how the flavor of the meat can be affected depending on how the different animals have been raised.
Most of you probably didn't even know that it is a good option to asking your butcher to leave the bone in whenever you are purchasing a pork butt, which I didn't even know, is actually a shoulder joint. The course is full of interesting tips and guidelines!
Aaron Franklin MasterClass: Organize yourself before the game!
Cooking the good BBQ is tricky and sometimes tedious art that takes time to cook. So, you need to make sure that your guests are not left hungry for too long. This requires you to be pretty well-organized to pull it off.
When it comes to being well-organized, Aaron Franklin works out on what one needs to do when well in advance. The master-chef has everything well sorted and ready before he even starts cooking. He tells us how keeping things organized allows him to be sure that nothing gets missed. What's more important is that he is always able to go back and work out if something goes wrong, so he can easily identify where or what the problem was. This allows him to easily tweak his process the next time he tries to cook the same dish.
Furthermore, Aaron also goes a step further in explaining how when deciding how long it should be cooked, the toughness of the meat and how you should serve it, need to be factored.
Learn to cook these classic Texan barbecue dishes!If you are wondering that Aaron's Masterclass only involves giving general guidelines and steps on cooking some conventional BBQ dishes, then you are completely mistaken. During this course, you will also learn how you can cook numerous classic and yummy Texan barbecue joints from the Guru himself. Some of these dishes include:
It will be interesting for you to also note how Aaron has crafted the entire cooking process in a way that you can easily cook other cuts or meats using the techniques and flavors used for these recipes.
- Smoke a pork butt?
- Cook the perfect pork ribs?
- Cook a Texan barbecue brisket?
- Create the perfect sauce for ribs?
- Grill steak and broccolini
Aaron Franklin MasterClass - The "in-depth" cooking process!
I and my sister checked out many video lessons from Aaron's Masterclass, amongst which, the video on "Smoke: Pork Butt" seemed the most interesting one. In this lesson, Aaron explains how you can and should monitor the cooking process and assess things while you progress.
This includes simple yet key things like how the meat should look like, and how it should smell as you progress through each stage of cooking. This allows you to be assured whether things are going as planned or not. When the cooking is done with, he demonstrates this cool "toothpick trick" to assess the hardness of the cooked meat and it is ready to rest and serve.
Each cooking recipe shown in the lesson, Aaron explains the following:
After seeing all this, I was pretty convinced that you will quickly be able to work out how to cook almost any kind of meat or cut it by the time you finish watching all of the videos.
Slicing/pulling the cooked meat!
- Trimming and shaping the joint for cooking
- Seasoning your meat
- Infusing the ideal flavor
- Assessing the cooking as you progress
- When and how to spritz
- When and how to wrap a barbecue joint
Cooking a Texan barbecue may seem fun and quite exotic, but the joints you use to create one are sometimes expensive. If you are into spending a good amount of money with an aim to cook one of the best BBQ dishes of your life for your loved ones, you will definitely want to bring the most out of what you are planning to cook.
Like I said earlier, I don't really know too much about cooking, but my sister was really enticed to see how Aaron covered every neat detail on how to carve, slice and pull barbecued meats including how you can cater to all tastes by creating a perfect mix of lean and fattier cuts. If you're not attracted by just that, he takes things a step further by showing you how to evenly spread out the flavorsome bark across the dishes you are creating, so you are able to add the same heavenly flavors for people to relish.
The right equipment to cook!
Whoever said that cooking on BBQ requires expensive equipment, just lock them in jail! The master cook Aaron Franklin himself uses all the regular stuff like a standard and conventional bread knife to cut up his brisket. He is completely against pushing his students towards buying expensive equipment because that's simply not needed. Bringing heavenly taste to dishes doesn't need to be expensive all the time. Aaron urges you to have a down to earth approach towards cooking exotic Texan barbecuing, allowing you to mentally and physically learn and enjoy this art of cooking.
Buying the ideal Texan BBQ smoker!
My sister has read a hell lot about smoke cooking since she saw it for the first time on MasterChef - Australia! So, she totally loved this section, as Aaron explains numerous key aspects of the different types of smokers and barbeques that would be helpful for you. Tidy things like stick burners, different smokers that run on charcoal, gas, electric and pellets as well as kettle grills are all a key part of this section. Aaron himself used a wood powered smoker while demonstrating you the techniques.
Buying a good and reliable wood smoker is an art and Aaron shows you exactly what to look for when you buy a wood smoker through an entire dedicated video. When it comes to offsetting cookers, he has a custom made one built specifically as per his own needs, as he explains to you what to consider when buying one. Furthermore, you will also learn how you can also upgrade the cooker you already own!
Aaron brings you some bonuses!
I might have made it pretty clear by now that you get access to many little extras here and there throughout the course. The most important and useful bonus being the workbook feature which works as an add-on piece of extra information to some of the things shown in the videos with this course. There some nice in-depth detail about how to plan out many different aspects of your BBQ cookout.
The Workbook helps layout everything very clearly making it easier for you to print out a few and practice the relevant sections. This feature particularly comes in handy when it becomes hard to find the exact video containing the information you are looking for.
Making the most of all this!
Aaron Franklin's Masterclass also shows the office timings during which you can put all of your doubts and queries regarding Texan barbecuing directly to Aaron and he will be more than happy to help you out with them.
Some of the videos in his course already had a few comments when I took this course for my sis, AND THE BEST PART is that none of them were left unattended. Most of the comments and feedbacks had been responded to in some way! And to add as a cherry topping, Aaron has already added a bonus video to the course where you will learn from him how the brisket meat became the most important ingredient for Texan barbequing.
Should you buy the course?
I sat down with my sister after she was through with the Masterclass to see what she thinks about the course. She seemed pretty overwhelmed by how the power of the internet is getting millions around the globe to learn such exotic cooking arts from celebrity chefs like Aaron. Overall, here some key things she pointed out from Aaron Franklin's Masterclass:
Aaron Franklin MasterClass & Student Reviews
- She really loved Aaron's teaching methods, which were very down to earth, neat and organized from beginning till the end.
- The course sections were structured nicely, which makes it easier for people to follow and learn better.
- Often overlooked aspects like the quality of wood, technique of buying the meat, the "toothpick" technique of checking the hardness of the meat before serving, and more were given due emphasis and importance, sometimes through dedicated videos.
- Emphasis on how the barbecuing principles can easily work on all other cuts of meats.
- Encouraging students on working with standard equipment instead of buying expensive ones.
- Detailed workbook and bonus videos.
Quick Links:
Final Thought: Aaron Franklin MasterClass Review [ Year]
There is also an additional course that you can take on learning how to cook using a kettle grill or gas smoker. If you are really that passionate about BBQ cooking and smoking, then you can consider buying an all-access masterclass pass as it will enable you to take multiple courses without having to pay any additional fee!
We hope this Aaron Franklin MasterClass review suits your purpose well. Give us a thumbs up by sharing this post on social media channels such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
