#kitparker

This spring semester, Harvard Engineering Professor Kit Parker, a teaching assistant, and 16 engineering students went on a quest to build a scientifically optimized smoker.

It was in Memphis, Tennessee, that Kit Parker first began to think about teaching a class on American barbecue at Harvard. The engineering professor was wandering through a barbecue competition, studying the smokers where entrants had marinated their meat in smoke for hours on end. And he noticed something distinctly odd. “They were the most godawful contraptions you've ever seen.” The junkyard of cobbled-together smoking chambers, of all shapes and sizes and materials, told Parker something important. No one really knew how to build a perfect one yet.

Barbecue, of course, is a word that has two uses in our modern vernacular: a verb meaning to slap some meat on the grill and slather it with sauce, and a noun referring to slow-smoked meat, a staple of southern US states including Tennessee and Texas, where Parker grew up. Aficionados of the latter develop a practical knowledge of the complicated series of chemical reactions that produce the melt-in-your-mouth texture, the crusty exterior, or bark, and the particular flavors of barbecue. 

To begin their research, the team purchased one of the most popular smokers on the market, called the Big Green Egg, and smoked brisket through the brutal Boston winter, gathering data that allowed them to build computer models of the movement of air and heat in the smoker and of the brisket itself as it cooked. Then they drew up plans for a device that would provide consistent heating regardless of the user's skill in loading fuel, and do it in rain, snow, or shine. It would need to have an hourglass waist, where they would mount fans to spread the heat out evenly around the meat. And it would need to be ceramic, to retain enough heat. Of course, none of them had built such a thing before. “We had 45 days left in the class,” Parker recalls, “and we had to learn how to do ceramics engineering.” The students shaped the smoker out of 300lbs (120kg) of clay, a kind of black Dalek (see below), built an app that controls the fans and temperature remotely, and began testing again.

Their device has a few interesting features, in addition to its hourglass figure. It generates turbulence around the meat, so smoke is constantly bombarding it, a process that may impart more flavor. It can be controlled at a distance with the phone app, which will also send updates throughout the smoking process to salivating friends. And it has attracted interest from companies looking to get into the smoker business. The class was sponsored by Williams Sonoma. At a recent test on the sunny quad with a media audience, representatives from the firm that sells Cuisinart grills were there.

Did they produce a smoker that's better than the Big Green Egg? That can fool-proof and standardize the smoking process? Parker says their data so far suggest that it heats more consistently than the Egg, showing about the same temperature curve each time they run it. The answer will be clearer with more trials – so far, they have run their smoker only four times. 

the prompt is really lame (this is for kit bc she asked~)