Finally, an acknowledgement that engineers make the best cooks.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/19/bu...r-brisket.html

Learning to Engineer a Better Brisket

By CLAIRE MARTINJULY 18, 2015

At 3 a.m. on most Saturdays last winter, a handful of students wheeled a
barbecue smoker into the yard outside the Harvard Law School library,
stuffed the contraption with charcoal and wood chips and lit them.

Around 5 a.m., a second group of students emerged wielding hunks of
spice-rubbed brisket that they slid into the smoker. For the next seven
to 10 hours, the students took turns tending to the meat, sometimes
through blizzardlike conditions because the semester coincided with
Bostons snowiest winter on record.

This was not some strange undergraduate ritual. These were engineering
students enrolled in a course called Engineering Problem Solving and
Design. They had been assigned the task of creating a technologically
sophisticated barbecue smoker that could outperform the best product on
the market and be sold for less than $1,500.

The syllabus for the three-month course incorporated business and
culinary lessons in addition to engineering skills. Guest speakers
included a taste chemist, a barbecue pit master and patent specialists.

At the end of the semester in May, the final product €” which included a
smartphone app €” was evaluated by the professor of the class, Kevin Kit
Parker, and his teaching fellow, Peyton Nesmith. Also offering opinions
were a chef from a local barbecue restaurant and two executives at
Williams-Sonoma who had set some of the design parameters for the smoker.

Since then, Williams-Sonoma has expressed interest in carrying the
Harvard smoker in its stores. Patrick Connolly, executive vice president
and chief strategy and business development officer at Williams-Sonoma,
called it €œa real breakthrough.€�

Mr. Parker says he has been flooded with interest from prospective
investors and barbecue devotees. He, Mr. Nesmith and several students
have said they would like to be involved in a company that manufactures
and sells the Harvard smoker, which the school is patenting. Separately,
two other students are planning to start their own company to sell a
version of the Harvard smoker.

Harvard owns the intellectual property of its employees inventions; Mr.
Parker and Mr. Nesmith would receive a portion of any money the smoker
makes for the school. The students profits from the smoker would be
theirs alone.

But first, there are steps the groups must take, such as refining the
prototype and developing a plan to commercialize the smoker.

It would not be the first business to be spun off from the class. In
2012, Mr. Parker, who is a lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserve and
served in Afghanistan four times, challenged his students to develop
software to help police departments do intelligence analysis against
gangs. Several students from the class went on to start a related
software company called Mark43.

Undergraduate courses at other schools also have spawned businesses.
StartX, a nonprofit accelerator that helps Stanford entrepreneurs
develop business ideas, was developed in a classroom at the university.
And an M.I.T. entrepreneurship course has led to several businesses,
including Rest Devices, which makes the Mimo brand of smart
baby-monitoring devices, as well as the high-tech apparel company
Ministry of Supply, and Charitweet, which lets people donate to
charities through Twitter.

Mr. Parker came up with the idea for the smoker project at a cooking
contest in a Memphis parking lot before a college football game. He was
stunned by the smokers he saw. €œI mean, just piles of metal junk,€� is
how he described them. €œTrash cans with smokestacks. It was offensive to
an engineer.€�

He recognized an opportunity to create a more reliable, scientifically
engineered smoker. Before the class started, Mr. Parker and Mr. Nesmith
became certified barbecue judges with the Kansas City Barbeque Society
to better evaluate the briskets coming out of Harvard Yard.

When the semester began, only two of the 16 students in the class had
smoked meat before, two were vegetarians and five were from abroad and
did not know what American-style barbecue was.

They began by analyzing smokers on the market, focusing on Big Green
Egg, a popular one with a ceramic cooking chamber. They evaluated the
extra-large version, which costs $1,200. €œWe went through the patent of
the Big Green Egg and just completely dissected it,€� Mr. Parker said.
€œWheres the opportunity here? Wheres the weakness here?€�

They built computer models of Big Green Egg, of the brisket and,
eventually, of their own smoker. They ran hundreds of computer
simulations, and they learned that maintaining a precise, steady cooking
temperature is crucial to evenly breaking down the meats collagen,
tenderizing it. Several students spent their spring break taking a crash
course in ceramics at the Harvard Ceramic Studio to build two prototypes
of the smoker.

During the smoking sessions, the students attached sensors to the
cooking surfaces and collected smoke particles and airflow data. They
also inserted thermal imaging devices and probes into the brisket. €œIt
was a heavily instrumented piece of meat,€� Mr. Parker said. €œIt looked
like it was in an intensive care unit.€�

The final design was a 300-pound ceramic smoker with an hourglass shape
that was inspired by power plant cooling towers. An internal computer
controls fans that blow oxygen into the fire; it calculates whether the
fire needs more or less oxygen and communicates the smokers temperature
to a smartphone app. Refueling most other smokers requires opening the
top and inserting more charcoal and wood chips, which destabilizes the
temperature.

A chute on the side of the Harvard smoker lets the chef add more fuel
without disrupting its internal temperature. Sensors gauge fuel levels,
the temperature of the cooking surface and the weight of the food being
smoked, and transmit that information to the app.

€œInstead of the cook having to sit and babysit the smoker all day, for a
12- to 15-hour smoke, they could be off with their family and check the
temperatures on their app,€� said Joe Festa, a bioengineering major who
took the course. They can also share that information with family and
friends planning to attend the barbecue, turning the smoker into what
Mr. Parker calls €œan entertainment device.€�

He brought in Williams-Sonoma as a client to give the students a sense
of urgency and encourage them to think of themselves as engineers rather
than college students. Several students said it worked.

€œIt was the first class with a real work environment where it meant more
than just a letter grade,€� said Michel Maalouly, an environmental
engineering major. €œYoure developing a device that people want to use.€�

In the weeks leading to the final display, which included an hourlong
PowerPoint presentation and a brisket cook-off, some of the students
logged 60 or 70 hours of coursework on the class a week. The final push
was a 96-hour stretch of continuous smoking and experiments.

€œBy the end of the class, it didnt feel like a class at all,€� Mr. Festa
said. €œIt felt more like we were working for a start-up company.€�