Welcome to Biscuits and Jam from Southern Living.

I'm Sid Evans, editor-in-chief of Southern Living magazine.

And in this episode, I'm talking with someone whose Texas barbecue spot has become so popular that standing in line for two hours

is just part of the experience. Aaron Franklin is now a barbecue legend, as well as a guy who's

led something of a smoked meat renaissance in his home state. But he started out as a musician

playing in bars around Austin.

After a long run with a bunch of bands, his interest in barbecue became more serious,

growing from backyard cookouts to selling barbecue out of a trailer to opening his own smokehouse.

We'll talk about working in his grandparents' music shop,

the building of Franklin Barbecue, and the rebuilding of it after a fire, plus his third cookbook, Franklin's Smoke, on this week's Biscuits and Jam.

Aaron Franklin, welcome to Biscuits and Jam.

Heck yeah, thanks for having me.

Congrats on the new book.

I've got a copy right here, and it's called Franklin Smoke.

And if the point was to make people want to eat more barbecue, I think you've definitely succeeded.

Well, mission accomplished.

I'm pretty excited about the third book.

We always kind of meant for it to be a trilogy, even though I guess the publisher didn't know that. But yeah, I'm pretty excited about it. The pictures are great. Same team that's worked on the other two, White McSpadden on photography, Jordan McKay, I'm a co-author on this stuff. I think it turned out really nice. Well, I think it looks great. And we will get into the book more in a minute. But I wanted to start out just asking you a little bit about

where you grew up. Well, I grew up on the side of a highway here in Texas, a little place called

Bryan College Station. Not much of excitement there really grew up in a

record store that my grandparents owned. I grew up in a restaurant that my parents owned for a couple

years. You know, I didn't quite realize how hard it was because I was, you know, 10, 11, 12, somewhere

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