Franklin Barbecue Will Soon Make Sausage In-House

Franklin Barbecue’s sausages aren’t currently made in-house, but Aaron Franklin hopes to remedy that eventually. The housemade sausage game plan has been in the works for the past six years or so, but now there is new equipment and a recipe.

While Franklin has the recipe down, he expects there will be further tweaking once they use the equipment. The sausage will be cooked on pecan instead of his usual post oak. "I really like pecan for short cooks," he tells Eater, "It’s a little sweeter." Attendees of the Texas Monthly Barbecue Festival got to preview early editions of the sausages, but he thought there were "too many mustard seeds."

The sausage on the menu right now comes from Texas Sausage Company, which creates the linked meats specially for Franklin using his formula. "Anybody can just make sausage," he says. "It’s not hard, but to nail it to the level of consistency that I want it," means doing it himself.

Inside the restaurant, the back rooms change constantly to fit demands, so Franklin had to "Tetris" in the sausage cooker. "It is a real Inspector Gadget kind of cooker," he describes. There is no set timeline for the housemade sausages yet.

Franklin explains the process after burning through a whole bunch of sausage puns ("You never sausage a complex way;" "It’s easy to link things together"): once the entire set-up is done, the staff will slowly undertake the process. He reckons it will take five night shifts plus a new daytime cook for the procedures.

Another treat in the works will be grilled sausages, using Franklin’s other new addition: the Argentinian grill, which took about six months to create. The plan, for now, will be to grill sausages during lunch hours.

Until then, Franklin Barbecue customers will just have to settle for brisket and ribs.