Since June I've been wanting to try my hand at cooking a brisket. I've tried it once before to disappointing results. I did one today, also disappointing. Meh, yeah, I got a ring, woop tee do. But I'd gladly trade the ring for the correct chew. There were maybe a dozen slices in the point to flat transition that came out half decent. The other two ends were both unremarkable. Fun perk of being an engineer at an EPC in Houston - Zach! Zach could have easily ran a restaurant, but he preferred catering lunch for various companies here in Houston. He'd cook a few briskets, bring them and the tater salad and beans to a local company's lunch meeting and call it a day. For desert this dude brought peach cobbler. Effing-insane-free-lunch! And, unlike the cliche, this was in fact a totally free lunch. In fact, it was even better than that, because these lunches that Zach catered were pretty much always lunch-n-learns. We'd get all kinds of suppliers host these events and would almost always learn some nifty info about general engineering features of their products applicable to all suppliers, and of course there would be the pitch why theirs was better. I digress. Having never had any of Franklin's brisket, Zach's is my holy grail. Every slice, either from the flat or the point, was cooked to a perfect pull apart tenderness. Mine today was nowhere close other than the half dozen slices in the middle. Apparently, it seems, the trick is in the rest. Anyone know if this is correct? yep, huge scalp job in my trim work. this sucked. freezer is so full of crap there was no way I could chill this beast down correctly. and I couldn't distinguish the hump as this brisket didn't match the features shown in the videos I watched on how to trim this thing. My boning knife didn't have much of a chance against this too warm fat. well, I didn't have much of chance either, as I was only able to get so much out of the youtube training. and, as a general rule of thumb, I'm a slow learner, or I used to be. nowadays I suppose I'm a glacially slow learner.
I’m not going to be much help. I grow ‘em but don’t know how to cook ‘em. Sorry it’s so expensive to keep practicing but it ain’t cheap feeding the hungry beasts these days.
The cook is still edible, but round here, what I'm hoping for is bragging rights on getting a proper cook on this thing. Tenderloins, meh, you can eat 'em raw ffs and they are great. The reverser sear on the Masterbuilt 560 is cake with a filet. Or any other steak. Ribs, a bit more skill required. Brisket, ugh, it's gotta be the secret to rest it hot for a good while is my guess. It's not a bad way to spend some time and money, not at all.
My brother sears it on high heat and then does the all day low and slow cook, but I have never done it. It isn't my favorite thing in the world.
I like to cook, but despise cleaning up after. Playing a meat cutter with this thing practically gave me a nervous breakdown. The thing is though, I’ve had some smoked brisket where both the fine grained flat and the marbled point were somehow both cooked to perfection. Aaron Franklin is able to do this. He has videos that show him pulling a brisket that jiggles like it’s full of jelly after one of his cooks.
Just a guess that they use indirect heat and keep one end further away from the source. I am just too afraid to put that money into a piece of meat I will probably ruin. I am invited to a cook out next weekend where they are doing a whole pig in the ground Hawaiian style. If I go I will ask around if they ever do brisket and what their technique is. I figure when you go that in on a cookout, you probably have a lot of experience.
HF! I ruined another Costco USDA Prime - even worse this past Sunday, $64 +maybe another ten or twenty in charcoal and wood chunks. Imma have to practice on some cheaper chunks of brisket if I can find any! This time my mistake was that I didn't pay attention to some of the tips I should have. For example, if you study how to cook one of these you'll find some variations about different things and one of the things that I learned for sure is that a brisket cannot be cooked to a target temp. I had anticipated that it would succumb to such an approach and targeted 203 °F. Nope, this was the fatal flaw this time. This brisket was done at about, from the point to the flat, 199, 194, 194 & 196.
Interesting color it picked up at this point, reminds me a little bit of the rock creature's skin in the original Star Trek episode, Devil in the Dark.... This is the skill I am missing to be able to cook one of these correctly,
This brisket was maybe perfect sometime between 10pm Sunday evening and 2am Monday morning, I didn't take it off until about 8am Monday morning. I over cooked this thing by 6 to ten hours.
Bitter crust, dry dry dry meat, and nasty foul bitter fat cap. Trimmed the worst away to try and salvage the meat for chilli....
Well, I may be a purist, but you have to have: and some properly seasoned oak: and smoke the brisket, fat cap up, at 230F to 250F until the internal temp reaches 170 or so (approx 8 hrs depending on size). Then wrap (aluminum foil or butcher paper with added beef broth or tallow) and put back on pit until internal temp gets to 202-205F, approximately 4 hours. Remove from pit and let rest for 3+ hours. But if you really want something good, do a tri-tip instead of a brisket.
The opposite is what folks have been telling me works best, wrap at the end. I think my second cook would have been decent if I hadn’t been stuck on cooking it to a target temp and had starting probing it for tenderness beginning at 190 as my bbq mate at work advised me to do next time around.
Nice rig. I’m not feeling I’ve got the patience to f with maintaining temp with an offset stick smoke. And sobriety is a challenge as I am stuck with this notion that there is no grilling or smoking allowed unaccompanied by a continuous cold beer in hand.
I hear ya! Down in these parts, it is a tradition and part of the challenge. Barbecue is as much (or maybe more) about the process as it is about the eatin'... checking the temps and fire every 15 to 20 minutes, no fancy wireless probes, just an instant read thermometer for the meat, and analog temp gauges mounted in bungs welded into the pit. In between checking on the temps, maybe you work on the boat, or weld up some project, or whatever. And never forget... if you lookin', you ain't cookin'. With the conventional flow offset smoker, the point goes toward the firebox, so it gets slightly more heat than the flat. So back to yours... do you wrap for the last several hours? I think that taking it all the way to 205 without wrapping will expose the outside to too much dry heat.
I know it's not a brisket but today my girlfriend cooked deep fried chicken livers and we had mashed potatoes and gravy so I thought why not throw some chicken livers on a sub roll and smother it with mashed potatoes and gravy? It turns out that's pretty damn good. Also with just the livers straight out of the Grease... Hot sauce is the usual go to. But I thought why not try something different? A dollop of A1 steak sauce is pretty damn good too on them
Well…, this is part of my entire experimental f up is that I’m attempting to do this with a gravity charcoal grill. So, if I do succeed, it will be props! Masterbuilt 560. It’s an interesting $400 concoction that I’ve had about a year and don’t much expect it to make it to 3, due to fairly crappy China type quality. I’m on the verge of believing / acknowledging that the nature of this grill will never produce the brisket I’m shooting for. But, there were two failures that were on me with attempt 1 & 2 on this thing. The first time I hit it at 250 and it was done way too soon and I didn’t let it go for anywhere near a long enough sit after the cook. The second, I started it out at 180 for several hours, and this I think was not too bad. But, I was intent on not wrapping it and hitting 203. Turns out this one was done at 195 unwrapped and I continued to look for 203 without checking it. Fat side down is what this grill maybe seems to require due to the way the thing is built, and this is an obvious “never gonna work right” type situation. I’m still rollin around some ideas of how to get it close enough with this thing. I’ve got a fairly proper offset at my flood house that I might see about, but it’s unlikely I care enough to put the work into it - it’s not like I’m as stoked about this as my other guy at work that won 1st place in brisket recently in get down Pasadena.
@Grey Matter, I've found brisket to be hit and miss, sometimes it cooks well, sometimes it doesn't, and this is from the same supermarket My mother always cooked meat by gas oven, probably why us kids always fought over the first well cooked slice on the end. I always put it in the slow cooker, then experiment the depth of water, less is better.
I could find success cooking shoe leather in an Instant Pot. All I'd need would be some water, onion, garlic, salt and black pepper. During the US Great Depression, it's my understanding that folks actually did resort to boiling and eating shoe leather. This is exactly what I've done to fair success with pork shoulder / butt. 3 to 4 hours of smoke and then into the Instant Pot. Basically fill with water, and add the nominal requisites - onion, garlic always; carrots, celery, usually; green peppers, hmmm, not tried this yet. Pineapple just now occurs to me might be interesting. Or apple. However, I think you are not quite following what I'm posting about in this thread. The brisket cook I'm posting about is to get one of these:
It is kinda fun perusing all of the stuff available online about cooking a brisket. @Nonnie, this link pretty amusingly spells out the difference between doing a brisket in the oven or a slow cooker versus what I'm posting about trying to achieve, https://urbancowgirllife.com/how-long-to-cook-a-brisket-at-250/ Here is something that we feel needs to be kept in mind as you’re reading this and planning your first or 50th brisket. We use the words cook and smoke interchangeably, so please do not ever interpret “cook” as “cook in the oven”. A brisket is never “smoked” or “cooked” in the oven…ever. I know some people that still do that and somehow they don’t realize that they’re just making roast beef and not smoked beef brisket! If you have a friend or family member that does this, politely encourage them to put their brisket on the smoker versus cutting them out of your family tree.
