IMBB6: Imagine...Mmmm...Barbecued Brisket
Fast-forward a couple months, when our friend Tim sent out an email that he was going to be having a "barbecue". What he meant, of course, was that they were going to be grilling things. Worried that my friend might be embarrassed by his faux pas, I convinced him to let me come by really early and smoke a beef brisket.
Tom picked up the brisket for me, since he was buying two for a party of his (coming soon) the day before Tim's party. It's an impressive piece of meat, a solid 10 pounds (at least) of meat and fat, untrimmed. If I had known the gang at Too Many Chefs was going to choose barbecuing for IMBB 6, I would've taken more pictures.
Tom (and his sous-chef William) gave me a "brisket 101" talk at his party. He showed me how to distinguish the "point" (the pics are the point piece) and the "flat" portions of the brisket, since I was going to separate them for the cooking, and he offered some advice on cooking it faster, since the Saveur recipe calls for 7-10 hours in the smoker, a daunting prospect for a barbecue at 2:00pm. See below for the full technique.
I was at Tim and Mitch's the next day at 6:20am (horribly hungover, I'll add), prepping the meat and preheating the smoker. Trimming the meat was tricky despite the experienced words of Tom and William; I realized midway through how I should have done it. Hopefully I'll remember that the next time. I also removed about a pound of fat. If that seems like a lot, it's worth remembering that the rule of thumb is you get about 50% yield by weight from a cooked brisket, with much of the rest of that being fat that renders out during the cooking. In other words, there was still plenty of fat on and in the meat. I didn't do much of a rub; my idea for a rub (dried tomatoes, chiles, and cocoa powder) was impractical at Tim and Mitch's; in the future I'll make it the night before, but I got home awfully late from Tom's party. So I just rubbed salt all over the meat.
It's unfortunate that doing a whole brisket (10 lbs. of meat, remember) is of necessity an infrequent event. It was good and surprisingly easy. Next time, though, hopefully I can do it for dinner so that I can smoke it all the way for a full 10 hours. Yum.
I wasn't quite up for wine that day, but if I were to choose a wine, this is one of the few times when I'd like some toasted oak in the barrels. Not enough to be overpowering, but enough to add some hints of smoke to the wine. Perhaps a California Rhone blend of some kind. Zinfandel is often recommended for barbecue, but I think that works better when there's more barbecue sauce. Besides, I think that magazines that say that mean "barbecue" not barbecue. You don't need a tannin monster, and I think your brisket will suffer next to one; a lot of the fat has rendered out of the brisket, and your meat shouldn't have a big helping of char on it, so the tannins will just overwhelm the food. Of course, beer is a perfectly respectable option.
"Quick" Brisket
Serves heaven knows how manyPrep and preheat your smoker. Soak wood chips in water.
Take a whole, untrimmed beef brisket ("packet cut") and trim off all but a 1/4" of fat around the whole thing. Separate the point and flat portions. The point will probably jut out above the flat. You should see a thick layer of fat separating the two, and you can pretty much just bisect that; on mine it actually curved down. Trim the excess fat (down to 1/4" again) from the newly exposed surfaces.
Rub the meat all over with salt, or concoct some interesting rub and use that.
Place brisket in smoker (point on top rack; it has more fat, so putting it on top will allow the fat to flavor the flat as well). Put wood chips in smoker. Take a nap and start to recover from your hangover.
About three hours later, preheat an oven to 250°. When the internal temperature of the brisket reaches 145° or so (about four hours from the start), take it out and put both pieces into a roasting pan. Cover loosely with foil and put in the oven until the internal temperature of the meat hits 185° or 190°, about two to two and a half hours. What you're doing here is "braising" the meat in its own fat.
Remove from the oven and slice (no need to let it rest). Watch your friends pass out in ecstacy.
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