i’ve never made an awesome brisket. i’ve made a few ok briskets. this was neither. it was a lesson in humility. i am not skilled enough to take a questionable piece of meat and turn it into amazing bbq.
so please ruminate on this pic and leave your best desert puns below. but then please also leave me a good brisket chili recipe because i need one, badly.
A clear case of your temp being too high. I’d do max 200 degrees, and wrap it in butcher paper after smoking for a couple hours to retain moisture
I think it depends on your smoker but in general I think this is the right approach. Lower the temp and wrap when the bark is looking good. Pull when at temp, or even a bit under.
Yup. At higher temps this becomes grandma’s roast beef and potatoes
Do you always cook beef max 200? Or is that your advice for my flat today?
And I wrap everything with butcher paper at the stall.
So, the food science angle is that with tough cuts of meat, you need low and slow heat so you have appropriate time to break down the collegen in the meat. Pulled meats like chicken and pork shoulder need to end up round 200 degrees after a long cook. I havent messed with brisket so Im not sure of the right temp but I would follow with the advice kf the butcher wrap and a low cooking heat to get it the rest of the way to target after bark.
F
Indeed
What did you cook it on? What temp and how long?
Edit: this link to easy bbq brisket
I love Malcolm Reed’s videos. I make his Mississippi chuck roast sandwich all the time.
It was a 4 lb flat only from Costco. It was the last one they had at 6pm yesterday and it looked crappy. There was almost no intramuscular fat. It was pre-tenderized with most of the fat cap removed (which I didn’t realize until this morning when I opened and flipped it over).
I trimmed off a little more hard fat and did a simple spog rub. Normally I would cook this in my wsm. But today I took the easy route and used the masterbuilt electric.
The temp was set at 225. I didn’t set up an ambient probe, but in the past it ran reasonably true to temp when I did.
The meat stalled at about 160. I let it go a little bit and wrapped in brown butcher paper. I probed with the instant read at 199. The instant read showed 200 - 202 in several spots. Total cook time was about 7 hours.
It felt right so I pulled and rested in a cooler for a little more than an hour. I sliced at 165 and almost choked on the first bite.
The chuck roasts looked much better and I’m much more comfortable smoking those. That’s what I should have grabbed. What I really wanted were some beef ribs, but they only had back ribs and boneless rib roasts.
I feel your pain. When making my first few, I was temp probing at the wrong location and screwed them all up. I’m betting it’s the lack of fat/moisture that did it in this time around. Just keep cooking and you’ll find the process for your smoker.
Oh I have the process down. It goes like this: buy chuck roast instead. It’s half the price and less finicky.
Nice bark!
But yeah, looks dry and awfulI knew before I even cut into it that there was a problem.
If they had a point i would have bought it. I just didn’t need a full packer. I didn’t know about letting it rest in the open air. I thought it was supposed to go straight into the cooler to slow things down. Thanks for the tip!
Brisket is over-rated anyway.
So two things, I personally think flat only should be saved for Jewish grandma brisket. It’s just better suited to braising when it doesn’t have the point to protect it and share the thermal load. Second, when you pull the brisket at temp, you need to let it sit out for 45 minutes to an hour before putting it in the cooler. That brisket may have been perfectly cooked when you pulled it off, but you have to let it stop cooking. 225 is fine for brisket and a lot of people cook them a good bit hotter than that with good success. That being said, don’t be too hard on yourself, brisket is hard to nail and those who do have probably turned out at least a few bad ones getting there. It’s a shame it’s such a big piece of meat to experiment with.
