It's been a while since I have posted anything about BBQ. Part of the reason is that I have not done much cooking as all of my go to stuff is packed away in a locker and its just been plain hard to get the time anymore to do it. When you are living out of Moving boxes its easy to think about things other than BBQ. I have found a few things that have tried that are now in the regular rotation on the grill and I will try to give a summary of these things in a future post.
Today I tried something that I have never done...a whole packer brisket that has the point and the flat portions un trimmed. In the past I have only used the "Flats" and they tend to dry out over a long cook. Brisket by nature is a really shitty cut of meat. Its a tough muscle that has a lot of connective tissue contained inside. This cut lends itself very well to a low and slow approach with the long cook times necessary to break down and covert the fats out of the meat and render out.
The plan was to wake up early and fire up the Smoker....little did I know Sam came down wide awake at 3:15 am and Max woke up at 5am. I ended up falling back asleep and finally woke up around 8:30. At 1.5 hours per pound of brisket in the conventional way...no way it would be done in time for dinner.
If you have ever read anything cooking brisket every once and awile you run across a topic of high heat. This goes against evey rule in BBQ. You know what? Worked pretty darn good. I don't think it had as strong of a flavor if it had gone the traditional route of 15-20 hours in the smoker at 225F...but it was not dried out and for the most part very tender. Part of the process is wrapping it in a foil pan for 3 hours or so at 300 or better. I put the whole trimmed brisket on at about 9am at 230F until it hit 150 internal...then jumped the temp to 315F until the meat hit 170F. Then in the pan and foiled for about three hours until the avg. temp was between 195 and 200F at around 5:30am. Really you are looking for a tender product that either a temp probe or fork has little resistance in. I made up a brine of sorts....beef bullion cubes in about 2 cups of water and some Worstishire sauce. I let it rest in the fridge for a day prior. Rubbed the Meat with almost a entire bottle of HEB brisket rib only found in TEXAS.
I normally don't care for Beef as BBQ...but this was great. Having a little confidence in cooking a brisket at higher temps and shorter times will allow you to do bit more experimenting with spices and techniques because you don't wrap two full days into cooking it and when it comes out like a space rock....no big deal.
Its worth mentioning that the BBQ Guru Temp controller did a great job of holding the selected temp at the higher elevations than I thought. The Duty cycle of the fan was at about 80% at anything over 300F.
Lastly....Picked up a bottle of Costco brand Bourbon. I am pretty sure I have had this before at some point and for some reason but wanted to try it again. If you know anything about Bourbon you can tell by the info on the label what distillary it came from. It's a Jim Beam product and they produce a wide variety from the White classic Jim to Booker's and Knob Creek. This Costco Bourbon is somewhere just below a Knob in my best guess. Found this to be one of the few that I like on the rocks with a splash of water just like Knober. You can pick up a bottle for less than $20.00
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