Labor Day Brisket and Bourbon

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

Memorial Day Cook

Short week this week as expected with the holiday and all.  I am starting to get frustrated with the home building process. Honestly I don’t know why I didn't expect this to happen…I guess I was just being dumb in thinking that it would get moving the day after we closed. I think realistically it will not be finished until mid to late September. Whatever. Still need to pick out flooring and talk about a few other things with the design but right now any forward progress is what we are looking for.

Memorial Day BBQ- I purchased a little gizmo called “The BBQ Guru” that is intended to help control the temps a bit more effectively in most wood/charcoal fired cookers. Basically what it is a watertight programmable device that is connected to a 10 CFM fan that will pulse off/on to stoke the fire for an indefinite amount of time.  You set the temp to whatever you desire; close all the bottom vents on the cooker and let the fan do the work. It’s really a great idea and seemed to work very well under the right conditions.

Here is a photo of the set up. It looks a little robotic with the whole contraption but well worth the results.

I was able to figure out a few things that I was previously un aware of. First off, the temperature that I had  been cooking at prior to using the controller were considerably higher than my targeted 225 while manually setting vents and adjusting the temps. This was evidenced by the much longer cooking period…the shoulders never got to the target of 195F internal and I decided to pull them anyway as we were all getting hungry. Important note: The target temp of 195 is not the temp that the pork is safe to consume…realistically is in the 160 range. For smoking a shoulder the magic happens at around 195F. It’s at this point the shoulders have broken down to the point all the fat renders out of the meat making for a juicy and tender product once you start shredding. In my experience anything south of the 195 mark makes the shoulders a little tougher and not quite as juicy.

The other thing that I noted is that I stink at cooking ribs. My technique is not consistent enough to produce the same quality every time. It also might be that I was still operating the cooker at the 225F mark and realistically the temps should be a bit higher than that. The other thing I did was instead of foil wrapping the ribs I instead put them all in an aluminum pan and covered them in foil. Bad idea. I was using spares trimmed to STL style and truthfully I have not had good luck with them and I think I am not using high enough heat and long enough cook times. I want to give it another try in the near future at a higher temp and see what the outcome is. They looked good just didn’t have that fall off the bone texture I like. I need to try to get a little more consistent to attempt a competition cook that I am thinking about next May.

Lots of experimenting with this weekend and for the most part it turned out OK…Pork shoulders were the stand out. I fired the smoker up around 2 pm on Saturday to try some chicken thighs and didn't shut it off till Sunday at about 5:30pm adding charcoal only once.

I didn't get a ton of pictures with this cook as I drank my way through most of it!