Brisket Flat

Today we are doing what many consider the quintessential barbecue cook, beef brisket. Since a whole so-called packer brisket, is a whole heap of meat for one person to be eating, this time we are cooking just the brisket flat (this sits on the bottom of a whole packer brisket under the point muscle and produces the long thin slices that people generally think of when say “brisket”. It is much leaner than the point with a lot less intramuscular fat so it can be hard to stop it drying it out in the long cook). Cook times for briskets can range anywhere from 8 to 16 hours depending of how big it is and how low a temperature it is smoked at. Read on to see how it turned out after this long cook.

• Setup: Weber Kettle, with Smokenator. Setup for indirect 2-zone cooking with a Weber water pan on the bottom grate.
• Meat: Beef brisket flat. This came from Shalhoob Meat Company. The original uncooked and untrimmed weight was about 5lb.
• Fuel: Kingsford Blue Bag briquettes with red oak wood chunks.
• Cooking temperature: Aiming for 250 F grate temperature which is midway between the Aaron Franklin recommended 275F and the Meathead/Amazing Ribs recommendation of 225 F (which will take forever)) and “about 203F” internal temperature (brisket done-ness is a frustratingly imprecise science).
• Prep:
  

  The Brisket Flat in its plastic packing as it came from Shalhoob. Weight was about 5lb with its plastic wrapping.

  1. Washed the brisket after removing it from its plastic packaging and then patted it dry.
  2. Trimmed off the small amount of fat and silver skin on the under (meaty) side and a lot of the fat cap from the top side and especially round the edges where the fat folds over, leaving about a 1/4″ left on.
  3. Injected with beef broth. I used just under 1/2 cup of beef broth and a meat injector to inject the meat at about 1 inch increments. This was done in the kitchen sink as this often results in jets of broth coming out at odd angles (keep eyes out of the firing line)…
  4. Sprinkled all over with kosher salt and then into a large foil tray covered with plastic wrap and into the refrigerator overnight to give the salt a chance to penetrate.
  5. All of the previous activity was the previous night. On the morning of the cook, I made up the dry rub according to the recipe below.
  6. Rubbed all over with a little bit of water to allow the rub to adhere better and then sprinkled with dry rub, patting to try and persuade it to stick properly.
• Dry rub recipe:

The brisket flat with the fat cap up still in its packaging.

The brisket flat (fat side down) after trimming, brining and sprinkling with the dry rub and ready to go on the smoker.

Cooking diary

• (previous night) 8pm: Trimmed, injected and brined brisket as described above in the prep.
• 6:30am: Made up dry rub.
• 7:00am: Filled up Smokenator with as many briquettes as I could squeeze in (since this should be a long cook) and filled the Weber chimney
  

  Graph of brisket flat temperatures

  with 15 briquettes. Lit the chimney sat on the bottom grill grate over two Weber starter cubes.

• 7:05am: Applied dry rub all over the brisket (For once the quantities came out exactly right).
• 7:15am: Transferred hot coals from chimney to Smokenator. Put top grate on and fitted grate-level thermometer probe.
• 7:20am: Squeezed in water pan and filled it with hot water (Not to self: It is much easier to do this if you do it before putting the temperature probe otherwise the Weber kettle lid is very difficult to get out of the way without unplugging and unthreading the temperature probe)
• 7:35am: Put the brisket on, fat side up and thickest part (such as it is) towards the heat.
• 7:40am: Add two red oak chunks and put the internal thermometer probe into the meat and connected it up.
• 8:05am: Added two more red oak chunks.
• 9:25am: Re-positioned internal probe to be a bit more central, spritzed the meat with water and added a few more wood chunks/chips (getting to the end of my bag of  red oak and its getting somewhat “bitty” down there).
• 9:50am: No sign of the stall happening at 150F, worried it’s going to be done too early so close the vents down a bit and set new target grate temperature of 230F.
• 10:30am: Spritzed with water (color developing nicely although the bark is a bit wet still) and added some chunks of wood.
• 11:10am: Added more briquettes, raked the coals to get the ash to fall through. Used the vent control to sweep the ash into the ash catcher (the Smokenator doesn’t seem to like a large build-up of ash at the bottom restricting the airflow in through the bottom.
• 11:50am: I think it has got dark enough so wrapped the brisket in a double layer (laid cross-wise) of heavy duty grilling foil and carefully poured 1/2 cup of beef broth into the inner package of foil before crimping it tight. Back onto the cooker with the internal probe carefully poked through into the meat.
• 2:40pm: Picked up brisket (with insulated gloves, natch…) and gave it the “squidge test” and the “probe like buttah test” (as you can see brisket done-ness is a very precise science…) to see if its done. Apparently not; feels quite stiff and the probe meets quite a bit of resistance.
• 2:50pm: The temperatures are getting a bit low, so added a dozen briquettes and opened up
• 3:50pm: Reached 205F internal temperate, probe goes in very smoothly – calling it done ! (So total cook time of about 8 1/4 hours, which is on the short side for brisket cooks…)
• 3:55pm: off to rest in a blanket-lined cooler. I put a Weber foil tray in first as the “package” of foil-wrapped brisket was leaking a little.
• 6:30pm: Slice and eat !

Results

Completed brisket flat after resting in the cooler for 2.5 hours and unwrapping from its foil.

Brisket flat after the removal (and eating!) of the end cut (the narrow pointed part that was furthest from the camera in the previous picture)

Sliced brisket flat. I need more practice on my slicing skills – these came out a little thicker than the canonical “number 2 pencil” thickness but it was also tricky with the soft bark.

Verdict: A-

I was more than slightly worried about this cook – brisket is generally regarded as tough to get right, brisket flat by itself has little fat running through it so can dry out during the long cook and judging “done-ness” is frustratingly vague and reliant on feel through gloves or towel (which offends this scientist). At several points during the cook that this was supposed to be a relaxing way to spend a day off…

All that said, I was really very happy with how this came out. The bark came out a really good color but still moist, the color of the meat was good (although there wasn’t that much of a smoke ring) and passed the “pull test” (take a slice and gently pull apart. If it breaks with a gentle tug, then it’s about right)  and was really moist and juicy. There was quite a lot of bite and heat from the rub, both from the black and chili peppers (I might tweak the amount of chili down a touch or add a little more sugar to balance out the black pepper).

Minor negatives were that the trimming of the fat cap on the top was a little uneven with it being a little thick in some places (although the fat was soft, tasty and well rendered but I don’t like a lot of fat on anything) and down to the meat in others and the bark was a little soft. I could probably have left it a little longer on before wrapping to set the bark better (at the risk of it coming out even blacker and more meteoritic looking), spritzed less (or not at all, although I normally get too-hard bark on things like Pulled Pork/Pork Butt cooks which is why I was spritzing this time) or put less liquid in the ‘Texas Crutch’ foil wrapping.

Overall though I was very pleased with how it came out. I think this may be only the second or third brisket cook (I’ve done a whole packer brisket which is a lot of work and a very long cook and a challenge to fit in a Weber kettle) and I think I did an brisket point early on so I certainly don’t claim to be anywhere near accomplished at this yet.

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