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Brisket Smoked Competition Style
Oct 31,2006 00:00
by
naveena
A brisket can be marinated for several days, but in competitions we only have about a half of a day to marinate. Marinating doesn’t penetrate very deeply in a thick piece of meat, so we inject the marinade to even out the flavor. We try to make the brisket taste like beef, preferably, a “prime rib” flavor. Sounds funny, making beef taste like beef, but we feel that most people add flavors to brisket that don’t compliment the beef flavor. The marinade that we inject is an “au jus” sauce consisting mainly of beef stock, Moore’s Marinade, and other spices. One ingredient that may seem strange is the melted bacon grease. Because briskets have such a tendency to dry out, we thought why not add some fat in the injection. Bacon grease was a logical choice because it will also help add flavor to the beef. Here’s the exact recipe: Au Jus Sauce 1 Package of French’s Au Jus Sauce seasoning 1 cup of Moore’s Marinade 1 tablespoon of Texas Pete Hot Sauce 2 cans of beef broth 3 tablespoons of melted bacon grease 1 tablespoon of mesquite liquid smoke Make the French’s Au Jus Sauce according to their directions on the stove, except add the beef broth instead of water. Mix in the rest of the ingredients and simmer for 15 minutes. Lay the brisket fat side up and inject through the fat cap every square inch. You want to insert the needle as far as you can without punching through the other side of the meat. Once the injections are completed, wrap the brisket in plastic wrap and store it on ice in a cooler. At a contest we usually get to allow the brisket to marinate for about 6 to 10 hours before we start cooking. We remove the brisket from the cooler about one hour before smoking. Unwrap the plastic from the brisket and place it on a table. We then apply a liberal coat of HomeBBQ Beef Rub on all surfaces and edges of the brisket. Even the small piece we cut off the flat, which was for checking the grain direction after cooking, gets coated with rub. After the rub, lay a piece of foil over the brisket to keep it covered while it warms up. Our smoker takes about an hour to really heat up evenly so just before rubbing the brisket we will start the fire in the smoker. We cook brisket at 250 deg F. We use an even amount of oak and hickory to smoke brisket. Brisket requires a long smoke and it tends to act like a sponge soaking up smoke. Because of this, we don’t recommend using mesquite to smoke brisket. Some of the best brisket is cooked out West on mesquite, but it is too easy to over smoke the brisket if you don’t have a lot of experience cooking with mesquite. Over smoking any piece of meat will cause it to have a bitter taste. Our smoker has an upper cooking grate and that is where we place the brisket (fat cap up) to start. We put the brisket opposite from the firebox end of the smoker because we want a more consistent temperature. The firebox end of most smokers will get too hot and the temperatures will fluctuate too much when adding fuel to the fire. Another thing we do is to place a disposable metal pan on the grate under the brisket. The pan needs to be large enough to hold the brisket. This pan catches any of the juices that flow from the meat and we will add this to the au jus sauce for more flavor. After the brisket has smoked for four hours, we want to place it fat side down in the pan that has been catching the meat’s juices. We then add just enough au jus sauce in the pan to cover a depth of ¼ of an inch. The au jus should be brought to a simmer before adding to the pan. We now cook the brisket on the lower grate for the duration of the smoke. The juice in the pan will become our mop sauce to keep the brisket moist. The best tool for doing this would be a large turkey baster. We baste the brisket every hour with the au jus sauce until it is done. Brisket cooks in about 1-1.5 hours per pound, but there really isn’t an exact temperature for finished brisket. We try to test the brisket after the temperature reaches 180 deg F. We test for tenderness with a really small meat thermometer probe. We check the meat again at 190 deg and then start checking every half hour. The place to check for tenderness and temperature is in the flat. The point of the brisket will always reach tenderness and temperature before the flat. Some people even separate the point from the flat when it is done. When brisket is done, the probe will slide in very easily. Brisket has to be cooked until it becomes “fork tender”. Cooking brisket to a predetermined temperature every time won’t always yield a tender piece of meat. Every brisket just has to be cooked until it “gives up the ghost”, and becomes tender. Bill Anderson The Chatham Artillery BBQ Team co-author of "Competition BBQ Secrets" http://www.bbq-book.com |