I am now the owner of a pellet grill! I plan to break it in by smoking my first-ever homemade brisket (my favorite among smoked meats). I know nothing about butchery, but I’m to understand that the brisket is a unique muscle and that there’s one per animal, yes? Do I need to call my butcher shop and order one in advance? Or are they likely to appear on the shelves, packaged and ready for sale?
The brisket is essentially one of the cow’s pectoral muscles. So there are two per cow.
Around here, they’re just in the meat case in the cryovac bags. Some groceries have multiple variants- full packer brisket, trimmed, point, flat, etc…
I will caution you though; pellet grills/smokers don’t seem to get very smoky relative to a stick burner or charcoal smoker, so if you’re looking for a more Central Texas style of barbecue with heavy smoke, a pellet grill isn’t going to get there.
Yes.
Sometimes my local Kroger carries whole briskets, cryovac-ed as @bump describes, but otherwise you might want to try a butcher.
Briskets can come whole, which means a ‘flat’ and a ‘point’ cut together, or you can just buy a flat. A whole brisket is huge, and it’s difficult to cook the whole thing properly since the point is thicker than the flat. So you might want to start out just cooking a flat.
The key to BBQed brisket is getting it to an internal temp of around 200F so that the collagen renders and it’s fall-apart tender, but don’t overcook it and dry it out. It’s more unforgiving than pork shoulder that way.
I started a thread early this past Summer and got a ton of great advice about how to up my brisket game…here it is if it helps:
Costco has very good briskets, and they’re not crazy expensive. I got a whole brisket there last month, and have gotten flats by themselves there. I would start with a flat (there’s a ton of trimming and butchering involved when you get a whole because there’s a ton of fat between the 2 muscles that won’t render, so let’s ease our way in here, okay?). I smoked the point and flat separately both because it was too unwieldy in my vertical pellet smoker and I wanted a little more control over the temps.
I would recommend reading through AmazingRibs.com’s brisket recipe, there’s a ton of good information there. The most important thing I’ve learned is that the rest is one of the most important parts of the process. I wrap mine (foil or butcher paper) once it hits the stall at around 160°, and then once it hits 204°, I pull it out, wrap it in a big bath/beach towel, and put it in a cooler for 2-3 hours. I got much better results when I had planned on being able to rest it that long.
My BIL has been smoking various meats for the past 5 years. Your grill looks like his first. He upgraded after the first year, then made another huge upgrade last year.
Hope you enjoy smoking as much as he has!
Which part of the country are you in? For example, if you are in Texas, whole briskets are easily available, Kroger just had choice whole briskets for $1.99/lb a couple weekends ago. I picked up two, one to cook right away, the other to age until Thanksgiving in the refrigerator.
I know availability varies across the country. My brother, in the Wash DC area, has a harder time whole briskets. It doesn’t sound like they stock many there at all, instead they are already cut as flats or points.
And I don’t recall even seeing whole, flats or points while I was in Australia several years ago now.
Let us know how the brisket cooking goes!
The main mistake people make is to not keep on going through the stall because they think it must be done, since the temperature has leveled out around 160, and stayed there.
If you take it off then, it’ll be tough. What’s actually happening is that enough evaporative cooling is taking place that the meat temp doesn’t rise. So you have to keep going- eventually that water loss will slow and the temp will go back up. You can accelerate it by wrapping the brisket in something- butcher paper, foil, etc… and basically stop the evaporation and keep it going.
Once the brisket’s at an internal temp of 203-ish, you’re ready to go. You can keep it at temp longer than that, but it’s not strictly necessary for a tender brisket.
I’m in rural southeastern Missouri, about 100 miles from St. Louis. There are lots of good local butchers around here (although any one of them is a 30-minute drive at a minimum), and also lots of organic-ish cattle farming. Which means I can basically get humanely-raised, farm-to-table meat with a bit of investment of time.
Around here, most of the time, Costco doesn’t just have very good briskets, they have prime briskets at a exceptionally nice price.
Correct. I switched to a pellet grill last year and find for things like brisket, I supplement the smoke with a tray or tube filled with pellets sitting inside the grill. Something like this or this.
Last but not least, watch some of Aaron Franklin’s videos on brisket. My favorite is this one where he shows how to trim them prior to cooking.
Even then (I have both of those pellet gizmos) it’s barely adequate. I ended up getting a Weber Smokey Mountain for brisket, and reserve the pellet smoker for things like chicken, turkey, jerky, and the occasional pork butt, even if they do come off the WSM better.
In that case, I’d reach out to my favorite butcher and see if they can custom size one for you. You want to get one the right size for your grill, but also one you can finish in the time period you have to cook. Plan on about 1/hr per lb for your cooking time.
One thing I found with my first grill was that my eyes were bigger than my grilling space. I picked up a couple of huge (16-18 lb) whole briskets, prepped them, then found I could only fit one at a time in the smoker I had at the time. Plus, of course, they took forever! That first cook went damn near three days!
Now I look for briskets in the 12lb range and after I trim all the heavy fat off of them, they are done in about 10 hours or so with a target temp of 200-203 (I’ve tried the pull them earlier and let them rest to finish but didn’t have luck with that. Now it’s about 6hrs on the smoker, wrap in foil, and finish in the oven.)
REPORT: Made it yesterday. It was an unqualified disaster.
The meat was tasty, but it was overdone AF. Fortunately, it was only two pounds (a very nice butcher cut it for me), so I’m not out a great deal of money.
I think I was bedeviled by mechanical failures. Long story short, the grill didn’t consistently produce the delightful billows of smoke that I expected for 10 hours. Also, per the instructions in my grill handbook’s recipe section, I cooked it to an internal temperature of 190F. When I read that I thought, “Wow, that’s really high for beef, but OK.” That indeed was really high for beef.
When you say it was overdone, was it dried out or just chewy?
I normally smoke a full packer brisket, not a smaller cut, but I normally don’t think it’s finished until it hits 210. At that time, the connective tissue starts to dissolve and makes for wonderful brisket.
Both.
FWIW Mrs. H loved it. But she likes her meat so done you could snap it in half.
So a couple of issues here:
- A 2 lb piece of meat is not well suited for a long smoke like this. They tend to dry out.
- This is not a steak, it’s a brisket. Ignore the 135 degree medium-rare, and 190 is actually not hot enough. The collagen renders at about 200 degrees, the sweet spot for a brisket is just over that at about 204 but you really need to go by the jiggle. The handle of a wooden spoon should push easily into the meat as the fibers separate.
Did the butcher know you were going to smoke it, rather than roast it in your oven? The culprit here is a) it was too small and dried out far too quickly (the butcher likely trimmed too much fat off, and probably gave you just a portion of the flat) and b) it didn’t get hot enough.
Now, there likely may not have been enough fat and collagen to melt off at the proper 204° if you had gotten that hot.
Next time, avoid the “I’m new at this - I’ll start with something small” trap. You’re adding an unpredictable variable into the equation when it comes to following a recipe. If you’re following AmazingRibs.com’s recipe, or Jeremy Yoder’s YouTube videos, or Aaron Franklin’s videos (he’s arguably the absolute best in the business) - you can’t make major changes to the recipe. A flat is at least 6 lbs - I don’t know what you got, but that butcher set you up.
As said above, that’s not a lot to smoke at once. If you’re just doing the point, you could be find. With the flat, I’ve had very uneven results doing a flat-only. I only smoke full packers these days, but that’s a LOT of food, so it’s always for parties.
You don’t need billows of smoke for 10 hours. In fact, you don’t generally want any smoke that would be considered billowing, especially in a fairly enclosed environment. (In more open environments, you can get away with it). Good smoking smoke is thin, bluish, whispy smoke. Also – depending on which source you trust – your smoke flavor is developed and in the meat as much as it can be in about 2-4 hours. Some people even only smoke for that amount of time and finish in the oven.
190F is nowhere near high for barbecue. When you make barbecue, you are cooking the meat way past what is traditionally well-done because you are using a piece of meat with a lot of connective tissue that breaks down to form gelatin, which is what gives your meat that soft, juicy, unctuous mouthfeel even though the meat itself is technically well done. Typical ending temperatures for barbecue are anywhere from 195-210. I personally do not pay attention closely to temps, as finishing temps feel to me to differ from brisket to brisket or shoulder to shoulder. When I have checked, for brisket, it seems to be done for me at around 200-205 most often.
I don’t usually like to foil or butcher wrap my barbecue, but with brisket, I find it works fantastically and produces more reliable and repeatable results. Google up “Texas crutch” as this post will be too long if I explain everything.
Also, make sure your brisket is not trimmed all the way to the meat. There needs to still be fat on it. Some people trim everything down to about 1/8 inch of fat – I like a bit more than that – closer to a 1/2 inch, maybe more in parts, and I’ve seen recent videos extolling completely not trimming the fat. I would definitely err on too much fat rather than not enough. And, if you decide to do the foil/butcher paper method in your cook, the melting fat lubricates your meat in a lovely way. Some cooks add beef tallow before wrapping, but if you’re using a fairly untrimmed cut of brisket, you pretty much have it naturally right there.
Everything I’ve ever read says the rendering is at around 160F-180F, hence the “stall.” That said, it doesn’t feel fully rendered to me until you reach that 195-205F point I mentioned above. But, yeah, don’t go by temp so much as cues like “jiggle” and a fork (or similar) test.
Also, wrap and rest your meat after taking it off the smoker. I will usually wrap it in foil, blankets, and put it in a Coleman cooler for about an hour (when doing a full packer) to rest.
Good luck, and the first few smokes will be highly variable as you are learning. Brisket is notoriously a PITA to get consistent. I wouldn’t even want to try to do a 2lb flat as barbecue.
If you want to try something much more forgiving, do a bone-in Boston butt.
Rendering starts at around this temperature, but it’s not the cause of the stall - water evaporation is.
Dammit. I knew I should have looked that up because that’s something I feel I’ve learned before.
There’s a ton of things happening to the meat in that heat range. I’m amazed they were able to narrow it down to just one.