(saw buzzing)
(slow slide guitar music)
(upbeat music)
- All righty, so we've had the brisket
on for about six hours now, when you decide to wrap,
could be anywhere between four hours,
it could be eight hours, you could maybe cook
a whole brisket and not wrap it at all.
Either way, you're looking for color,
and you're looking for how quickly the fat's rendering off,
and you're not burning it up.
You don't want it to get crispy around the edges.
You can wrap in paper, you can wrap in foil,
foil is called the Texas Crutch, I don't do it,
but if you were really in a pinch
or if you were trying to cook a brisket
in maybe six, seven, eight hours, you know,
real hot and fast, you might wanna use foil.
If your brisket looks like it's getting really, really dry,
you may wanna try foil, but I'm sporting paper,
because this stuff's got plenty of fat left on it,
and it's cooking along pretty nicely.
Also, the time that you decide to wrap
is gonna have a lot to do with how your fire's burning.
If it's dirty, if it's clean, if you've got green wood,
if you've got cured wood, it's gonna accumulate
to whatever color you have about now.
Some people may wrap about four hours in,
a lot of times I won't wrap at all.
I could finish off a whole brisket in 12, 13 hours,
and not wrap it once until it's finished.
But this one, for this episode, we're gonna wrap it.
It's looking just about right.
We've got the flat right here,
it's kinda got a nice mahogany color.
A lot of times, these things will kind of pull up,
and it will collect moisture right there.
A lot of the fat will cook down,
so you might end up with a light spot right there.
If you do, it's OK.
Got the flat right there, it's looking good,
nice and pliable, not getting crusty.
Got a nice bark forming right here.
So I think it's about time to wrap this thing.
Get my butcher paper situated.
So normally what I do, I put my paper like that,
kinda wrap it up, cup that around the point,
put that paper folded along the...
Whatever the actual angle of the flat is.
Roll it over once, tighten it up, roll it over a second time
and that way you can always grab it under there
without hitting the paper.
Wrap it up, put it back on.
Maintain at 250 degrees until finished.
While we've got our brisket cooking,
we've got a lot of time on our hands.
We're gonna come inside, make a barbecue sauce.
There's two types of people in this world:
One type thinks you need to have barbecue sauce,
while the other side knows without a doubt
that you absolutely do not have to have barbecue sauce
nor should you, on a piece of barbecue, if it's good enough.
I'm on that side, but either way, the sauce is kinda nice.
So we're gonna make one.
We're gonna do a real basic, Texas sauce.
We're gonna start off with a half pound of butter.
Unwrap this little guy, we're gonna get it melting first
in a stock pot that's already hot.
I prefer to use a stainless steel pot
as opposed to aluminum, it's non-reactive,
and there's a lot of acid in the vinegar,
the lemons, the ketchup, all that stuff,
so stick with a stainless steel pot.
While the butter's melting,
we're gonna chop up a little onion here.
All right, so now that we've got
our half pound of butter melted,
I'm gonna throw in half of the yellow onion.
Gonna let it cook down 'til it's nice and translucent.
It's gonna start to smell really nice here.
That's what onions should look like
when they're ready to go.
Now I'm gonna plop in a cup and a half
of low high-fructose corn syrup ketchup.
Gonna do a half cup of apple cider vinegar.
This is two ounces of lightly packed, light brown sugar.
A little more than a teaspoon of kosher salt.
Looks good to me.
Little more than a teaspoon of black pepper.
Little less than a teaspoon of chili powder.
And a little less than a teaspoon of garlic powder.
Half a lemon.
That's a juicy lemon.
Then we're gonna stir that up,
and use the largest whisk we can find.
(whisking)
Let the flavors kind of meld,
really just gonna let it simmer for a wee bit.
Let's go check the fire.
♫ Boil away, boil away, boil away ♫
(laughs)
So we've been cooking this brisket
for a really, really long time.
If you've been watching your fire really closely,
and you haven't fluctuated a whole lot,
it's really gonna tell you right now.
If your fire was up and down,
if it's been dirty, if it's been clean,
if you wrapped early, if you wrapped late,
it's all gonna come to a head right now.
It could mean the difference between a 15-hour cook,
it could mean the difference between a seven-hour cook.
So, it's really up to you and how much
attention you're paying to the fire.
So, we're gonna check this.
I'm ready for brisket.
Hasn't been wrapped a real long time,
I'll kinda, flop it down.
Yes, you may wonder, this brisket would be really hot,
and it's true, I don't really have any nerve endings
in my hands anymore.
So it feels really good, it feels pliable,
much like the ribs would be, much like
any other meat would be, I'm feeling for looseness
to see if the meat feels soft and pliable.
And it does, so we're gonna unwrap it.
Gonna kinda take a look at it.
If it cooked real hot, maybe the paper might stick to it,
and that's OK, but something that you're always
looking for for brisket is to get it where it's
kinda caramely and sticky, and the fat really renders down,
I guess kind of a meat-candyish kind of thing.
It looks moist, gonna kinda feel, it feels really soft.
If you wanted, you could poke at it with a toothpick.
You can overcook a brisket, and you can
severely undercook a brisket,
so there's a pretty small window of where it gets loose
and before it really starts to dry back up.
We're kinda at that time right now.
Roll it over, lookin' at it, looks good.
We're gonna let it rest for about an hour,
or at least until it's cool enough
where you can get your hand under there
and it doesn't burn too badly.
We'll wrap it up.
Just gonna let it hang out for a little bit,
and then we're gonna learn how to slice this guy.
So our brisket's rested for about an hour,
it's ready to cut, I can touch it,
it doesn't burn me delicate little hands.
So we're gonna dig into this thing.
Like we did when we trimmed it,
this is the point that's the fattier half.
This is the flat, it's the lean half.
And the deckel is that fat band that runs through,
so pretty much we're gonna trim up to here,
and if you look at it, you can see where the fat
and the lean part kinda split off as you jiggle it,
and the line is right about there.
We're gonna cut this way against the grain.
The grain on the flat side, being the flat.
It goes kinda like that, it can change a little bit,
but either way, we're gonna start off like this
and we're gonna fan up, and we're gonna
terminate right there.
At that point, we're gonna turn this 90 degrees,
and then we're gonna start cutting
against the grain of the point.
And that's the difference between lean and fatty
or lean and moist or whatever.
A lot of people go through, and they'll take
the back of the knife and they'll scrape off the fat,
and they'll just cut this part off
and they'll throw it away.
That's the best part, I don't know
why you'd wanna get rid of that.
That's the good part, this is where the burn-ins
come from right there, that's like black gold right there.
As usual, I prefer to use a 12-inch slicing knife.
It's kind of a bread knife, it's not scalloped,
it doesn't have the dimples, but it is serrated.
I think this is a great knife, it's flat.
We're gonna start cutting this thing.
I like to cut it and kinda hold it,
and you never wanna scrape off the fat or the bark.
We work really, really hard to render fat,
and we work really, really hard to keep a good bark,
and you don't wanna cut it off, it's the best part.
(knife slicing)
And this, when you're cutting these,
you can always tell, that's what a brisket should look like,
should have a smoke ring like that, lots of black pepper,
that's Central-Texas style, that's how we roll.
The fat should hopefully be rendered off,
it should be kinda sticky, and kinda just caramely,
and a little sugary and kinda sweet.
So that's a really good-looking slice,
it should look moist, too.
It shouldn't be tough.
When you're looking for a brisket,
it shouldn't fall under it's own weight,
but you should be able to pull it delicately.
That's called the pull test.
If you were judging barbecue at a competition,
that's how you would judge it.
We'll finish this up.
Proper thickness for slices is the thickness of a pencil,
about 3/16 to a quarter inch for lean,
I think little pencil, big pencil.
On the fatty slices I like to go
about 3/8 of an inch like a big pencil.
And I still use those on a daily basis.
If you go to a barbecue restaurant, a lot of times
you get really paper thin slices.
That's a great way to fake out a tough brisket,
and sometimes you get really thick slices,
and that's a great way to fake out a brisket
that's overcooked and too tender.
If it can't hold up on a quarter-inch slice, it ain't right.
(knife slicing)
Cutting against the grain.
And sometimes, if you get something that's kinda charry,
and if it is cooked to tenderness,
you may have a slight problem
getting through it a little bit.
One of the big things about a brisket,
is that it's a severely uneven cut,
some of it's fatty, some of it's lean,
some of it's thick, some of it's thin,
and the biggest challenge to cooking a brisket properly
is to make the equal amount of tenderness
all the way through, and that's really, really hard.
I think that's probably what most people struggle with.
Hopefully, this one turned out right,
I think it's pretty close, it feels good.
Don't be surprised if one part's a little more
tender than another part, maybe.
That's one of the things about low and slow.
Keeping it all held together so it'll stay moist
and won't oxidize on the edge of the slices.
This is the fatty half, the point,
we're gonna turn it 90 degrees.
And I'm gonna cut right down the middle,
and this, in my opinion, is the best-looking part
of any brisket right there.
And that's what it looks like when it's fatty,
that's the deckel right there, it's rendered pretty well,
you're never gonna be able to get completely rid of it,
just 'cause it's a huge band of fat,
and if you got rid of that, you probably burned
the rest of it pretty badly.
I feel pretty good about that.
That's more like a ribeye texture,
which is my favorite part, and this is the bottom part
of the flat that extends underneath the point.
So that's still lean, and if you really wanted
some lean brisket, that's where you'd go for it,
'cause that's the leanest part
of the whole brisket right there.
We're gonna get to slicing this
in big-pencil style, about 3/8-inch slices.
And in a perfect world, if you wanted to get crazy,
you could do burn-ins.
And this is where burn-ins would come from, right there.
This is the delicacy of a brisket.
This is the best part, it's got all the
fat marbled in there, it looks like a ribeye,
it's got bark on it.
You could sauce this, you could dust or sauce
the bottom of it, put it back on the cooker.
If I was gonna do burn-ins, I would cut them like that
and have little one-inch squares.
This is the best part of the
whole cow right here, I love it.
Gotta cut enough, I'm gonna leave this part whole.
As soon as you cut brisket or any meat,
it's gonna dry out almost immediately,
so you wanna leave it whole.
If you're gonna travel a long way with it,
you don't wanna cut it early,
you wanna try to leave it whole and cut it
as soon as serving time is possible.
That's why we cut it to order here at the restaurant.
Keep it as fresh as you can, always.
So we've got our lean part cut right here,
got the fatty part cut right here,
got our little burn-in hunk right here, rest of the fatty.
I think it's time to eat.
I'm getting really, really hungry, it's been a while.
Get me a couple little burn-ins in there.
Just an easy slice of fatty right there.
This looks real nice, I've got a good smoke ring,
the fat's rendered out nicely,
got some little Texas-style burn-ins right there,
my favorite part.
You know, if your brisket doesn't turn out
exactly the way you want it to, don't be discouraged.
It takes a lot of practice, it takes a lot of
sitting around watching the fire.
And it's more about trying to do something fun.
You know there's really only one way to make it right
and that's just by doing it more.
Hopefully, if it didn't work out right,
you'll get it really soon,
and it's still gonna be pretty darn good.
You can make chopped beef out of it, it'll be delicious.
Good luck to you.
Oh baby!