Question: what do you do if you want brisket but you only have 8 hours?
Our daughter Alyx is back in town visiting from LA for the day. In anticipation of this, I decided to do a brisket. Now, the thing about brisket is it just takes so dang long to do it right. Most of the time at least 12 hours, and for a really big one it's best to start it the night before and smoke it overnight.
Another thing about brisket is that the people in the butcher department at grocery stores think they're doing us a favor when they pre-trim it to remove the fat cap and cut it into pieces. I don't fault them for this, the whole huge hunk of brisket can be a little bit intimidating, they probably don't sell too many of them as-is, some department manager somewhere probably figured out that they can sell more if they trim the fat off and package it attractively in nice manageable portions. Usually the way around this is to buy it from a specialty meat market like
Gartners, or
Ponderosa, or
Sheridan's, but in a hurry I sometimes don't have the time to make a specialty trip to one of those places when there's a
Winco right around the corner. And Winco does seem to always have a great selection of the types of meats that are best for BBQ, they're one of the only meat departments where you can get a whole "picnic roast" pork shoulder. (Most grocery meat departments sell the shoulder in parts, again probably because they can sell more volume and get more money that way.)
Fortunately there are ways to work with a pre-trimmed brisket and still make it delicious. There are certain things we can add to make up for the lack of fat-cap. See, what
should happen is that the fat-cap renders down during the long hours of cooking and keeps the brisket from drying out. If the fat-cap is gone, we must rely on other means. These means involve several strips of bacon, woven together in a mat and placed on top of the brisket. Mmmmm.... bacon... is there nothing it can't do?
So two days ago I bought a medium-sized piece of pre-trimmed brisket. The first thing I did when I got it home was immediately place it in a casserole dish, cover the outside of it with Montreal Steak Seasoning (one of McCormick's best seasoning products IMHO) and pour a liquid marinade mix over it consisting of 3 equal parts of Worcestershire, Balsamic vinegar, and olive oil, blended with a whisk. There it has sat for slightly less than 2 days.
So the original
plan was to get up, start the fire, smoke the thing for most of a day, and have a nice dinner at around 6:30 or 7pm. The Best Laid Plans and all that... turns out we don't get the luxury of having a nice leisurely dinner. Having a grown-up daughter who's only in town for a day means sharing her with all of the friends she grew up with who also haven't seen her in years. So the deadline is now an afternoon late-lunch of brisket.
"but Brisket can't be rushed, you say..."
That's what I thought, too. This is where the panic sets in. Obviously for a full-size brisket it would work better to have started smoking the whole thing last night. Where's the TARDIS when you really need it? Or that little necklace Hermione had in the Harry Potter series that was elemental to the plot in saving Buckbeak, but somehow couldn't be used to go back in time and save Harry's parents or rescue Dumbledore. Maybe Doc Brown is available with his deLorean. I know, I know, he'd probably just lecture me about the dangers of rewriting history and all that. That's the thing about time travel, it's so risky...
So instead of breaking the space-time continuum this time, I'm just going to try to see if I can get this thing to get done a little faster by using some very unorthodox methods and tricks that will probably make the BBQ purist curse my name. The following method will get your brisket done faster, if you absolutely positively can't wait 12 hours.
1: take the casserole dish with the marinating brisket and place it (covered with foil) in a 350-degree oven. Set the timer for 45 minutes.
2: while the brisket is in the oven, go out and set some wood on fire. Let the firebox rage and heat up the BBQ to smoking temperature. I usually start a full cylinder of lump charcoal, and once that is going I pour that into the firebox and add 2 full-sized pieces of oak. Run it with the dampers full open at first until the wood all catches. The smoker will heat up to 450+ right away once the wood is fully burning. At that point I turn the intake damper down to about 1/4 open, add a big piece of cherry wood, and let the fire settle.
Once the smoker temp is cruising along back down at a steady 225, it's ready for the meat. If the timing is right, the meat will have been braising along in the oven for 45 minutes by now. Time to...
3. Take the brisket out of the oven. I use a digital meat thermometer, now would be the time to stick the probe into the thickest part of the meat. It should already be reading 80-90 degrees internally. Set the temp alarm for 180 degrees.
4. One more step in the preparation: Take 6 strips of bacon and weave them together in a mat; lay the mat on top of the brisket to take the place of the fat-cap that the butcher so thoughtlessly removed.
5. Take the bacon-matted beef out to the smoker and place it directly on the grate. Find something to do for the next few hours.
6. Check the wood every so often; you'll probably need to add more wood every few hours or so. If the smoker temp gets too hot or too cold, adjust the damper to regulate the level of air in the firebox so the smoker stays right around 225 to 250.
7. At this point you can make some of my
death-defying BBQ sauce.
8. When the internal beef temp reaches 150 or so, it will hit a plateau. No one knows why this happens, but the temp will rise steadily until it gets to 150-ish, then it will stay there for hours. Keep the BBQ temp steady, don't panic, everything is normal. It will eventually start rising again. After that you'll need to watch it closely because it will rapidly jump up to 165, at which point you're less than an hour away from carving into it.
9. When the meat hits 165 or so, take the (now fully-cooked) bacon off, mop it with some sauce and put it in a "Texas Crutch". That's basically fancy-talk for wrapping the meat in foil for the last hour of cooking. This keeps the meat moist and juicy and helps give it just that little extra added tenderization at the end. It's important to keep the fire going at this point, usually by this time the coals are starting to die down a little bit.
10. This is a good time to get those side dishes started!
11. When the meat's internal temp reaches 180 you have a choice: you can pull it off the heat (keep the foil wrapped around it) and let it sit for 30 minutes before carving, or you can leave it on the heat. I sometimes leave mine on until it reaches 200, it will be well-done inside but won't be dry because it's in the foil.
12. That's it: take it out of the foil and slice it into thin slices across the grain. This meat will be so flavorful it will make you jump up and down. 8-hour brisket won't be as tender as 12-hour brisket, (after all, I canna' defy the laws of physics, Captain!) but it'll be flavorful and juicy. Put the sauce on the table as a garnish, chances are it won't even be needed.
10.
