The first in the Brisket adventure series…
Oh, well, I’ve just got to my photos where I’ve come across brisket. The first brisket I think I tried to smoke since 2015/2016. It didn’t go well in 2015/2016, and whilst it went better this time around, it certainly what I was going for.
I was going for that really, luscious soft melt-in-the-mouth texture that I’d had from various brisket-vendors at Feastival (a 3 day food festival held at the end of August).
Now again, we have ‘levels’ of bad. This on a scale of 1-10 of “how nice this is” was, it was probably about a 5 or so… it was absolutely perfectly edible, but just wasn’t what I wanted.
Now I knew there were several key points to getting a good brisket by this point.
- Temperature. It needed to hit 92-93 degrees celcius and ideally, stay there for a while. This is the temperature at which point everything starts to ‘melt’ and break down in the meat, giving it that superb texture.
- Time. I knew it needed to have as long as possible. Judging by the timestamps on the pictures, it had about 6 hours or so, probably with an hour or so to rest.
- Humidity. I knew the ‘pit’ had to be as humid as possible to keep the moisture in the meat.
- Smoke. It had to have good smoke.
What I didn’t know at this point, was what cuts of brisket there are, and frankly didn’t even know that I shouldn’t (to get what I wanted) get a rolled brisket. But, that’s what I did.
I knew that didn’t look right, and realised I needed to get it ‘flat’. Easy enough as I’d removed the string to get the marinade over it. I expect the marinade I used was a simple BBQ rub I’d got from the butchers; this was “Pre-Harrisons”. Just like I have “Pre-MEATER” – I have “Pre-Harrisons”. Harrisons is the best butcher in the local area I’ve found, and to top that off, Harrison, Ben and the rest of their team are really super helpful and super friendly.
Anyway…
That’s the start of the cook. I can see the woodchips I used and I want to go back in time and slap myself, but y’know, I didn’t know any better. They’re far too small, and for the smoke I wanted, they’d burn off way too quick. I did however, have a bowl of water which I think I’d mixed in a bit of apple juice and some of the left over marinade.
The next thing to do… was wait.
Another thing I know I did wrong, and that’s because I have photographic evidence – is I kept taking the lid off. I think I was basting it, but that’s a bad idea. All the smoke, moisture/humidity etc that was there just disappears.
So, more waiting, and it eventually looked like this…
And finally…
So as you can see, that looks really firm (and it was). But it wasn’t that dry, and most importantly, it tasted pretty decent. Especially the edge / crispy bits!
If you want to see the “end result” of me learning over the last couple of years, go back to my first post – there’s a sneak peak of a post that’ll be “coming soon” which shows you one of my latest briskets. That one was pretty divine – although it still didn’t have quite as much smoke to it as I wanted, but that one was on a “short” cook (I only had about 8 hours for it – I’d normally try to go for 18 hours or more).
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