A brisket for Christmas?
Why not?
Was over at keratosis's house for Christmas dinner and here is how it went.
Picked up a whole packer brisket from the butcher shop in the cryovac packaging and let it wet age for a little over 2 weeks in the fridge. Separated the brisket into the flat and the point, trimmed almost all of the fat off of the point but left 90% of the fat cap on the flat. Rubbed it with salt, pepper, garlic and a few other secret powders.
Here is how it looked ready to go.
keratosis had some wood chips pre-soaked and got the charcoal grill set up with heat on one side with the wood chips smoking away.
Here is the brisket when it first went on the smoker.
Here is 2.5 hours later
Water bath was pre-heated to 155C. I've looked at many recipes that call for lower heat but with the crappy weather I didn't get there until Xmas eve day so we only had about a day of cooking time. 155C seemed best to get all of the fat and collaten broken down.
Cut the flat in half so it would fit (should have done that first), bagged everything up into 3 large ziploc bags using the water submersion method to get the air out, it all just fit in the plastic tub.
Because the tub was so full we rotated the bags around twice just in case. In hindsight that probably wasn't necessary but I got a nice shot of the meat mid cook.
After 26 hours of cooking the meat looked nice and dark just before pulling it out.
The bags had tons of juice in them, I was a bit worried the meat might be kind of dry. We mostly filled a regular saucepan with juice to reduce down to sauce.
Here is the sauce about 1/3 reduced.
Meat was pulled out of the bags and patted dry ready to be finished on the barbeque.
Gas grill was pre-heated in order to get a nice sear on the outside. Put the meat on the grill, went back to check it after about 3-4 minutes and Disaster!!, there was so much juice running out of the meat that the barbeque was on fire with flames about 2-3' high. Managed to get the flames down and salvage the meat but it got a little charred. A couple more minutes in that inferno and it would have been totally ruined.
Meat turned out really nice, of course it was perfectly cooked throughout but was still nice and juicy.
Here is the flat, you can see the nice pink smoke ring on the fat cap. The flat meat took no effort at all to cut through, you could actually just pull it apart with your fork.
Again you can see the nice pink smoke ring. The point was ridiculous, it was dripping in juices and could be easily cut with a fork.
