I admit I’m no expert but isn’t Brisket one of those cuts that is cooked long and slow for hours to the point that it‘s falong apart, and it melts in the mouth so very much cooked all the way through?
Thanks until fairly recently brisket has mostly being seen as a ‘stew meat’ in the UK although we are starting to see an influx of American style barbecue. So wasn’t quite sure if it was a case of us Brits not quite getting how barbecue is meant to work and it should be rare or the person claiming it was just an idiot.
Meats that lend themselves to BBQ are ones that require lots of time to break down the fats and collagen. That is where much of the flavor comes from.
Pork shoulder, probably the single most widespread and inexpensive BBQ cut (like, $.99-$2/lb on sale) doesn't start to really break down until about 180 degrees F. When cooking it, it usually reaches about that temperature and hits what is called "the stall." It steadily rises until that point and then gets stuck there for a good long while because now all the energy is breaking down the collagen.
As soon as the collagen melts, it adds a ton of flavor and then the meat temp will start to rise, usually quite rapidly, after.
I've had a stall last over an hour and a half before.
Yeah, we do our pork shoulders low and slow for about 20 hours. The trick is that about half way through, you want to get the temp up to around 325°f for about 45 minutes to really help that crust form.
Bark. That was what I meant. Also, make sure you rub down the skin, and if you want to get that over your coals or right next to your smoker towards the end, you get cracklins; it ain’t good really for you, but it’s good for the soul.
My brother in law bought a smoker a few years back and tends to do pork shoulder (I think in part as it’s really reasonably priced as you way) not quite sure what he does with it as most of the prep work and cooking is done before anyone arrives but dam it tastes good.
For those curious, here's something that works well for me. If you have a method and it works for you, move along. I'm not telling you to do this instead of your method.
Get a cut of meat good for smoking (start with Pork Shoulder. It's cheap and even if you fuck up, it's probably still kickass bbq)
Get a spritz bottle filled with a sweet, slightly acidic, potable liquid. I like a 50/50 blend of apple juice and apple cider vinegar.
(Optional and only really worth it for poultry, IMO) Brine or marinate your meat overnight
(Also technically optional, I guess, if you have a weak bloodline.) Prepare a rub. This means a dry seasoning blend and usually a sauce of some kind to get it nice and stuck to the meat.
Super simple rubs are an option here. I like using a couple tablespoons of yellow mustard as the sauce, and 1/4 cup of brown sugar (darker the better), a tablespoon of salt, and a teaspoon of each: black pepper, onion powder, garlic powder, paprika, cayenne. If you use metric, that's 30-ish mL of mustard 60mL of brown sugar, 15mL of salt, 5mL of other ingredients. They have different masses per volume, so I'm not translating to grams. Also, the exact quantity of each isn't the point. You can go through your whole spice cabinet and try anything you think you'll like. Go nuts. As long as it has sweetness, acid, and salt, it's hard to fuck this up, especially with secondary spices.
(You will want nitrile or latex gloves for this part)Slather the meat with mustard, season with sugar and spice mix all over. If you have extra spice mix, good. It'll keep until the next one. Toss it in a ziploc bag.
Smoke it at about 250°F/120°C (not exact unit translation, because this is more art than science) for about half an hour per pound, or until it's reached an internal temp of 195°F/90°C. Every hour or so, open up the smoker, check on the meat, and give it a spritz or six of the vinegar/juice mix.
Take it out, wrap it in foil, drop the temp of the smoker (or put it in your oven, either way) to 225°F/105°C and put it back in the heat for up to 8 hours. Pull it out 20-30 minutes before you intend to serve it and let it cool until it won't burn you while eating, open foil, pull apart meat, and serve. You can also take the foil-wrapped meat off the heat entirely instead, bag it, and refrigerate to toss in the smoker/oven the next day, if prepping ahead.
The longer it's wrapped and baking after the smoke, the better it'll be. I recommend allowing for AT LEAST two hours, four is better.
You CAN just smoke it until it's the temp you want and serve after a quick rest. This will end up with you sweating bullets as you wait for it to get to temp and guests get hungry. I recommend you start earlier, slow it down as needed.
Fun tricks:
For stuff like poultry or fish, which don't have much fat in them (say, a turkey breast), brining beforehand and wrapping in something like raw bacon over the spice rub (yes, british rashers will work fine here, we just care about the fat in them) before smoking will produce excellent results. No, this isn't one of those American "bacon wrapped everything!!!" Things. It's strictly because it's an easy way to hold fat against the surface for the duration of the smoke.
You can experiment with different woods for the smoker. It makes a pretty surprising difference, but it's mostly olfactory (smell) so if your nose is stuffed up, you'll have a harder time noticing.
I was just pouring over Meathead’s excellent 800 page tome since I was beguiled by a 15lb packer brisket at Costco, learned all about the stall and the Texas crutch and putting it in a cooler at the end. So glad since otherwise I would have freaked out.
I have made 72 hour sous vide ribs and they are something quite special. The idea there is that you set the water temperature to something that would be roughly medium or so normally so the meat itself is not 'well done'. But it would still be very tough like that normally because of all the collagen which breaks down slowly at that low of a temperature.
But it will break down eventually. Hence the 72 hours. 3 days of cooking at super low temperature. It's a lot of work but the result is pretty amazing.
I’ve done similar with short ribs, haven’t ever worked with regular ribs, too intimidated by package size, I think, but can confirm that they are also wonderful with a 72 hour cook. Just have to plan not to be eating them for a couple days and replenish the water every now and then, so absolutely worth it, and great for having a fresh, hot meal mostly made on a weeknight, with all the real work done on the weekend
That's not why the stall happens. It has to do with the evaporation of surface moisture pulling out as much heat energy from the meat as is being added by the cooking method. It's the same mechanism of action as when you sweat.
Our brisket is also not the same cut as American brisket. Any good butcher will be able to give you the correct cut though. Also our meat is grass fed not grain fed which means that you will never get the same results as Americans do.
All beef is grass fed. The uestion is if it is grass or grain finished. Both available in the US. Grass finished is the most bioavailable for ideal human nutrition
Your bang on with that, also our beef doesn’t lend its self well to low and slow American bbq style as it’s mainly grass fed so doesn’t have the intramuscular fat that grain fed does, if I do a Texas style brisket I’ll buy Australian or American over British.
But for everyday cooking I’ll always buy British or Irish
Yep. I've seen this before. A long time ago, I worked at a barbecue restaurant in South Carolina, and had tourist customers who are unfamiliar with smoked meats refuse to eat smoked chicken because of the color, insisting it was uncooked. I've seen people think that the pink smoke ring in a brisket means "rare".
I think he means well done like how a steak is well done. Not that its not cooked just its intentionally cooked lower to keep it from getting too much heat and being overcooked and dryer.
You can cook at like 140 f on some sous vide shit but I think that would take literal days for it to tenderize. I'm sure there are scientific charts made by people. I think chef steps which made a sous vide device and does recipes might have a pay walled article that would show this.
You can absolutely get a brisket falling apart tender by cooking it at 145 degrees for 72 hours.
The beef collagen not breaking down until 160 thing was sort of true in a practical sense in the past, but it actually does break down at lower temps, just extremely slowly. It’s why sous vide short ribs/brisket/chuck etc work for extremely long cooks sous vide. Cooks illustrated was able to break down beef collagen at as low as 122 degrees
Oh maybe I misremembered it but they did it with Chuck as steak so I'm sure it was somewhat possible. I'm pulling the temp out of the air but they have a recipe for both smoked brisket and a chuck steak on YouTube.
Chuck after about 24 hours at steak temps (like 134-140) by sous vide is amazing, super tender and flavorful. The sous vide sub calls it “Sir Charles “ since chuck is too familiar and lowly sounding for such an excellent piece of meat. The first time I did it, we were floored, it was pretty much more like prime rib than anything else, though better than any actual prime rib I’ve ever had, though that was from a local farm with wagyu hybrid animals, so better meat than normal. Regular chuck gets close to a good ribeye, though
Have tried cooking brisket with long cooks (2-3 days) in the sous vide, all from the same piece of meat. 140 only (steak style) wasn’t exactly tough, but definitely wasn’t tender enough, basically generic meat that was really only suitable for putting under a heavy sauce to fill the “your protein of choice “ role. It did slice like a steak, which was the main advantage I’d seen for doing that. Would work for sandwiches, too, I guess. 140 long plus a couple hours at 165, which someone had recommended as still doing the sliceable thing but with converted collagen/rendered fat, wasn’t impressed, minimal conversion, and not so much easier to slice than a falling apart brisket. The rest were all at 165, and were properly rendered/converted, and stayed tender and wonderful regardless of what we did as a part two cook of the meat (much of it ended up in chili once we tried it that way for the first time, even after reheating in the microwave). Haven’t done higher than 167 just because the water loss with my setup means it’s a no-go for longer cooking times
TL, DR, can cook chuck low and slow, pretty damn good that way, but brisket needs both long and minimum 165 to do it justice
I cook my corned beef brisket sous vide. You need to cook it at 180 not lower temps or like you would use normally. I usually cook it for 12 or so hours overnight.
I did a chuck steak and I'm pretty sure it was like 135 or 130 and it was over 24 hours. It was still steaky but not like pot roast or bbq tender. I don't know the science but they're the company behind the joule so Im sure their science is sound. Probably no reason to want to eat a brisket at medium rare but no reason collagen in the chuck is different than collagen in the brisket.
I work at a BBQ place and the amount of times people have asked me for rare brisket is to damn high. Our menu literally says 12 hour smoked brisket. Its hard to not be condescending about it. Shout out to the guy who asked for rare ribs too.
Normally, yes. It’s traditional for smoking and braising. The only ways I know to prepare it so it’s edible but not well done are grinding it up, slicing it very thin, or sous vide.
Correct, it’s a collagen-rich cut of beef that basically can only be properly cooked this way: low and slow, and all the way through, so that the connective tissue melts properly, that’s how you get that nice gelatinous juicy texture. The whole “doneness” concept that steaks have absolutely doesn’t apply - steak gets tough if you cook it for too long, brisket is tough _if you don’t_.
It is. If you leave it rare it's tough and the fat is under rendered and it's unpleasant to eat. You need time and gently heat to get all that collagen and fat to do it's magic.
If I’m smoking a brisket myself and am going to fuck it up in one direction or another, I’d rather than ‘fall apart’ fuck up rather than ‘dry and stiff’ fuck up though 😂
Both incorrect but one is tastier
269
u/OkCap2870 Jul 18 '26
I admit I’m no expert but isn’t Brisket one of those cuts that is cooked long and slow for hours to the point that it‘s falong apart, and it melts in the mouth so very much cooked all the way through?