Super Bowl Brisket

So this is the ridiculously enormous piece of meat that I prepared for myself and some friends to celebrate America's favorite holiday, the Super Bowl. This is a 16.62 lb beef brisket. The chef's knife – included for scale – has a blade that is eight inches long and is about a foot in total, which means the brisket was about two feet wide. I trimmed off a fair amount of fat and it shrinks around 30%, but it is still a lot of meat. Five large dudes and one average sized finished about half of it, so with a few side dishes one of these could probably feed around 12-15 people.

There are many ways to cook a brisket, but one of my favorite techniques for cooking anything is smoking. Something unbelievable happens when you put a large chunk of meat in a heated box filled with wood smoke for a few hours (actually more like 16 in this case). The smoke flavor that penetrates the meat when you cook with wood is incomparable. That being said, you can still make a delicious version of this in the oven.

As you can see from the photo, the entire top of the roast is a thick layer of fat. A significant amount of that needs to be trimmed off, but an 1/8 of an inch left on is still desirable because the flesh itself is very lean and has little marbling. For the most part, you should be able to visually see how thick the layer of fat is, but when that isn't the case I usually try to take off more. It won't be a tremendous problem if you trim down to the meat in small patches.

Here is the trimmed brisket with the fat that I removed. Although it's hard to see on the actual roast, you can see from the pile of fat above the brisket that it was quite a bit. I'm not sure why the color looks weird on some of the trimmed fat. It looked completely normal in person, so maybe something weird happened with the color. PSA: save that fat. You can either render it and cook with delicious beef fat, or save it as is and grind it if you make your own ground beef.

As I mentioned earlier, this whole piece was about two feet wide. That presents a problem for me because my smoker is only slightly wider than a foot. Thankfully brisket is actually two pieces of meat usually referred to as the flat and the point. The flat runs the entire length of the brisket whereas the point is only about a foot long and ends near the middle. I cut it pretty much right down the middle. You can tell where the point ends because that section is much thicker than the part that has only the flat. The issue with this method is that the two halves are going to cook differently. The half with both flat and point is considerably larger and takes longer to cook.

Brisket ingredients:
1 whole packer brisket
4 tbsp kosher salt
1 entire batch brisket rub (recipe follows)

Brisket rub:
2 tbsp brown sugar
2 tbsp garlic powder
2 tbsp smoked paprika
2 tbsp ancho chile powder
2 tbsp fresh ground black pepper
1 tbsp chipotle powder

I put all four tablespoons of salt on the brisket, but I always apply more to the meat than the fat cap. The salt isn't going to absorb into the fat as well as it will into the meat. I also put the entire batch of rub on there even though it sounds like a lot. I don't just sprinkle the rub onto the meat I actually rub it in because it helps it stick to the brisket rather than just falling off when you lift it or turn it over. Ideally at this point the brisket should sit with the salt and spices overnight so the salt can absorb into the flesh.

I didn't have time to let it sit overnight, so here is the roast after the rub was applied right before it went in the smoker. I used hickory because it is my favorite wood when smoking, and I smoked it for 16 hours at 225 degrees. I wanted to smoke it until the internal temperature reached 203 degrees, but unfortunately that was not a possibility. It was 4 PM on Super Bowl Sunday, and I needed to get this brisket to the party I was attending because it was supposed to be the main dish.

This is the section that contained the point and the flat. When I removed it from the smoker it was at 170 degrees, and before I sliced it I allowed it to rest wrapped in aluminum foil in a cooler for 2 hours. 

After it's sliced, it looks and tastes pretty incredible. On the right you can see the separation between the flat and the point. The grain runs in opposite directions, so you can see the point where there are long lines, the flat where there are small sections, and a layer of fat between them. 

I feel the need to write a disclaimer here. Everything I've ever read about brisket has talked about how easy it is to screw up, and how it can be dry and chewy. This is the fifth time I've ever smoked a brisket and every time it's been delicious even though I have never done it like the experts who have far more experience than I do claim it should be done. I don't know if that is a fluke, or if I just have a different idea of what brisket should be than they do. All I can say is that this was unquestionably juicy and tender and it was removed from heat about 30 degrees lower than barbecue experts say it should be. If I'd had the time I certainly would have done it their way, but I am in no way disappointed with this result.

Alright here's another theory: barbecue pitmasters don't want regular folk to know how easy it is to make delicious brisket! If everybody knew, they'd be buying briskets like crazy and the price would go up. Brisket is like the cheapest cut of beef you can get. I paid $2.99/lb for this roast, which is cheaper than ground beef. It's not like this was low quality either. It was USDA Choice and Certified Angus beef. Let's make this a thing. We can call it the Great Brisket Conspiracy of 2014.