Brisket, which is slowly becoming more available in New Zealand, is the group of chest muscles from a beef animal. These muscles do a huge amount of work; they’re in constant movement and support some 60% of the animal’s weight. They are dense with connective tissue and laced with fat, all reasons why in this country the brisket is usually ground up for mince or turned into sausages.
When I was queueing to buy barbecue in Texas, and I did this as often as possible, I would listen to the people around me speak in hushed reverential tones about the brisket they were about to buy. The only quandary they had was how many pounds they could justify purchasing, and this often came down to storage space. Brisket isn’t a food in Texas, it’s a cult.
Blissfully ignorant about the amount of effort that goes into cooking these massive slabs of meat, I asked my butcher to source me some and he happily obliged. Did I mention how big a whole brisket is? When you’re buying it at a barbecue joint you see a portion getting sliced, so I was quite unprepared for the two foot long, 8 kilogram behemoth that was cheerfully delivered to my freezer. The smoker I use is a home built affair made out of a 44-gallon drum and the brisket was so large it covered the whole cooking rack.
It might surprise you to learn that I’m not the world’s most patient man, so it was with a growing sense of despair when I realised recipe after recipe called for cooking times of 10 to 18 hours, there’s even a barbecue place in South Auckland that cooks their brisket for two days, and while I loved the brisket I tried in Texas I wasn’t sure I was quite that invested. The lesson here is to do your research before committing to an improbably large lump of meat.
I had just about resigned myself to the idea of the brisket staying in my freezer forever when I stumbled across a hot and fast recipe; this sounded like it was written just for me. Hot and fast in this context was five hours at 150 degrees C, but that was less than half the cooking time of other recipes and I was totally here for that.
While I was waiting for my smoker to come up to temperature I doused the meat in Worcestershire sauce to give it a peppery hit and to give the rub something to stick to; and that’s half the fun of this barbecuing lark, trying different rubs and finding the ones you like. I used one I’d brought back from Texas but there’s a huge array of local suppliers that I’m just itching to try. With my smoker sitting nicely at 150 degrees, in went the rub covered brisket and on went the lid. The neat thing about smoking food is there’s a long period where you can’t do anything but wait for the meat to take on smoke and develop some bark.
When I lifted the lid two hours later the meat had darkened considerably and started to puff up, so I took it out and wrapped it in tinfoil, pouring two cups of beef stock over the meat before I sealed the tinfoil and placed the package back in the smoker. This is when I inserted the meat probe, I hadn’t been worried about temperatures so far, but reaching an internal temperature of at least 80 degrees to dissolve the collagen and connective tissue is vital or you end up with chewy brisket, and nobody wants that.
Two hours later things started to go horribly awry; the brisket was cooked an hour early and I’d also allowed an hour for it to rest. No vegetables were ready and it was way too early for dinner, I’d almost accepted the indignity of having to serve cold meat for tea when I remembered a trick from the eighteen hour recipes; they rested their brisket in a chilly bin! I warmed a chilly bin up with boiling water and put the brisket in and covered it with a towel for added insulation.
This trick is nothing short of magical, that brisket went in at 90 degrees and came out a good three hours later piping hot at 70 degrees.
I highly recommend unwrapping and carving your brisket outside, it’s gloriously sticky and messy but well worth it for the rich, smoky, succulent and tender treat that follows. The meat stands alone without the need for barbecue sauce, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t add your current favourite. My sons were home for this meal and the leftovers were, as they say, gone by lunchtime.
That may have been the first brisket I ever cooked, but it definitely won’t be my last
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