brisket mishap

[netspyder]

no pics - apologies to those folks that like to drool on their keyboards. this isn't really a post of what not to do - but i'll have some gems along the way.

anyhoo - i cooked a brisket yesterday... 18.8lbs before trimming. trimmed maybe 3 lbs off total between the deckle fat, silverskin, and extra from the flat. started for the first 8 or so hours at 225F, then bumped it to 250 to push through the stall. forgot to pull my jar of tallow out of the fridge, so that was pretty solid when i went to wrap. i always add smoked rendered tallow when wrapping - tip i picked up from mad scientists bbq, and it usually turns out amazing. make my own from trimmings from the brisket usually, but i opted to freeze the trimmings this time around since i still have a jar and a half in the fridge from the last one. noticed pooling in the middle of the flat at maybe the 6 hr mark and stuck a piece of wood under the middle there to help it drain. once wrapped, bumped the temp up to 275 (or so) to finish it off. overall, the fastest brisket cook i've ever done - 8am to 1am - 17 hours. i attribute that to remembering to keep my water pan full during the stall. this is where i think it all went a little sideways. once it hit the 'done' temp (i pull at 195 most times, because it i wait till 203, it falls apart after a cooler rest), and dropped it in a 9x13 pan. well, it didn't all fit and the flat ended up kinda resting on the one end. all of my precious tallow and other juices leaked out of my wrap and into the bottom of the pan(i found out when i pulled it to rest). popped it in the oven at its lowest setting (170) and went to bed. fast forward to 11am when my parents got here, and pulled it and set it on the counter to rest a bit before slicing.

smoke ring was perfect. bark was nice n crispy. flat was dry. good flavor, but very dry. point was ... on ... point, so to speak. so, maybe not a complete failure, but i'm really my own worst critic. not sure if it was because of the oven rest for 10 hours, or just that it wasn't sitting flat in the pan and all of the fat ran out into the bottom of the pan.

 

[SmokinEdge]

smoke ring was perfect. bark was nice n crispy. flat was dry. good flavor, but very dry. point was ... on ... point, so to speak. so, maybe not a complete failure, but i'm really my own worst critic. not sure if it was because of the oven rest for 10 hours, or just that it wasn't sitting flat in the pan and all of the fat ran out into the bottom of the pan.

Could be over cooked, but most likely not cooked enough. Cooking to temp is tricky. In the rest, you shouldn’t be trying to finish the cook on brisket, as in the expected rise of 5 or so degrees.
Once the brisket is probe tender, no temp needed, then rest the meat on the counter unwrapped until temp falls to about 180-ish. Then wrap and hold. But the key here is to initially get the brisket done in the first place. Temps from 195- 210 is the playground. So probing for tender first is key, and always in the flat, not the point.

 

[netspyder]

Could be over cooked, but most likely not cooked enough. Cooking to temp is tricky. In the rest, you shouldn’t be trying to finish the cook on brisket, as in the expected rise of 5 or so degrees.
Once the brisket is probe tender, no temp needed, then rest the meat on the counter unwrapped until temp falls to about 180-ish. Then wrap and hold. But the key here is to initially get the brisket done in the first place. Temps from 195- 210 is the playground. So probing for tender first is key, and always in the flat, not the point.

it was probing tender all around and floppy when i pulled it off the pit. guess i should've let it rest a bit before putting it in to hold. overcooked usually means it starts falling apart - the one time i let it get up to 205 then dropped it in the cooler to rest it literally came apart when i unwrapped it. next time i'll try letting it cool a bit after pulling it.

 

[gmc2003]

I don't worry too much about the tip of the flat. That part usually gets made into a hash anyways.

 

[netspyder]

i now know what i did wrong with this - because i almost did the same thing again yesterday. bought these briskets in a 'case' from sam's. supposed to be prime but i'm skeptical. the layer of fat between the point and the flat is nearly 1.5" thick, and my probe was in the fat instead of the flat. the flat was so thin when i probed for doneness that all i hit was fat. so, i wrapped too early and pulled too early. yesterday i caught my mistake because my probe was reading 170* after only 8 hours on a 20lb brisket, and i'm like "there's no way that's ready to wrap" and sure enough - the bark was set but the fat wasn't rendered, and plunged my probe in a little farther and it started reading 151*. will never buy the case of prime briskets from sams again.

 

[LoydB]

I’ve been cooking briskets for 30+ years and each one is an adventure and learning experience. I wish it was as easy as pulled pork….