I was doing laundry the Sunday after St. Patrick’s day, and my phone flopped out of my shirt pocket and ate shit on the ground causing the screen to pretty much explode into a million pieces – it was pretty astounding, but I use my iPhone to take all the pictures for this blog. So with it not functioning, I had to take a little hiatus from this blog, but I’m back, and I’ve got a good one for you!

Anyone who has investigated great BBQ knows that when it comes to brisket, Texas puts out a superior product. Bark-laden, jiggly, meat candy that puts Pringles to shame when it comes to shit that you can’t stop eating once you start. If you have an interest in attempting a Central Texas style brisket on your own, I strongly suggest watching the ‘BBQ with Franklin’ Brisket videos on YouTube: (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VmTzdMHu5KU) He doesn’t give you ALL the tricks, and he promotes cooking at 250, which is higher than some of the Grill/Smoke forums suggest, but the guy is a master – he will certainly give you some great insight!

Anyways, last week I pulled a brisket that I had smuggled home from Texas out of the freezer to thaw for a Saturday cook. (Smuggled from Texas? Yeah – because the shit is under $2.00 a pound down there vs $5.99 a pound on sale up here in Buffalo, NY. Not to mention, you can’t find ‘Packer Cut’ briskets up here, you can only find 3-4lb ‘Flats’ – the heck am I supposed to do with that WEGMANS? the #1 supermarket in the US? Pssshhhh.)

Look at that thing – doesn’t even fit on a full sized cookie tray! (seriously Wegmans.. look at that. call me when you start carrying them, and start charging a reasonable price.) Look at the price on this thing:

That’s a 12 pound brisket – 3x the biggest brisket I can get up here – for $24…  oh my lord – and the Vacuum pack job was good enough that this thing was able to survive in my freezer for almost a year past it’s sell-by date. I was expecting this thing to smell like farts when I opened it as some vacuum packed meat will occasionally smell like – nothing but delicious red meat.

So – after trimming this packer cut (via the advice of Aaron Franklin) it was time to drop a rub on this thing. I also looked to Franklin for this move as well, because I have personally consumed a heavy handed half pound of his brisket in one sitting, and I wanted to get as close to that experience as possible with my results. So a 50/50 blend of Salt and Pepper was my move.

I didn’t have coarse ground pepper, so I had to hand-crank all of the pepper in my pepper-mill. That was 1.5 loads of my pepper mill to cover this thing, and my entire forearm’s ability for the day. As I was seasoning this thing, I kept hemming and hawing over the fact that I only had basic no-name brand charcoal briquettes to cook with. If I truly wanted to go Central Texas style – I needed some oak. You drive past these BBQ places – especially in Lockhart TX and you see cords upon cords of wood just chilling outside – exposed to the elements. I decided to leave the brisket on the counter and run to home depot for a bag of ‘Royal Oak’ lump charcoal. That was the closest I was going to get. I grabbed some alder and hickory chips too because whatever.. I’ll use it.

I got home, and got the fire rolling. It was about 9:30am when the meat finally hit the smoker. According to popular theory – if I kept the fire at a consistent temp of 225, for 1.25 hours per pound, my 12lb brisket should have been done in roughly 15 hours. Fire maintenance is easy with a Traeger or some other computer controlled or fine-tuneable apparatus, but with a charcoal fire, anything can happen, and usually does.  I was scared as hell to let my fire go above 250 so it fell to 200 more times than I care to admit. There was even one time where the fire basically went out, and had gone under 150, but the drinking was good, and the day was pretty fun!

Here’s the first picture I took with my new phone:

That was about 3 hours in – It was a quick shot just to brag to my brother with.

9:30pm hit (12 hour mark) , and I was getting into some good drinking at the time – 10:00 hit, and I decided to go take another pic:

It was starting to look awesome, and I was getting really excited! Rich mahogany color!

11:30 hit, and I decided to take a temp reading: yikes – 160! the dreaded Stall Plateau temp! For those unaware of what that is, a brisket will slowly go up in temp until it hits about 160, then stall out and not rise in temp for as much as 2 hours!! This stage is the most frustrating, and can easily discourage a noob (like myself) into pulling it off or cranking the heat up and ruining all the hard work up until that point. I was trying to pull this thing off at 185, wrap, and tuck it in an insulated cooler to stay warm. Also, at this point in the evening, half a bottle of Jim Beam was sitting in my tummy and the concept of seeing this thing to the end started to become an uncertainty, but I toughed it out.

1:30 hit, and I was getting sleepy, and the brisket was only at 170. I needed to sleep, so I decided to throw a hail mary-  I pulled the meat off the smoker and brought it in the house –

It looked awesome! I wanted to taste it, but I knew it was 10 degrees away from perfection so I restrained myself. I decided to go with the Texas Crutch – a triple wrap of aluminum foil, and into the oven at 200. I went to bed, and set an alarm for 3 hours hoping that everything would work out fine. At 3 hours I actually managed to wake up, and I just shut the oven off, let’s face it, I was winging it at this point.  I went back to bed, setting another timer for 3 hours. I got up and turned the oven back on to 190. The thought was that I could get the brisket back up to temp by the time our Sunday Brunch guests arrived. As our friends arrived, we started putting things out for consumption – I crossed my fingers and pulled out the brisket –

TEXT BOOK. Color and jiggle – nothing was falling apart like it had been over-cooked – it was soaking wet it looked so great!  But how did it look on the inside – you can’t judge this book by its cover, right?

I did it – I had nailed Texas style brisket in a major way – I could not believe it.

Here’s a video of the action:

The forums are great, the Facebook ‘I love grilling meat VIP’ group is the best, but it’s my family and their proximity to great Texas brisket that really drove me to knock this thing out of the park (with some luck-lol). Like they say in Hockey, it wasn’t a clean goal, but a goal is a goal – this was a victory that made my stomach happy – and it would have made my family proud – ! I DID IIIIIT!