(upbeat music) - [Aaron] So I'm putting
the brisket on right now. We've got a fire box on
this side, cook chamber, smoke stack. This is a real tiny smoker
so the way I'm putting this one on is I've got
the fat on the top side. There are two types of
people in this world. One is fat side up, the
other half is fat side down. I like it fat side up. I always put the point towards the fire because it's got more
fat, it's got a little bit more insulation right there. So the fire is going to come up here, it's going to come
across here, underneath, on top, swirl around,
do all kinds of stuff then go out the smoke stack. I've got the flat, it's
by the smoke stack. There's going to be a
high concentrated heat right here so I'm going
to have to be really careful not to burn that. One thing there's a big fire
and it's a small cook chamber. I'm going to put a water pan in here. That's going to keep a
lot of moisture in the cooking chamber, it's
going to help it not burn quite so easily. We've got fat on top,
point towards the fire, flat towards the smoke
stack, water pan in there to keep it moist. Shut the lid and watch
it fire for a long time. (upbeat music) So how long is a long time? Well long enough to drink a beer. Long enough to need a koozie for it too. (upbeat music) And talk about brisket. A good rule of thumb to go by for how long a brisket is going to
cook is generally about an hour to an hour and
15 minutes per pound. For this brisket, I
always kind of calculate about 12 hours. If I'm going to serve
it at 5:00 PM, I'm going to start it at 5:00 AM. The smoker I'm using for
this one is really, really small in comparison to
what I normally cook on. I'm going to try to keep it
pretty low, about 250 degrees. I'm going to keep it really, really steady and I'm really going to watch the fires and make sure that they stay clean. If you were cooking a lot
of brisket or a lot of meat on a big cooker, it's
going to take longer. The more meat you cook, it
takes longer, there's no way around it. There's a little term people
throw around, it's called if you're looking, you
ain't cooking and that's very much true. If the lid's open, you're losing
heat, you're losing smoke. It's going to take a certain
amount of time to recover that heat, and that really
gets people in trouble a lot of times. When they're getting impatient
and meat's not cooking on time, dinner's about to
get served, people are showing up to the house and
it's just not ready yet. You keep on checking it,
you keep on checking it, but the truth is you're just
shooting yourself in the foot. At the end of the day,
it's going to take as long as it's going to take
and you can't rush it. Good barbecue just takes a while
and just got to be patient. That being said, there's a
balance between spritzing and mopping, and actually
opening up the lid. If you've got to check it,
do it as little as possible, and when the brisket starts
looking a little bit dry on the surface, you can
hit it with a squirt bottle and you can mop it or whatever. But you really want to try
to avoid opening up the lid really, really often. The biggest key to having
a good brisket, or a good rack of ribs, or a good
chicken, or good anything you're cooking on a
barbecue is fire management. The last thing you want to
do is have fluctuating fire. You don't want it to get
too hot, you don't want it to go low, it's going to
add a lot of cook time. I guarantee that if you keep
a good, steady temperature it's going to cook way
faster and more consistently across the board. One of the things to fire
management, you don't want a dirty fire, when you burn
a dirty fire that means that you're choking off
the oxygen supply to it and it's going to create
a lot of creosote. It's going to get bitter,
it's going to be over-smoked. If you look at your smoke
stack and you see that it's just pouring out
just gross looking smoke, you need to open it up,
you need to maybe think about what kind of wood you're using. Different woods burn differently. You don't want to use
green wood necessarily for certain types, you don't
want to use overly cured wood for certain types. You really want to be
able to look a the smoke stack and see clean heat coming out of it, not a lot of smoke,
especially with an offset cooker too, when you
shut off the air supply, you're shutting off the
air flow to the cooker and you need a certain
balance of radiant heat versus convective heat and
all that kind of stuff. That really comes into your
cooker and just knowing how well it cooks, knowing
where the hot spots are, knowing how to manage your
fire and all that stuff. So that's a lot of experience
that will eventually go into that. But those are some pretty
good guidelines to go by. There's a lot of different
ways to retain moisture in a brisket or anything
else you're cooking. One way that I really like
is to have a water pan in there, I always keep
a water pan unless the humidity is really high,
and sometimes it gets like that here in Texas. But elsewhere it may not,
always keep a water pan. Other ways are spritzing,
mopping are the two main ones. Spritzing generally means
that you've got some type of thin liquid in a squirt
bottle, like a little squirty spray bottle, I like that. It could be water, it
could be apple juice, you could put hot sauce
in there, you could do apple cider vinegar, white vinegar. Anything you want, the world is yours. A lot of people think
it adds a lot of flavor. I use it more to keep meat
moist and to keep stuff from burning. Another method is mopping
and that essentially is just some type of liquid,
it could have onions, garlic, oil, butter, all kinds of stuff. It literally means a mop. You've got a pot, it's
staying hot, you stick a mop in there and you
mop the top of the meat. I don't like to do it, I think it's messy, you've got to clean a
pot, you've got to clean a mop, and it just makes
a huge mess in the cooker. I'm not really cooking
that kind of barbecue so it's not my thing. So to wrap or not to wrap? A lot of people claim to wrap briskets, a lot of people claim
to not wrap briskets. I really try not to wrap but
sometimes you just have to. What that accomplishes
is it retains moisture, it's going to help it
cook a little bit faster. If your meat is getting
a little too smoky, you're going to want to wrap it or if it's also getting too dark
and certain woods tend to get dark a lot faster than other woods. So you could either
burn a really clean fire and not wrap it, you
could use butcher paper, or you could use foil. Here in Texas using foil
is called a Texas crutch. I don't like to use it
but it's going to retain a lot of moisture in there,
it's going to steam itself, and you could really cook a lot faster. If you were getting in
trouble and maybe your brisket wasn't going to get done
on time, you could wrap it in foil and really
accelerate the cook time. It really comes down to
taste, if you want it smoky, if you want it dark, if you want it moist. It's kind of a trial and
error kind of balance. So if you think to wrap, go
for it and see what happens. (upbeat music) Another thing to be mindful
of is a little thing called the stall and that
really messes up a lot of people that are trying to cook brisket. But if you know it's
coming, it's really not that big of a deal. The hotter you're cooking,
the less it's going to affect you, the lower
you're cooking, the more it's going to take to get passed that hump. The brisket is going to
be cooking, it's going to be going up, and when
it hits about 160 to 170 it's going to stop, and that's
where the stall happens. It's tightening up, it's
squeezing out the moisture. Along with that moisture
is going the heat. That's the stall and then
it's going to keep going up and you've got to think of
it kind of like a train. It builds up so much
momentum, depends on how hot you're cooking and how
quickly it's cooking. But if you're going hot
enough and fast enough, if your fires are steady,
it's going to be like a train, it's going to
have momentum, it's going to hit the stall, and
it's going to plow right through it and keep going. That's how I like to think of it. That being said, when
the stall has to happen, it's going to be a while before it's done. Don't pull it off yet, it may look pretty, but it's not ready.
Good Guy Aaron Franklin: Makes amazing BBQ. Teaches you how to do it.