Brisket Experiments - Should you INJECT Your Brisket?

welcome back to another episode of barbecue and bottles and on today's brisket experiment we're going to be injecting one of these briskets with beef broth and the other one we'll just do our traditional central texas preparation method and we're going to see if that makes a difference now i'm mostly interested to see if it makes a difference in how juicy it is the flavor profile a doubt will be any kind of difference in the bark formation or the smoke ring but you never know so those are the dimensions we're to compare these two briskets against so if you're into that kind of thing stick with us now i know these brisket videos are really long so if you want to skip to just the trim the cook the actual final results we've got time stamps over here for different parts of the video if you just want to skip ahead so we've got two full packer briskets here both of these are about 14 15 pounds and when we look at them the reason i think these are great briskets is one a i know the butcher and i know where the meat's coming from and it's sourced from a local farm here in southern ontario but secondly when you actually look at your brisket we've got a thick flat over here the points where all the fat is and then on the flat it's a little bit thinner and sometimes the flats end up being too thin and if you get a flat that's too thin it can burn or by the time the flat's cooked the point still has a ways to go and so getting a brisket that's a little bit more even thickness all the way through that should help with our cook but enough of the jibber jabber here let's just get cutting into these so we'll take a knife and we're using a boning knife here as we always do and you'll just slice an opening in the brisket package like that and that's because you want to keep as much of the void on the inside of the bag as opposed to your cutting board we usually just grab this decal here pull it out perfect now this one wasn't too juicy but you can see here we kept all that juice just down in the bag and that's just a nice little secret to keep it all in the bag no mess no fuss so now we're just gonna get a little paper towel pat this dry flip it over perfect now the first cut i like to make is just along this edge here you can see part of this edge is just browned up and that's because of the oxidization at the avatar so this side of the steer would have been exposed to the air and that all just oxidized and that's why it's brown so we're going to come down the side here we'll get a little bowl just for all of our trimmings to go into and you can see here like the real difference between the redness here and how brown it is and that's what we're really trying to expose just some of the fresh protein on the inside so don't throw away your trimmings you can use these either to blend in with other chalk as part of making hamburger meat or we've also got a video here where we made beef tallow out of it and that's a great substitute for butter or if you're deep frying it's a great substitute for canola oil i'm gonna flip it over just quickly and we're gonna take off the decal that's this really tough white piece of fat here this is exceptionally hard fat that's not gonna render down over the course of a low and slow cook and you certainly don't want to be cutting into this and serving somebody a slice of brisket that has part of the decal fat in it now we've got a little bit of silver skin and fat here on the back of this brisket so we're just going to get in under that trim some of this off now you don't have to do this perfectly it's backyard barbecue after all this silver skin you know it's not going to make a huge difference but if you've got the time just pull it off pull off this fat now we're going to switch back to the fat cap we're going to want to take off any excess fat here and leave at least a quarter of an inch thick worth of fat and that's just going to help protect the brisket through the cook from the heat source and of course we're gonna try and get off any of these little hanger honors here these flaps of beef they're just gonna end up burning away over the course of a cook now i always remind myself when you're trimming up the fat cap like this that it's great to have cold brisket that's come straight out of the fridge it just makes trimming the fat cap that much easier and the fats a little bit harder makes it a little easier for your knife to actually go through the fat it just helps avoid the knife slipping and you hurting yourself this brisket had a fairly thin fat cap from the outset so i'm not going to do too much trimming off of here i've just cleaned it up a little bit but now again we're gonna round out the edges so we're just gonna take our knife here and this is just gonna help ensure smooth smoke flow around our brisket that we don't end up with any burnt pieces and then i think we're done with this guy all right so we've got our trimmed up brisket we're gonna go ahead trim up our second brisket the same way and then we'll bring you back for the seasoning and the brining of one of these guys so now for the injection we're just using a regular beef broth here we'll get this opened up and we're trying to inject about 15 ounces of beef broth which is about half of this container or about 450 milliliters for those of us who are not american so we're just going to pull this up so we're going to be taking our needle we're going to be injecting it about every inch throughout the whole brisket and we're going to be injecting about half an ounce worth of the beef broth with every squeeze here now you can see as we push in the broth actually fills up the brisket and as a consequence you might want to end up doing this in a in one of those large foil pans that could just prevent some dripping where the beef broth it's inevitably going to come out of the brisket here and a foil pan will just keep it all in one place make less of a mess [Music] so i think we've got enough of the beef broth injected here so now we're going to move over to the seasoning so for the seasoning we're going to keep this real simple we're just going to use coarse ground black pepper so it's going to be two parts coarse gram black pepper to one part kosher salt this is a heavy pepper rub that's a central texas style that's really what we're going for here we want that rich dark black bark and the pepper really helps us accomplish that now you can add other things in here like brown sugar paprika for color but we're again keeping it pretty simple and straightforward here all right take a sip of coffee and now we're going to grab a handful of our rub and just start sprinkling from high up when you sprinkle your rub over your brisket you want to go from high up because as the seasoning actually falls or the rub falls it'll just fall more evenly across the whole brisket i'll do the same thing over here don't worry if you're not getting all of it onto the brisket you'll inevitably get some on the cutting board or the surface that you're seasoning your brisket on flip these over get the other side [Music] all right now let's make sure we get the edges so now let's pat this in and of course to get the edges you can always lift your brisket up get some of that excess that's hit the sides under this flap here we want to make sure that gets seasoned up all right now we'll do the same over here get the sides beauty now that we've got these guys seasoned up we're going to fire up the pellet grill get them on and now for the first part of our cook we're going to be going nice and low and slow so we're going to set it to 225 we've got the grill open we've got some fresh foil down on our grease trap here so we're gonna get these guys on the grill and fat cap down now the reason we're going fat cap down is because the heat source from this pellet grill comes up from the bottom and so we want that fat cap to just protect the actual protein from drying out or just taking too much heat it'll act as a bit of a shield for us so we've got two built-in temp probes here so we're gonna put these into the flat side of the brisket and we're just poking that into the center of the flat we'll do the same with our other brisket perfect now we'll get the lid down here in a second and these guys are ready to cook now when you're planting your brisket cooks you want to be planting for somewhere between an hour to an hour and a half per pound of brisket so these are done really low and slow as we mentioned we've got the grill set to 225 so we're just gonna let these go for 90 minutes before we do our first check on them and then we'll start spritzing them and for those who said pellet smokers don't generate enough smoke just check this out so we're just gonna check and make sure we've got a full hopper pellets here we're pretty good but we could top this up a little bit we've got the cuisinart cherry rum pellets and these are made from real rum barrels so there's a really nice smoky profile to these it has into that rum perfect and this is a 30 pound copper so that'll be loads for this cook so what's great about this grill is you can just connect into the app here and this will let you actually monitor the temps you can see you can see the temps of either of the probes here and you can even set desired temps so they'll be alarms when you hit certain temperature readings so you can set manual temperature here come across we're ultimately going to be looking for a cook at 198 but we'll start monitoring at 195 so we'll do the same for the second brisket [Music] 195 so at 195 we'll start probing to see whether it's probe tender or not and that's how this little app works so you can come in here as time passes you can see how the temperature readings on the probe actually changes relative to your target temp here so it's a pretty cool little feature and just let you see how your cook's been progressing and you can hang out inside and monitor your cook indoors as opposed to just having to be out by your grill so we're just going to check in on the briskets here now you can see we've already started to get a really nice red mahogany color from the smoke on these guys so we've just got a little bit of our spray here and this is a mix of apple cider vinegar and then an equivalent amount of water so one to one ratio diluted apple cider vinegar we're just going to spray these guys down here and this will help ensure that we still have really nice juicy briskets as opposed to drying them out so i'll hit them on that side and then we'll come in from the back as well [Music] so we're 90 minutes in our briskets are at about 135 to 140 internal temp so at this point we're just going to spritz these every 30 to 60 minutes over the rest of this cook until we hit the stall and that's the point in which we'll wrap we're gonna check in on these guys again we're at an internal temp of 145 to 150 right now oh beautiful those guys are looking great look at that bark really nice rich mahogany color now let's spritz so now if you look at both of these you don't see any pooling on the flat sometimes you'll get liquid that will cool on the flat and that'll just make it really tough for the bark to actually get crusty and form that black exterior that we're looking for in these briskets so we're in pretty good shape here on both of these if you do find yourself in a situation where you've got some cooling of the renderings that are coming out of the brisket just crumple up a little bit of tin foil stick it under the flat and that'll just prop it up and let the moisture roll off the brisket and of course delilah's come over because we're cooking brisket no i don't have any brisket for you yet still a few hours to go delilah we're getting ready to wrap these briskets have been at 165 for about the last hour so they've pretty much all the way through their stall at this point so we're gonna get the other one we'll show you how to wrap so this is the brisket that was injected this is the one that wasn't and to be honest at this point i can't tell a ton of difference maybe this one's a little bit plunker but not that big of a deal so we're just going to wrap these up and we're going to pick butcher paper [Music] all right now the reason we're using butcher's paper is it's a little bit more breathable than foil when you're using foil you just get a ton of steam that's really captured in that foil and it's almost like you're braising the brisket over the last bit of the cook so now with this we've got a little bit more of a breathable membrane so that steam can escape so now we're going to get these back on the grill so we're just putting the briskets back on the grill here and we're going fat cap side up now we're going to put the temp probes back into the flat and we took these off around 165 so you'll know that you're putting the temporo back in the same place in the flat if it's registering 165 when you put it back in so now we're just gonna let this go probably another three or four hours until we hit a final temp of 195 so while we're smoking these briskets we threw some chicken down on the grill and i want to show you the crust just look at this absolutely incredible these were just down on the smoker skin side down salt pepper garlic and we were just using up a little bit of extra real estate that we had on the grill i just love doing that you know there's they've got some extra space you're going to be burning the pellets anyway why not cook up a few extra things throw them in the fridge you can eat them later in the week just a little tip for you in case you know if you were just doing one brisket you got a ton of extra room here now we're up to 203 so we're gonna check for doneness so we're coming in here and for it to be pro tender you really want no resistance you want this probe just to slip down into the point with very little resistance this is starting to feel much better so i'm gonna give this another two minutes and then we're gonna get it into the cooler let's get this guy into the cooler now just like that now we'll let them rest in there for probably 90 minutes before we carve into them and that's just going to allow the muscle to relax again the moisture to redistribute the juice to redistribute throughout the brisket just so we get that really nice and juicy brisket when we carve into it all right our second brisket's registered 198 here so we're going to check if the points probe tender oh yeah look at that just like butter wow that is really that's perfect okay we're gonna get this into the cooler now just look at that it's got a really nice bend to it got that down in the cooler we've probably got another 60 minutes to go on these briskets the first one was taken off about a half an hour earlier so we'll let these rest again for another 60 minutes and then we'll carve into them all right we've had these briskets resting for 90 minutes now so we're going to pull them out first one here this is the one that we hadn't injected and this is the one that we oh and this is the one that we did inject now i want to show you just how much juice is left over in the bottom of your cooler so that's juice that's just relaxed out of the briskets while they've been sitting there for the last 90 minutes so now we're going to get these bad boys out of their packaging beautiful just pull this out of the butcher's pooper here while you're doing this it's great to have an apron on because i'm telling you these things are so juicy it's going to be next to impossible not to get yourself dirty just look at that guy so the first thing we're going to check out here is just look at how much juice is actually in the butcher's paper here and this one it's a lot drier so i think that's a bit of an indication that this may end up being the juicier brisket i mean looking at the exterior it doesn't look like there's that much difference in terms of the moisture content and if you shake the table here we're getting a good jiggle on that one we're getting a good jiggle on this one as well but this one might be a little bit better of a jiggle you never know but we'll see when we slice into these guys just how things turned out all right so let's get the butcher's paper out of the way just look at that drip and get this butcher's paper out of the way now the first thing we're gonna do i'm just gonna carve about two-thirds up the brisket between the flat and the point we'll just check out that wow [Music] incredibly incredibly moist now we'll do the same on this brisket just compare the two look at that one as well that's no less juicy i'm here to tell you look at that incredible how much renderings coming out of it so we've got the muscle fibers on the flat moving this way so we're going to want to cut against the grain so we're first just going to take off the tip here and we'll cut that into large chunks these are beautiful morsels and we're just gonna slice in [Music] oh look at that [Music] and as we're carving brisket slices off of the flat here we're aiming for slices that are about a pencil width thick a little cheap for the pros here is if you've overdone your brisket then you want to cut your slices a little bit thicker if you've under-done your brisket then you cut them thinner so these guys just look at that beautiful really nice and tender it's passing the clap test here oh and it broke so there you go this shouldn't have broke that would suggest that we've maybe overdone this a little bit which i'm surprised about given this is the one that we took off at the outset so now we're gonna carve down the point and for the point the muscle fibers run in the opposite direction and so that's why we turn it and we carve it the other way just look at how juicy this guy is okay so now we're gonna carve thick slices here this is where the higher fat content in the brisket is so these are going to be gorgeous slices just look at that now we've got the mussel fibers running this way on this flat so we'll cut this off now we'll start carving in slices here as well [Music] so we're just doing the clap test here to make sure that the brisket's tender enough that it hangs over the slicer but it's not overdone to the point where it breaks so this guy right here passing the clap test now we'll slice into the point all right now we're going to carve into the point just looking at this guy beautiful slice right there nothing to complain about now for the taste test i'm gonna cut off a little piece of the point from there i'll do the same over here and then we'll get a piece of the flat get a little bit of that juice that's dripped off onto it we'll do the same over here okay let's taste the flat first [Music] great piece of brisket no complaints you've got that smoke flavor that's really penetrated the beef here really nice spiciness from the black pepper and the seasoning of the salt and that rub really really nice flavor profile not the juiciest but we'll try this one to be honest even though that brisket was the one that had the injection and that the flat was appearing to be a little bit overdone on the bend test that actually tasted a little bit chewier to me i want to go in maybe get a thinner piece here just to make sure i didn't miss something on that [Music] there we go maybe i just had a thick piece now you're really noticing the difference in the tenderness there [Music] excellent really really good now we're going to go in for the point [Music] that's like butter and now i'll do the point on the other brisket really really good so here's how i'm going to come down on this the difference between these two briskets i think in part had to do with a difference in the evenness of the briskets so the one that we didn't inject i think that one actually had a little bit thicker of a flat so the ratio of thickness of flat to the point was a little bit higher or greater than the one where we did inject and you saw that because we had to get this brisket to 203 before the point was actually probed tender so the point on this one absolutely incredible it's like butter done perfectly super juicy and tender and and that's one of the best briskets we've done over this entire brisket series so my opinion if you have the time for the injection go for it it's not going to be a huge difference no uri because we really like grilling you'll probably notice it but to the average person you're probably not going to distinguish the difference so there you have it this is the last of our brisket experiments in this six part series if you haven't watched the rest of the series we've got a link over here we've tested whether you should do the fat cap up or down hot and fast versus low and slow whether to inject or not whether to trim your brisket or not we've got a bunch of different really popular hypotheses around how you should actually smoke a brisket and we just really enjoyed putting all those to the test so if you like this video consider giving it a like below subscribe to the channel and we'll see you on the next one thanks for tuning in

Channel: BBQ and Bottles

Views: 9,575

Rating: 4.9695816 out of 5

Keywords: BBQ and Bottles, BBQandBottles, Inject a brisket or not, Should you inject a brisket, inject a brisket, why inject a brisket, should you inject, should you inject your brisket, brisket injection recipe beef broth, brisket injection or not, Injecting brisket, Do you need to inject a brisket, injecting a brisket before smoking, Brisket Experiment, Brisket Comparison, Brisket Experiments, Injected brisket, smoked injected brisket, why should you inject a brisket

Id: laKaeNIKvvo

Length: 25min 11sec (1511 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 12 2020