- Hey everybody! I'm Chef
Tom with All Things Barbecue, and today I'm cooking
up a holiday brisket. (water dripping and splashing) It's no secret that brisket
is a really fantastic holiday dish to do, and normally what we're doing when we do brisket is sort of a
barbecue style brisket but we're gonna switch
that up a little bit today. We are still gonna be smoking
our brisket on the smoker, but instead of going for a
sweeter barbecue flavor profile we're gonna be doing something
a little bit more savory; and, in fact, we're gonna
incorporate some veggies into it at one point. It's gonna be really great. But what we're gonna
start off with today is a whole packer brisket. This is a fifteen pound brisket. I'm gonna trim it up but I'm gonna keep that
point and flat in tact and we're gonna cook it all together. As you can see today we're working with a Creekstone Farms Master
Chef Choice brisket and I can tell you I've
cooked enough briskets to know that the choice level
stuff from Creekstone Farms is far better than what you're gonna get at the big box stores, so look em up, cause if you can get your hands on one of these Creekstone Farms briskets I promise you won't be disappointed. Alright so first thing I'm gonna do is just get rid of any of
that juice on the outside so this isn't too slippery. Just to kinda orientate yourself, what we've got here is
our point sitting on top. Down here is the flat. This is usually where you get your slices. This is where we usually do burnt ends. And I'm gonna start from the fat cap side. We can see down here where the flat is. This is the point down here and this is the separation
between the two. And we're just gonna
start trimming this up, get some of the excess
fat off the outside. We are gonna leave a good bit of fat here on top of the
flat, the leaner meat. I'm just gonna start up here. This is a hard wedge of fat in the side that we can kind of cut into. We don't need all this extra
fat here while it's cooking, so we're gonna get rid of this wedge. All of this stuff would soften
up a bit in the process, but it's pretty unnecessary
to keep it around. (meat squishing) Now with that wedge out of there we can kinda lay this flat which is good. We can get our knife flat so we can start to trim across the top of the point. (meat squishing) (knife cutting) And then what I'm gonna do here is work on cleaning up the point. I'm slicing just that
top layer of fat off. Don't wanna get into the meat too much. (knife cutting) The colder the brisket
and the sharper your knife the easier this is gonna be. (knife slicing) Now if you're wondering why am I taking all the fat off
of the surface here, well the thing is here on the point there's fat running all
the way through here. You can see how thick
these muscle strands are and those strands of fat like that they go right through the meat. So there's plenty of fat
running throughout this muscle, and while I do like a
little bit of a fat layer, maybe a quarter inch on top of my brisket, you'll typically wanna do that down here on the flat side where these slices are a little bit more lean. Alright, here's another
section of really hard fat. This is gonna come off
at one point or another, so we might as well get to it now. (knife slicing) Get that big ol' chunk. Not even a little big of
muscle in the middle of there, so we can get rid of that. Alright, so you're starting to see the point pretty exposed up
here at the top which is great. And you notice I stop trimming when I get to about right here. That's because I can
see that this point meat is starting to fall over
the flat right here. In fact, if I cut down this is all just that layer of fat in
between those two muscles. And we'll start to see the
flat meat come out right here. And like I said, I do
like a little bit of fat on top of the flat, so
I'm not gonna shave this all the way down to the muscle, but I am gonna clean it up a bit so that there's not an
overwhelming amount of fat there. Try and clean up some of those sloppy cuts for presentation's sake. Now if you're looking
at this pile of scraps that you're trimming off of your brisket and you're thinking "Man I just
paid 80 bucks for this thing "and now I'm just
throwing that money away?" There's a couple of
things to keep in mind. You're paying less for this brisket than you would pay for
a trimmed one, right? So every time that a butcher
touches this piece of meat, they charge more money for it. So you're already paying a lower price which should make you
feel a little bit better. Now you can also keep in
mind that a lot of this fat, it's fine for you to throw
into your sausage grinds. So freeze it. Next time you're making
sausages grind this stuff up. You can even put it into
burgers if you like, if you need a little extra fat content. So there are uses for this stuff. Alright I'm feeling pretty good about the top side of this thing. Point's exposed, got a decent little fat layer on top of the flat. So let's flip this over and clean up the bottom side and the edges. Alright, so you'll see
right here we've got some like gray meat that's
probably hit some steam or something like that. Is it gonna hurt you to eat it? Probably not, but it
doesn't look very nice. So I'm gonna go ahead and take it off. (knife cutting) And that looks much better. Now back here we've got this
massive hunk of hard fat. So I'm gonna trim that down a bit. (meat squishing) A little bit more of
that gray meat back here, so we'll just trim just
the top layer of that off. And then this surface fat
I'm gonna take off as well. (knife slicing) Alright, now is it necessary to get all this stuff off of here? Probably not. You can spend all day doing this, but you gotta draw the
line somewhere, right? I just figure if you're
working on a big piece of meat that you spent a good amount of money on you might as well do it right. (meat thuds) Well now that the
brisket's all cleaned up, I wanna take this opportunity to add a little bit of extra flavor to fortify the beefiness of this cut, and we're gonna do that with an injection. Now this is a really simple injection. This is the Butcher's Barbecue Prime Dust and it's essentially
just powdered beef stock, so what you get is beef flavor. It doesn't offer anything
that isn't already there, but it really fortifies that flavor and it gives you a
little bit extra moisture in the leaner part,
and that's in the flat. We're not gonna be injecting the point. We're just going to inject the flat. We're mixing the Prime Dust
with some vegetable stock. I got about two cups here, which is probably gonna be more than
I need but that's alright. We're gonna mix a half cup, or two scoops, of the Prime Dust. (liquid shaking) I essentially just wanna work
my way into the flat here. Create a little pocket,
add some of that injection, and then move on over. I'm gonna work in a grid pattern, so that I can make sure I get
the entire muscle covered. And there's no gettin' around it. Some of it's gonna come back out. Not a big deal, cause plenty of it's staying in there as well. Now that excess moisture,
the extra injection, I'm just gonna rub around the surface. This is going to allow our rub to attach to the meat. And the rub we're using is the Cattlemen's Grilled Tri-Tip Seasoning. This is just a great savory rub. It's got salt, pepper, garlic. It's got some red bell pepper in it. And we're going for a
savory flavor profile on our holiday brisket, so
this is gonna work perfectly. This is a big hunk a
meat with a lot of meat that's not exposed at the surface. So we can be pretty
liberal with our seasoning. Alright let's flip this over
and get the other side as well. And we'll take just a little bit more of that injection to
rub across the surface. You know it's like 20
degrees outside right now. My hands are freezing. There's no reason why
this should be so aromatic without heat except that
it's a really fresh rub, and that's one of the
reasons I love working with these small batch rub companies. These artisan companies are
doing stuff on small batch level and they're getting their
spices and stuff fresh. Now it's a lot of fun to
make your own rubs and spices at home, but when you're
working with something like this it's coming straight from the packer. Where as when you make your own at home, you gotta go to the grocery
store, buy those spices. You don't know how long
they sat on that shelf, might be a year, right? Everything here's incredibly fresh and it's going to affect the end product. We're smoking our brisket on the Yoder Smoker's YS640 Pellet Grill. I'm running a combination of
pecan and cherry pellets today. Cherry for the color, pecan because it's a really nice nutty flavor, and it also is just a
pretty solid smoke profile. It's something that you're
never gonna get sick of. We're running that
temperature at 250 right now. That's where we're gonna start out. We are gonna crank it
up a little bit later, but for now, so that
that brisket can soak up plenty of smoke, we're
running it at 250 degrees. Alright, so dead center on the top rack is a perfect place for this. Smoke's gonna move right
over it and out the stack. We should get some nice color and plenty of good smoke flavor on here. Now I'm not even gonna open
the door to look at the brisket for at least four hours. I'm just gonna let the
smoker work its magic. So this is about five hours, actually five and a half hours in now. See we're getting some really
nice color on the outside. These pockets of fat that are forming... This is all looking really good. I love the color! So we're getting to the
point now where we can wrap this thing up to really
finish out the process. Now I'm gonna do something a
little bit different this time. A lot of times when we
wrap, we'll put a little bit of extra braising liquid or
something like that in there, but we're actually gonna
put a bed of vegetables underneath the brisket,
and as this thing cooks and the juices kind of
come out of the brisket, those veggies, those herbs and stuff, are going to flavor that jus, and then we'll have some roasted veggies to go along with the brisket. So I've got a pound and a
half of fingerling potatoes, a pound of carrots, a
nice big yellow onion, some garlic, and then we're gonna throw some rosemary, some thyme, and
a bay leaf in there as well. And I'm gonna dice these
into fairly large pieces so that they don't just
turn into mush in the wrap. I'm gonna cut these
potatoes down a little bit to roughly like one inch pieces. (knife cutting) For the yellow onion, we're gonna do a large dice on this as well. (knife cutting) Before I pull that brisket
off to put it in the wrap, I'm going to first lay down our foil and get a bed of veggies down that we can set the brisket on top of. And this is a big hunk of meat so you're gonna want a lot of foil (foil crinkling) and enough veggies that the
brisket can sit right on top. And then we'll lay out
our fresh herbs as well and our bay leaf. Alright now no oil, no salt,
no seasoning on these veggies because we've got salt coming
off of this rub, right? We're gonna have lots of liquid. We're gonna have fat. So for now we're leaving
the veggies unseasoned that way we don't
accidentally over salt them. We can always taste them at the end and see if they need anything extra. There's just one more
thing I wanna add to this before we get it wrapped up, and that's a little
bit of braising liquid. Alright we're gonna start with
a Shiraz wine, a red wine, and we're going back to
the marinade shaker here, because we're gonna use
some more of our Prime Dust. We'll do just a cup of red wine to a quarter cup of prime dust. I'm gonna get a quick taste of this. Ooh, that's gonna work really nicely. And this we can just
pour right over the top. As this gets wrapped up tightly, it's gonna work its way around the meat as these liquids braise the meat. Alright now I'm gonna wrap
this up just as tight as I can. (foil crinkling) You're definitely gonna want
two sheets of foil for this. Rotate it so we make sure we get coverage all the way around. (foil crinkling) Alright the tighter we get this, the better our bark is in the end. We don't wanna leave much room for steam to get rid of that bark
that we've created. But this is ready to
go back on the pit now at 325 this time so we
can expedite the process and eat some brisket. Now we got a little more vertical going on after we added those veggies underneath, so this is gonna need to go on the main cooking grate now. So I'm just gonna slide
this second shelf out and slide our brisket right over here. Now with a higher temperature
and the closer proximity to the diffuser plate, you're gonna get a little bit more radiant heat, but remember, we've got veggies down there and a fat cap that's gonna
make a nice thermal barrier so the brisket doesn't get
overdone on the bottom. Now going back onto the pit now wrapped up we're about seven hours into this process and I tell you that just for reference. That's not gonna be the
same every single time. When it came to wrapping
the actual brisket all I'm looking for is a
color, the color that I like. I'm not checking to see what
the internal temperature is. I'm not looking at a clock. It's really about feeling it out. How do you like the color? How dark do you want it? Alright so where do we go from here? I mean obviously this needs
some more time to break down. The internal temperature is
going to be over 200 degrees when it's done, but, again, we're not cooking to a temperature. We're not cooking to a time. So I'm gonna come back in about an hour and probe it with our thermometer just to check the resistance. The way we're gonna know
when this thing is done is when there's very, very
little resistance when probed. It's gonna feel like butter. We're about nine and a half
hours into this cook now and the brisket is probing super tender, so I wanna bring you guys in and show you what we're talking about. Look at that! It's a thing of beauty! Now if we go in here, you can see how that just slides in
without any resistance even down here in the flat
which is a bit more lean. And if we take a temperature reading, 208, 207, right in that range. Down here on the bottom we can see our veggies are super
tender but not mush yet, so perfect timing. Let's take this thing off and let it rest. Now we essentially have three components. We have the brisket. We have the jus, and we have the veggies. And I'm gonna separate all of them now that way we can heat up
the jus as we need to. We can hold the veggies warm, and we can rest the brisket and get ready to slice it here in about half an hour. And before I strain this off, I'm gonna pick out these herbs. (liquid trinkling) And I'm just gonna wrap
these up to keep em warm. And our jus is here ready for the slices so that we can warm those
up when we're ready to eat. Alright guys, moment of truth. This brisket's been resting
for about 30 to 45 minutes. Let's slice into this
thing and see how we did. Now as always with brisket you
wanna slice across the grain and to help you figure out where that is you're gonna wanna flip it over, right, cause we got a little fat on the top here. So check that out. The strands are running that way. Obviously this is super tender. So we're gonna go at 90 degrees to that. (knife slicing) Just check out all the moisture
on the inside of this thing. It's just drippin'. I mean that is everything you want out of a piece of brisket. Now down here at the point end, this point's what's sitting on top, right? You can see that the muscles run in a slightly different direction. Let's just slice into this
and see what it looks like right in the middle of there. Oh my gosh! Just drippin' with juices,
still gettin' some of that fat. And one a those cubes is
just barely holding together. The only thing that can make that a little bit better
is a dip in that jus. And look at that color! Nice dark brown color on the jus. That jus makes it. You gotta get your brisket
slices smothered in that stuff. It's smokey for all that time that this brisket spent soaking up that smoke and it's savory and delicious and it's got just a little bit of fat
that kinda coats your mouth. So you can build yourself
a pretty nice platter. Some really great servings right here. You got your fatty meat in the back there. Let's get some of that lean
meat spread out in the front, and just a drizzle of that jus. The slightest bit a tug to come apart. Flavor's spot on. Gettin' all kinds of garlic
and pepper outta that. I love it; it's perfect. It's savory; it's not barbecue sweet. This is exactly what I wanna
eat at Christmas dinner. Pour me a glass a red wine. Gimme some of those roasted vegetables. It's smoky, it's savory, it's delicious it's everything I'm looking for. Hey, thanks so much for watching! If you enjoyed the video please
hit that subscribe button, and be sure to check out atbbq.com for the products featured in the video. If you have any questions or comments, or there's anything you'd
like to see me cook, I'd love to hear from you in the comment section down below, and, hey, let's be good to one another. For more recipes, tips, and techniques head over to thesauce.atbbq.com and happy holidays from myself and the rest of the crew
here at All Things Barbecue, where barbecue legends are made.
