How to make Brisket with Truth BBQ

i'm matt pittman ceo and pit master of meat church throughout my barbecue life i've been lucky enough to make some amazing relationships with some of the top pit masters in the world for this series i've convinced them to share with you guys some of their best kept secrets so fire up your pits it's time to meet the masters hey guys matt with me church while i'm here in houston at my buddy leonard's barbecue joint truth barbecue rated number three on the famous texas monthly top 50 barbecue joints list it's quite defeat because truth has two locations one here in houston and one in brenham and they have clearly not lost any quality whatsoever well leonard and i have talked about this video for a long time and i couldn't be more excited we're talking all things brisket the amount of tips you're going to get out of this video and how he cooks his brisket i'm telling you it's going to be the best video we do all year so let's head inside and see what leonard's up to [Music] oh [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] all right guys we're here in the smokehouse with the best looking man in barbecue leonard dude appreciate you uh letting us come out to talk brisket no thanks for coming out we've been talking about for a while yeah well what we've been talking about specifically is i always say there's so many different ways to skin a cat when it comes to cooking barbecue and particularly in brisket so we've had a lot of back and forth about different ways to do things but man let's just jump in and tell us how you're doing things these things these days yeah like you said there's no right or wrong way to do it as long as you're satisfied at the end this is the way we do it in truth uh this is basically your traditional packer brisket we use all creekstone master chef prime i just like those because they got a nice amount of fat on there's no scalping they got a lot to work with this is going to be our final product as you can see how rounded everything is want to make it nice and aerodynamic don't have too many too many scalping our bald spots on there we try to refrain from it looks like we trim very similarly so i've i mean yeah i just i i like all the uh i like everything being rounded off because if you know if you think about like if you've got wings in there it's just getting hammered with heat the entire time the pit so we try to cut all that down um we just use straight up french's is my preference heinz is all right if you need that uh just slather a little bit on the back here so and i grew up in the south and we put mustard on our pork we didn't know what the heck brisket was where i came from so i love it when i see a mustard slather yeah in the heart of texas in houston on a brisket uh a lot of people think that the mustard actually tenderizes the brisket i couldn't tell you i mean there's so many myths out there like they always like it's all tall tales or whatever you want to call it yeah i have never noticed that a brisket gets a little more tender with mustard but it just a binder yeah it helps with binder i've noticed that if i don't use it the stuff starts to tend to flake off a lot more yeah so i just want to start with a nice really good bark and like we were talking about earlier this is all just salt pepper garlic onion super so you bust the myth again that the best barbecue in texas isn't necessarily just salt and pepper no no no i mean a lot of salt and pepper yeah a lot of salt and pepper um i like all of our proteins especially the beef ones to taste like a good steak like if you're going to steakhouse so that's like kind of where i'm going at with this um you want to keep it really simple and just bury beef forward or put forward i like it so you're already blowing our mind again because you're holding the shaker what i call upside down which is what our buddy dane did it made me and all my friends question have we been seasoning wrong our entire lives uh i don't i don't know how i started doing this it just seemed like i was like dumping out too much at a certain time that's the secret right there and sometimes we'll even cut out some of the the holes and like just have one hole in the middle and it makes it a little bit easier man uh but you know you want to get like a nice dalmatian uh salt and pepper looking there's a very professional even shake you got going here yeah you want to make sure that everything goes on nice and neat to help build that bark a lot of people think that the bark is burnt but it's actually a chemical reaction with that happens with the salt and the fats rendering down and just building that really really nice color so we want to have everything like super uniform so you're getting the same bite in every bite i love it yeah if this whole true thing doesn't work out for you you've got a future at meat church with those seasoning skills i can just be your demo guy like for all this these things it's not a very good paying position but anyway keep it in mind well i don't have a backup plan for barbecue so i might need to take you up all right so let's talk about uh how long do you let it adhere uh before we talk about how you cook it um so it kind of transitioned um i was always like super nervous like if it sat overnight it was going to get too salty but with the kosher salt in there it's not enough to penetrate the muscle or anything like that so some we'll usually see some the night before just so that everybody's not super scattered in here yeah loading up 100 briskets on the pit wait wait wait you're cooking how many briskets on the weekend if there's a if there's up to 100 briskets or more on the pit it gets a little hairy when people are seasoning and trimming and making sausage i just gotta say like you know it's crazy like the amount of knowledge people can get on youtube and videos you're cooking 100 briskets a day on the weekend giant game of tetris every day insane impressive yeah all right all right so we're obviously not going to let these sit overnight because we're making a video so we're going to put it on but if i had to come in last night let this sit overnight we come in today where do you go from there so we're going to pull these bad boys out of the cooler um let them sit out for about an hour so they can get it pretty close to room temperature um so that way when we're throwing them on the pit they're not seizing up going straight into that heat uh and we'll go fatties towards the fire and we'll ramp that fire up just to get to 275 because if you go straight into 275 it kind of what time do you like to start at uh 225 or so and we'll do every hour up until we get to there um just so it can kind of coast into there and kind of help the muscle to relax and break down at the right rate i feel like it's like a spa for your brisket yeah yeah just let it relax just kind of uh they just tend to you'll see a lot of that curling and that's seizing up if you if you throw it right on there so we kind of like we want everything to be super uniform and you know when we're cooking that many briskets a day we really baby them a lot and sometimes a lot of people will say we'll do extra steps like when we're rotating or spritzing blah blah but you know in this consistency is the name of the game and we want the customers to think that every brisket is the exact same thing that's a crazy thing you know that i don't think people can quite grasp of what you're having to do you're cooking a hundred of these a day and every bite has to be banging yeah everybody it it from 11 am to sell out whenever that is every every slice of this brisket of those 100 briskets all have to be dead on yeah so i'll be 100 honest with you you of course know that not every cow is going to be the same they're all going to eat different they're going to have more fat less fat blah blah blah the positions in the pit room are just as important as the guys cutting the meat because those are the gatekeepers they know exactly what to serve what not to serve not every biscuit's going to be the same it's our job to get them as close as they can but you know sometimes cows are stubborn and one's a little more lean one's a little bit fatty of course we want the fattier ones but these guys are so particular about what they're going to get yeah for sure all right well i guess we're headed out to the pit um i mean you got lots of pits here running for the restaurant today but you and i both are big fans of mill scale and you've got a very sexy thousand gallon mill scale out there that i think that we should cook on today yeah that's my baby all right well let's uh let's head out there all right this is a good looking mill scale by the way so start finish we're gonna load from the back all the way to the front uh we're gonna go fatties towards the fire and then the muscular fat's a lot heavier than the stuff in the back so we're gonna have to break all that stuff down we're gonna let this guy go untouched for about five hours let that bark really start to build love it [Music] so we're about five hours in where we got going now so typically when we're cooking about five hours in is when we start to like foil and and assess like what we're what we're looking for essentially um you can see this is a little bit darker than over here you got this puddling over here you definitely don't want that because it'll keep you from building that bar this is the point this is the flat we're going points towards the fire so we're going to want to foil up these front parts right here and i always like to just go like like that make a little bit of a hat on there you can kind of see on this edge right here this is a lot thinner um i always tell if people like think about throwing a pork chop in a in a really hot pan it starts to curl up really bad same thing with this you're going to want to protect that and get these flats to lay down again so what we'll do is we'll just cap the bottom of it and we don't do it too tight because we're just looking for that protection we still want to build that bark about four or five hours in is when you can start to notice like if you're rubbing it the seasoning's not coming off if you do it too early it'll start to peel off and you just want to make sure that that bark is like really set before you start messing with it and you never put anything underneath any foil underneath your briskets or no since we're looking for like that real natural convection in these offsets versus like a reverse flow or like other types of pits that have some metal on the bottom we want to get like everything super uniform and we don't want the bottom to like steam out or cook a little bit faster than the top or the front or the back so we try to keep everything as consistent as possible and at this point we'll start rotating the briskets on and off the walls and backwards um because here the doors and the walls are going to be your more radiant heats and you want everything to cook at the right rate here here here here so we just start weaving any everything in in and out every hour from now on awesome so we're going to let these ride and we'll check back in two three hours and see if we're ready to wrap yeah so we got the fresh one on uh this one should be about ready to wrap about eight hours in give or take yeah uh let's check it out smells awesome look at that bark [Music] so you've got a little bit of foil just for protection there from the heat on the front and the back keep from the curling protect the front of them because we go points towards the fire for the most of the most the cook and we'll flip it around to kind of even everything out so we don't want this guy to get too damaged because it'll start to tear up during the uh when it gets on the block if it gets too crispy or anything like that i'm sure i'm sure you felt it yeah let's go wrap it all right let's wrap this baby up sir so we like to use 18 inch butcher paper over 24. i just feel like you can get a better wrap all around with it i'm sure you know that too so i'm a fan of that me church butcher paper's 18 inches can you get it online you have to get it at our bbq splash shop it's a destination even better i go over there to get it ah here we go so we're gonna pop these foil pieces off real quick hold on this side [Applause] spritz everything down pretty heavy we use all apple cider vinegar i can smell it yes sir we're usually looking for about 170 175 degrees inside internally that tends to be a sweet spot when we're wrapping up just to not too many of the fats are rendered out usually typically if you go over 180 it'll tend to be a little bit drier if you go under 170 like low 160s you'll have a really kind of funky white texture the upside to that is you'll have a ton of fat that's rendered out in the paper so when you're unwrapping it you see all that dumping out but then on the back side you have that kind of nasty looking white fat and that's not what we're looking for we want it to be nice and caramelized like you can pinch this guy apart right here and you can see like that nice yellowing that we're looking for so you can't really always go off the temperature you want it to be like nice and soft and you want to have the right fat colors in the right color on the brisket this one's a little bit lighter than normally what we would have can sped this cook up a little bit for for uh video the magic of tv it still feels really good it's really nice um when we're probing we're probing like directly in the center when it hits that little muscle in the middle right in that break between the lean and the fatty you want it to feel like butter you don't want to slide all the way through a little bit of resistance on there then we're going to spritz like super super aggressive um and the reason that we like to use apple cider vinegar i prefer it versus like apple apple juice or anything like that you got to be really careful with the sugars that are in there it'll start to caramelize and burn up a little bit apple cider will keep that bark from sticking to the paper on you i've seen with the moisture shire my briskets have really fluctuated in salt like if the sediment sits on the bottom of the squirt bottle and you'll season all the briskets the same and then they'll have different flavor profiles just from that so i found that apple cider works the best huge tips we just spritz our paper with cider vinegar i don't actually usually spritz my brisket so that's a good tip so a lot of people um a lot of people are like worried about the bark getting kind of soft but if you're letting your bark like really build at the beginning part of the cook and set in it's going to hold up and you you have to remember that heat's also attracted heat and smoke or attracted moisture so we're still trying to get this brisket penetrated with smoke through the paper right the only reason that we're wrapping this brisket up is because we want it to be protected uh when we're rendering out those lats last vats in there and that huge fat band in the middle and that inner muscular fat on the fatty is going to be super hard to render out at 275 degrees so we're going to bump it to 300 and kind of crank it up to help cooking that rest that fat out we always go across the top like this and then basically almost like a paper football we'll tuck the bottom right here we touch the bottom right here and the reason that we do this is this kind of like serves as like almost like a paper boat method so all those fats that are rendering out if you have to unwrap the brisket to feel it like if you're not comfortable like with just probing um it allows those fats not to pour out it'll hold everything in but also if we really need to get in there and like we're talking like 5-10 minutes more on the pit and we need to see if that lean or the fatty are broken down it allows us to get our hands on the bottom in there and kind of like really get a good feel in there um because yeah we're going for temperature but we're more so going for feel the temperature is more of a guideline like a sanity yeah because every brisket's going to be different every cook's going to be different you know how it is first person that told me that was jordan jackson back when he's at franklin center news at bodacious he showed me how to reach in and grab it and it's a life it's tough for people at home i think sometimes because you know they're not doing a gajillion briskets a day like you guys are so it takes time and experience that's one of the huge benefits of having you do this is there's a lot of people that make youtube videos there's not a lot of people cooking the amount of briskets you're cooking every day and knowing that fill yeah um so i like to tell people it's like almost like a wet sponge like oh it's like super spongy on the bottom but with a sponge you couldn't really push your finger through all the way like until you like to break the sponge that's what you're looking for if like you can easily stick your finger through the bottom of the brisket it's going to be overcooked if you have like way too much resistance and you're like punching it it's still got some time yeah those are all killer tips say let's go put it back in smoker and finish it up let's go [Music] all right we're looking for now for the rest of the cook so we're gonna go leans towards the fire um just since those fatties have been hammered the entire time uh that tighter muscle on the lean side it's going to take a little more heat just kind of even everything out we're going to bump the pit to about 300 degrees if you're doing at home i'd normally say to like cook around 220 time 250 don't go any higher than 265 275 that'll just really help render out the rest of those fats about an hour we'll check them we'll check all the briskets and then we'll start going in 20 minute intervals and peeling the bottoms of them i found out that 20 minutes is like not too much to overcook something but it's enough to like get it there yeah and it's just kind of a sweet spot yeah sometimes if you go 30 minutes and that 300 degree heat it's just like pushes it over the edge and then you've got cat food at the end awesome let's go check the fire yeah all right it's been about an hour and a half or so since we wrapped this brisket yeah let's check it out so you can see the paper starting to get nice and saturated uh we're looking for like feel see like this has a nice little resistance on it almost kind of like a little balloon yeah uh then we're going into the middle making sure everything feels like nice and uniform through here you don't want this to be like too soft right here on that fatty or it'll just be mush uh when we're temping the briskets out we're going like right in that bottom of that lean right there and feeling we're not really going for temp we're going for like how soon it is uh and that's what we're looking for i feel good about this one yeah it feels good um like i said now the paper's like all nice and situated so if you really gotta get in there um you can really just like feel right there that's a huge tip yeah oh looks good so that's what i was talking about jiggly nice all right check the bottom of it we can wrap it back up and let them cool with the other guys so let's uh let's talk about your rest which i think that's super key as we take this into rest what do you like to do from here uh so like again we were talking about every cow is always different all these briskets are not gonna be the same size so we trim them down to about 10 11 pounds to get them all the same shape and size so that way they're all coming off at the same time but a lot of people make the mistake of letting the brisket cool down for a certain amount of time but you know this size brisket versus one that's 10 more pounds it's not going to be able to cool down at the same rate so we cool them down to about 140 degrees internally right where i tense it out for you so right in the middle yeah 140 145 degrees anything lower the fats are going to start to solidify and they'll struggle more to uh to get soft again anything higher the brisket's going to continue to cook so when we put these bad boys in the warmer the warmer set at 140 degrees we're just basically letting them sit you're going to let it sit on this sheet trade ambient temperature down to 140 then you're going in you're warmer than we are and how long you're gonna ride in the warmer all night uh yeah probably about eight hours or so um i used to go overnight and like get it as close as i could like resting it down to 140 degrees and then put it in the warmer and cut into it and you know one day you're tired one day you had too many drinks blah blah blah blah and you're trying to get some more sleep the quality actually gets better uh when it's in the warmer it gets nice and humid in there it helps those muscles relax a little bit more softer the only issue is the longer that it sits in the warmer the faster it oxidizes so you got to find that really sweet spot of not resting too long or resting long enough all right well let's take it in and rest it because it's about time to eat all right so i didn't want to have you wait for the full full rest time so we have one ready for you i appreciate that so thoughtful so uh we wrap everything with cellophane once we pull it off the pit because as you can see all that fat that's so kind of caught in there i didn't start doing that until after events and i got tired of cleaning out the yetis every time when i'm ready to go home uh let's see how much it it catches in there yeah you would have just lost that off beauty damn that looks good let's get into it [Music] oh it's like a waterfall okay see those nice burnt ends perfectly rendered appreciate you coming out of retirement to get on the block for me i know you got people to do this for you i mean like you talked about the fat man it looks good so we have this ongoing joke between me and bert backman out of la because like i said that has so much fat in it so we put it against the door and we'll always send each other this guy right here the fourth slice this is the first one of course it's going to be good because there's so much fat in there yeah so he's like we started saying to each other like go to the go to the fourth i wonder where the four slices let's see what the fourth one looks like because that's what turns boys to men if you can go all the way through and as you can see these guys from end to end they're pretty solid all right while you're finishing slicing this i'm gonna go get a beer and a seat yes sir i'll meet you over there i'll meet you over there that looks awesome oh not too shabby man look how pretty this trey is but the star of the show just packed in here all brewskin i mean i got to tell you it looks unbelievable like that i said earlier when you're slicing it that perfectly rendered fat i mean how look we'll just go in what you said how the fourth slice held together like looks legit i'm ready to get in here let's dig in all right i'm just going to reach in all right look at that right there oh yeah i don't need a fork i'm just going to rip it open with my hands like a caveman dude stupid dude nailed it that's the best brisket i'll have all year period hey there's you're not going to talk about it but that's there's a reason you're ranked so high on that famous list but i don't know it's not all about that but you're killing it man to have two locations to be pumping out this sort of quality on a daily basis i actually don't think i've ever heard a negative thing said about truth which is uh what's saying something dude teamwork makes the dream work it's not just me we owe a lot to these guys in the back they do a killer job and without them we wouldn't i mean it's all about you know we're all about one big happy family here so many people touch this brisket before it's done yeah gotta keep everybody on the same page it's pretty crazy you had different guys trimming and cooking and slicing and i mean i watched all the customers and like they make sure everything they give out is perfect like it's a it's an operation you guys got to come down here to truth in in houston or brenham for the matter well man i appreciate it like if you you've loaded us up with so many tips uh i know that meat church congregation appreciates it so uh i appreciate you having us out thanks for coming out man who really enjoyed having you it's a good time all right well you know what i'm gonna get in on these sides too while we're at it so thanks man man that was awesome let's talk about that cook and those tips by the way no tallow been telling you tallow's not the number one secret there wasn't one ounce of tallow using that cook and that's the best brisket i'm gonna have all year but you guys picked up a lot from this that mustard slather what it did to help build the bark foiling the tips of the brisket rotating it around against your heat source help render the fat and that rest the rest is just as crucial as the cook i'm telling y'all that brisket's gonna be the best brisket i had all year and that's the truth [Music]

Channel: Meat Church BBQ

Views: 997,114

Keywords: brisket, how to smoke brisket, brisket recipe, smoked brisket, truth bbq brisket, truth barbecue, truth brisket, leonard botello iv, truth barbeque brisket, texas monthly, texas monthly bbq, truth barbeque, truth bbq, smoked brisket recipe, meat church, tmbbq, houston bbq, texas brisket, matt pittman, bbq, barbecue, grilling, meat church bbq, meat church bbq youtube, Meat Church BBQ YouTube, Meat Church, Matt Pittman, BBQ, Barbecue, Grilling, how to, how to make, cooking

Id: h4c6C--WXa0

Length: 25min 28sec (1528 seconds)

Published: Wed May 25 2022