how to make TEXAS STYLE SMOKED BEEF BRISKET on an Offset Smoker (Oklahoma Joe's Smoker)

texas-style brisket is a timeless classic and it's something every aspiring pitmaster should try in this video I'm going to show you how to make the perfect texas-style brisket from selecting your brisket and trimming it to rubbing it with salt and pepper and cooking it low and slow to wrapping it resting it slicing it the only thing I can't help you with is eating it that's the privilege only you will have after you master this technique and make the best brisket of your life and if that's not enough to get you pumped about this I'm also going to tell you a secret that barbecue restaurants use to cook briskets the day before and reheat them so it's always ready on time and always perfectly juicy so let's get smokin [Music] all right let's check out this brisket this is a USDA select grade brisket that's on the lower end of the brisket you can get but usually it's the one you're gonna buy because it's on sale and you're not spending a whole bunch of money especially if this is your first brisket you don't want to invest a lot of money into it selecting a brisket one of the tests you can do this is a bit of an old wives tale but you can do what's called the bend test so you can bend it and if it bends like this that supposedly tells you that the meat is high-quality it's gonna be tender it's been wet aged for a sufficient amount of time so when you're buying brisket you are paying for a lot of fat that you're gonna trim off so whatever they say about the bend test whether it actually results in more tender meat or a better final product it does actually show you how much fat is inside of the brisket because if there's a ton of hard fat then it's not gonna Bend easily so this is a good test if it bends like this it's a good brisket and this isn't a cryovac bag a lot of times people in the stores are touching these you don't know where they've been I personally like to touch like every brisket I can see in the store because I'm bending them and looking at the different textures of the meat and the quality of the brisket so what I like to do is get a disinfectant wipe and just quickly wipe the outside of the cryovac bag just to be safe in this recipe we're not doing an injection because we're doing a traditional texas-style brisket but normally I would do an injection and I would just inject straight through the bag to keep everything clean so in that case it's even more important to disinfect the bag before you start poking needles into it and potentially introducing pathogens and to the center of the meat now knives it's always a good idea to have sharp knives I usually don't because I'm cutting a lot and I don't have a knife sharpener so get the sharpest knives that you have but don't worry about it too much if you don't have one if you only have dull knives then might be time to go to the store and pick up something like this they're usually pretty cheap and they come with a pretty good edge so let's cut into this we want the knife blade facing up and away from the meat so that we don't wreck anything and we just make an incision there let the air in keeping this hand dry and clean and I'm using this hand to touch the meat [Applause] and I don't slice all the way around because there's usually a lot of juices and blood in here so I'm gonna take this one side out all right the Beast has been released okay let's take a look at what we have here so as you can see we've got this weird flap of meat this isn't even part of what we want on the briskets so we've got some trimming to do for those of you who aren't familiar with briskets this is what's referred to as a full packers cut and what I'm doing throughout this video it only applies to a Packers cut with both the point muscle right here and the flat muscle that runs along here and tapers out on your right so this recipe is only applicable to a Packers cut because if you only cook the point or you only cook the flat it's a completely different method of cooking it's gonna cook a lot faster and you wouldn't necessarily want to follow this recipe to the T so let's take a look at this we're going to trim this down I know you just pay too much of money per pound for this brisket but we're gonna shave probably about 20% of the weight off of this by cutting this fat off and trimming it down and making it a little bit more cook about in the Oklahoma Joe's offset smoker so that it doesn't have any sharp edges it doesn't catch any really hot spots in the in the cooker and we get nice airflow that flows from point where all the muscle is the thickest and we've got the most fat and it flows over and down over the skinnier flat and cooks everything evenly so I'll show you how to do that now all right taking our knife the first thing we're going to want to do is if you look at the the point here a lot of times the butcher or the processor will leave on a lot of this extra stuff on the point and get into a different muscle and we want to shave all that off so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna make it cut spin this around so you can see it right here there we go and then we'll take a look at this it looks like we've got a really hard kernel of fat this is hard fat that runs along the side of the brisket here so we want to cut that out so what I like to do is I like to just shave from the top to the bottom because you really don't want to cut too deep into the fat and shave too much off because you're not going to have that delicious layer of fat that renders down over the meat and you're not gonna have the protective coating that the brisket needs throughout the you know up to 12 hour cooking process so what we want to do is shave this fat cap down to a quarter inch thickness and we want to make sure that to the extent possible we don't have any pieces of meat showing through there already is a bit of meat showing through over here but but that's okay so what I like to do is just start shaving it and just go layer by layer and we're trying to preserve the natural shape of the brisket so as far as we can I want to kind of round out this point muscle and I want to make sure everything is nice and smooth and round and we'll make one more cut right here take some of that fat off that is good so I'm happy with the fat cap side i left a bit more fat on this because this is a lower grade brisket there's less intramuscular fat on it so I'm gonna err on the side of caution and leave a little bit more fat on it's still not a ton of fat though the important thing is this point muscle side is protected with a bunch of fat and you've got a nice fat cap throughout so now what I'm going to do is you can see that when they split the brisket there's kind of this rough cutting edge over here and they actually treat this a little bit so we want to cut this off and expose the fresh meat okay there we go and the other thing we're gonna do is we want to cut some of this flat off this flat tends to get pretty thin near the end of it and in a lot of cases it's not going to survive a 10 to 12 hour cook so what I usually do is i I take a slice right here and I cut off the very thinnest part of the flat the thing is this is looking pretty thick on this particular brisket so we've got you know a good inch or more of flat here so I think this has already been trimmed a little bit so I'm gonna keep this the way it is I'm not going to trim any of that flat because we got a nice flat here so what I am gonna do is it does taper out a little bit here so I might I might just make a little bit of a rounded cut like this so we'll just trim this up lay this as flat as possible and this is kind of a sharp edge here so I am going to taper this a little bit [Music] there we go all right now we're gonna flip the brisket over see what we got on the back okay so right away you can see that there's a large gash mark that the butcher left but that's okay because this is the hard kernel of fat that we want to remove we want to leave probably about a third of this hard piece in the brisket and I'll show you as I cut this out what that actually means because we don't want to gouge too deep into the point muscle because then we're gonna have a bunch of jagged edges and it's not going to be rounded and it's not going to hold together as well so we want to cut this out and it helps it the brisket is really cold when you're doing this so if you just take it out of the fridge it's a lot easier to trim it up and that's about as far as I want to go so as you can see I've cut most of that heart fat away but I'm still leaving a big chunk in there because I want it to be streamlined so when the hot air in the offset smoker hits the point it's gonna flow underneath because this is the bottom it's gonna flow underneath and it's going to be protected by this hard piece of fat and it's gonna be more aerodynamic if I cut into this and carve this whole thing out there's gonna be this crevasse inside of the brisket and it's gonna cook unevenly and weird and get crispy bits so we're gonna leave quite a bit of this hard kernel on what I'm gonna do is just take this piece off here there we go and if you want you can also carve some of this stuff off I'm gonna leave it for now because again it's just more protective fat on the bottom and this silver skin will all get rendered out eventually but if you take a look at this you can see yeah this is definitely a select grade brisket we've got some visible fat intramuscular fat in the middle but in between the fibers there's not a ton of fat so in that case we want to keep a lot more fat on the outside to protect this brisket so we've also got some other pieces of meat here this isn't part of the point so I am going to cut it off all right so I'm pretty happy with this I'm gonna keep quite a bit of fat on this and I'm gonna start seasoning it now so for the rub this is a texas-style brisket so that means salt and pepper super basic rub we don't have any other ingredients we just have really coarsely cracked black pepper and we have coarse grain kosher salt the mixture is 50/50 I'm gonna put these in a shaker bottle so I'll put the pepper in first I'll just eyeball it it's probably all I'm gonna need and we'll put our salt in here all right there we go so we've got our 50-50 mixture and we're going to mix it up all right that looks pretty good actually great so we'll open up our shaker bottle here and I'm gonna go pretty high up your kitchen's gonna get a little bit messy so you're just gonna have to be aware of that but what I'm gonna do is I'm just gonna start on one end here I'm gonna put my hand on the edge of the brisket and sort of Pat the rub up against the side but the one thing that I should be doing actually is doing the back side first this is how the brisket is gonna lay in the Oklahoma Joe's smoker so what we want to do is flip this over and do this side first because this is the side that's gonna be sitting down if I did the top side first I would be doing the top side and then flipping it on the cutting board all that rub would come off on the cutting board we don't really want that so we'll start putting this on here okay that's good so we're going to flip this over now and we'll do the fat cap side and that's it so now I'm going to let this rest at room temperature for about 30 minutes to an hour it also has the benefit of letting the salt mix in with the meat and do some dry brining action it's going to bring a lot of moisture to the surface and it's gonna bind better with all of the rub that we just put on and it's gonna bring it up to temperature a little bit and decrease our cook time because we're not going to be putting a cold brisket into the smoker having said that it's not gonna come up in temperature to room temperature that would actually take probably four to five hours if you really wanted this brisket to come up to room temperature and that's just not feasible so all we're doing is bringing it up really a couple of degrees on the counter and letting that dry brine do its magic so let's wait for thirty minutes and let's get our fire started on the Oklahoma Joe's while we're waiting all right let's talk about starting our fire so the first thing you want to do is start a chimney starter full of some lump charcoal you can use briquettes if you want but I prefer lump charcoal because it's closer to actual real wood and that's what I like to use on my offset smoker so I do a chimney starter and just crumple up some paper I squirt a little bit of oil on the paper just before I put it under the chimney starter and then I light it with a match let that take light for about ten to fifteen minutes until the charcoal starts to get an ashy sort of gray color and it's gonna smoke a lot at the start but after the charcoal takes light it's going to start burning more cleanly and once you get that sort of ashy consistency and color then you just dump it into your firebox I'll show you my firebox setup here a little bit I've got an interesting setup I've got three great sort of aligned in like a V pattern and the point here is you have the bottom grate on the bottom so that you have air flow underneath and I can reach in there and I can scoop out any ash that drops to the bottom of the firebox and then I have two grates that are coming down at like a V pattern and this is so that all the charcoal and the burning wood on top once it starts to burn down it just starts funneling down towards the center instead of sort of just being like a big pile that goes off towards the edges and gets cold and and and burns out you always have this sort of V pattern in the middle of the firebox that's always super hot and all of that combustible material is funneling towards that so this just really helps to control your fire and for fire management so I highly recommend using this V method or at the very least getting a basket made of expanded metal or something where you can contain all of the charcoal and the wood in one area and once you've got a nice coal bed inside the firebox you're gonna want to add your first piece of wood I'm using some cherry wood here because that's what I have available right now at this time of the year but you can use poast oak or Hickory or anything that you have in your area that's a nice smokeable hardwood cherry or Hickory or oak usually when I'm smoking brisket but it's up to you whatever works for you and whatever you have in season that's the best wood to use so what I like to do when I put my first piece of wood on is I actually leave the lid of the firebox open for about 10 minutes because it lets a lot more air flow in and it lets that piece of wood take light and really burn for a few minutes and only at that point will I close the lid and let the firebox sort of self-regulate I leave the vent open a hundred percent of the way that whole door that accesses the firebox that is completely open the only reason I'd ever closed that at all is if I had a lot of win or if it was really rainy outside but otherwise I want the most amount of airflow going into the firebox continuing the tour of my setup here so we're moving into the main chamber I've got a baffle plate that is just made of an old sort of cookie tray at the bottom and I've got a deflector shield the deflector shield is just an old great that's wrapped in heavy duty aluminum foil and I propped it up against the firebox opening to deflect the air downwards and then up through the baffle plate so that you get a little bit of turbulence in the hot air that's flowing throughout the cooking chamber and it's not just coming out of the firebox going up and over the brisket and the heat isn't even getting to the actual brisket so did I did a few cooks with just the normal setup with the Oklahoma Joe's and that tends to be what happens the air just goes right over top of whatever you're cooking so you really want a deflector plate that really deflects the heat down so that you're getting a more steady flow of air throughout the cooking chamber the baffle plate also helps with creating a little bit of turbulence and letting some air up in different areas of the smoker so that's helpful as well there's lots of that stuff aftermarket on the online if you want to buy that but I just prefer to do the DIY method so that's what I have the the vent for my chimney I have it a hundred percent open all the time I never closed it at all don't don't restrict that airflow you always want maximum amount of air coming out of that because that opening is what's sucking all that air through the firebox through the cooking chamber over top of your brisket and then out the stack so that's pretty much it I have my two thermometers on the top of the lid this isn't really a great indicator of what the actual temperature is at the level of the brisket so usually I have a probe thermometer that's like either right in front or right behind the brisket to tell me exactly what the temperature is and usually depends how your baffle plates are set up your reading on the top lid thermometer will be a lot higher than it actually is in the brisket every one is different if your baffle plates are set up in in a certain way then you might actually have a situation where you have a lower temperature on the top near the lid and brisket level is actually much higher so always important to get a probe thermometer so you know exactly what the temperature is right before it hits the brisket the way that you cook a brisket in an offset smoker is you want to put it as close to the cold side as possible especially in this offset smoker that doesn't have a lot of room in the in the cooking chamber you don't want to put it right next to the firebox because it's gonna cook too fast that's too much direct heat so you put the point muscle so that it's facing the firebox and you put the flat as far back to the end of the firebox as possible and the theory is that all of that hot air that hot dry air is coming through and it's picking up any of the moisture that you might have from a water pan that's right above your firebox and the main cooking chamber and I'll be talking about that later but it picks up that moisture all that dry air flows through and then you have your brisket point here and it sort of just flows over top of it and then down the brisket flat and then out the fire stack so that's why you want everything to be aerodynamic you don't want any sharp edges on your brisket because you want it to like fly like an airplane basically you want everything to be smooth you don't want that brisket to start tumbling the air creating inserted resistance smoke control or smoke quality a lot of people when they first get the Oklahoma Joe's they think oh man there's not enough smoke coming out of this thing I really got to burn more wood and create more smoke because I'm smoking meat that's not what you should do just don't do that you want to have what's called really thin blue smoke coming out of your smokestack so you should barely be able to see the smoke that is coming out you should just be able to see sort of like the shimmering heat that's flowing out of the top of the stack and a little bit of smoke and that's when you know that you have a really good quality of fire and as soon as it starts billowing and getting a little bit gray then that's when you know that the combustion temperature in your chamber is getting a bit too low and you need to check another piece of wood on there to keep that temperature up hmm okay let's talk a little bit about timing this is what everyone wants to know how long do I have to cook it and what temperature in order to be ready for dinner at you know 5:00 p.m. or ready for lunch it what time to have to start what do I have to do this is a really difficult question because there's a lot of rules of thumb out there you know some people will say one hour per pound or one-and-a-half hours per pound at 225 degrees Fahrenheit one hour per pound at 250 degrees Fahrenheit I found that all of those rules of thumbs they've never really worked for me that well what you need to do is you just need to follow one simple guideline if you have a ten to fifteen pound brisket and I'm not talking about the brisket that you buy from the store before you trim it you have to keep into account what the weight is before you put it in the actual smoker I had a thirteen pound brisket that I bought but I as you saw I trimmed off three three pounds probably worth of fat and meat so that thing is probably around ten to twelve pounds at the end of the day when I put it in there so if you have a ten to fifteen pound brisket it's going to take ten to twelve hours to cook this thing and that's what you should budget for so if you're having dinner at five you need to start this thing at five in the morning in order to give yourself enough buffer time to cook this thing wrap it at the right temperature you got to rest it for at least an hour so you got to keep that into account so leave yourself 12 hours for everything and that's the only rule of thumb you need to know give yourself 12 hours if you're done ahead of time all you need to do is put it into a cooler you can hold the temperature on these things for up to five hours and it would still be at safe food safe temperature and still be ready to go for dinner after you take it out of the cooler so don't worry about finishing early you can always stick it in a cooler and maintain that temperature so for this cook my plan is I'm gonna budget for twelve hours so I think that it's gonna take around four to five hours to hit the stall the stall is when the evaporative moisture coming off the brisket starts cooling it down rapidly and the temperatures at 225 which we're trying to maintain enough to overcome that evaporative cooling so the temperature stops rising for a long time so at this point right near the end of the stall when we get a lot of that moisture loss we want a what's called wrap it or the Texas crutch and we're gonna wrap it in butchers paper but for now let's take a look at our brisket after two hours we're gonna open the lid and I'm gonna spritz the edges that look like they've dried out a little bit and also at this point I'm gonna add in my water pan so I'm gonna add in some hot water into a loaf pan on the firebox side and that's gonna create some additional moisture throughout the cooking process and keep that brisket from drying out too much so at around noon I switch from coffee to beer as you can see it's funny to see the changes in beverages as you go throughout the day but this is what it's all about guys it's really this is like a lifestyle this Oklahoma Joe's smoker is not something that you can set and forget it's something you have to plan ahead of time you got to have your wood all prepared you got to have little chunks so that you can manage the fire you have to have a whole day dedicated to doing this if you don't want to get up at 3 in the morning and get started on this or stay up all night then one option which I usually do is I get up at around 4 or 5 in the morning then I trim everything i season the brisket throw it on the Oklahoma Joe's and then I just spend the whole day until you know sometimes up to midnight just cooking that brisket and if you want to actually serve that brisket for dinner one way of doing it is you take your Saturday to just cook that brisket and just spend all day cooking that brisket and then let it rest wrap it in plastic wrap and then put it in the fridge so that none of that moisture is is getting out and then put it in an oven at around 190 degrees Fahrenheit don't get any higher than that and just leave it in there for a few hours until that thing comes up to around 165 degrees Fahrenheit and then slice it and serve it you're cooking it in the plastic wrap so that's kind of the trick a lot of barbecue joints do that sort of method because they have to serve a ton of customers and sometimes they the briskets the night before the day before and they reheat them in the plastic that makes sure you get a really tender nice brisket and it's super juicy without losing any of that moisture so that's a little hack that you can use if you don't want to get up at like 1:00 in the morning in order to meet some sort of dinner deadline for your brisket I prefer to just take a whole Sunday or Saturday and enjoy cooking the brisket and not having to worry about serving people dinner but it's up to you how you want to do that for me cooking the brisket and spending a day doing that is almost the most important part I take my mind off work I get to relax I get to have a few beverages and just enjoy the fire and just concentrate on managing the fire and cooking the best brisket possible and that's what really gives me my head space and what clears my mind and that's why I love cooking on the Oklahoma Joe's because it's really a experience and a lifestyle it's not like a pellet smoker it's not like an electric smoker where you can yeah like I said set it and forget it you have to like the experience of doing this so keep that in mind and know what you're in for because there's gonna be some early mornings and late nights and there's gonna be a lot of times when you're wondering why you have to babysit this thing so much but if you're not enjoying it then you should consider getting like a pellet smoker or like a electric smoker or something and and not using this because like I said this is a lifestyle choice so this is going a lot slower than I thought but we're at around I put a temperature probe in it we're at around 148 degrees in the point and 143 degrees in the flat so the temperatures in the flat and the point are starting to get closer together which is which is awesome it's that means that tells me that it's cooking really evenly but the bark isn't really where I want it it's got a nice red mahogany that a lot of people like and a lot of people might pull this and wrap it right now even if they want to speed up the cooking process so that's definitely an option but I'm gonna ride it out I'm gonna go all the way up to 165 I'm gonna hit the stall and when I hit the stall I'm going to wait out the stall so what that means is as soon as I hit around 160 165 and that temperature stops increasing I'm going to increase the temperature of the smoker so I'm gonna load up a bunch more wood and I'm gonna crank it up to 275 to 280 so that I can power past the stall and as soon as I see that temperature rising again from that stalled temperature mark then that tells me that it's the time to wrap so as soon as you power past the stall and your temperature starts rising again that's the time when you want to wrap and that's gonna be the best I don't know equilibrium trade-off between really good bark and really tender juicy flavorful brisket to wrap it it's really simple a lot of people like to do the Texas crutch method which involves aluminum foil which is fine but that tends to steam the bark a little bit and you lose a lot of that great bark so what I like to use is butchers paper and a lot of Texas barbecue joints use this method you just lay out the butchers paper you put the brisket on it I like to double layer the butchers paper and then fold it over on itself and you put it so that it is again I like to put it fat side up in the smoker some people like to go fat side down depending on what they're doing some people like to add a whole bunch of beef stock or apple cider vinegar or honey or all sorts of stuff into the actual wrap in order to give it some more flavor but I really want to preserve the bark on this so I'm not putting anything in there I'm just gonna give it a few spritzes with my spray bottle on the on the butchers paper just to make it easier to wrap I'm gonna wrap it up and I'm gonna put it back on the smoker and we're still rolling the smoker at 275 degrees at this point so a little bit higher than we were before and we're gonna ride this out and wait for that temperature to rise back up again until we hit around 193 to 203 degrees Fahrenheit that's the temperature when typically the fat starts to render in the brisket and you get the most tender brisket and everything starts to just get like really wobbly it's that's the best way I can describe it it just turns into like almost a piece of jello all right let's take a look at this I just took this off the Oklahoma Joe's transferred it to a pan and it's looking pretty good looks like a lot of moisture has come and soaked through the butchers paper which is a good sign because it tells me that there's a lot of moisture and fat in this brisket so what we're gonna do now is we're going to test it for doneness and there's a couple ways you can do that so the first way is you can use your temperature probe and this serves two purposes the first is it gives you a readout on what the actual temperature is but it also lets you test for the tenderness inside the brisket so I like to come from the side over here and this is the point muscle so we're gonna go right through that into the thickest point so we're reading at about one hundred ninety nine degrees Fahrenheit and my internal leavin thermometer was reading at about that for about the last thirty minutes and it wasn't rising in temperature anymore so I'm pretty certain that this is the final temperature I don't want to risk leaving it in for longer and overcooking it now in the flat we want to again come in from the side and we're reading at one hundred ninety seven which is okay it's not really usually what I want to be at but that all depends the second test which is what we'll do right now first of all I'm gonna get my gloves on here so it's got a pair of cotton gloves and then I've got some black rubber gloves this is just to protect my hands from the heat because this is super hot right now so now we're just gonna lift it up I'm just gonna feel underneath it for how bendy it is it's pretty good the flats a little stiff but it's going to continue to rise in temperature so I'm not too worried about it and the point is pretty good I'm pretty certain the point is done and you can see that as I picked it up a lot more of the juices started rolling out so I don't want to disturb this too much anymore but I'm pretty confident this is done so I'm gonna rest this for about two hours I'm gonna let this just steam out on the counter for about 15 minutes first just so it stops cooking and then I'm going to transfer it to the cooler leave it in there for two hours take it out and then we'll slice it up all right this is the moment of truth I'm taking this brisket out of the cooler and it's sitting at about a hundred and sixty three degrees so it's the perfect temperature to slice into it let's unwrap this from the butchers paper and see what we got I'm just gonna cut this thing right between the point and the flat so you guys can see how juicy it is nice smoke ring lots of juice really deep black bark with lots of texture from that course salt and pepper look how easily it pulls apart this is a really good texas-style brisket for the rest of the brisket make sure you have a long knife and you slice it against the grain your family and friends are gonna love this and you're gonna be really proud of this when it's done and now that you've mastered brisket you're definitely gonna want to try out cooking some beef short ribs in the next video I'm gonna show you how to make the best beef short ribs ever on the Oklahoma Joe's offset smoker so click that video on the top left of your screen and I'll see you there

Channel: Smoke Trails BBQ

Views: 344,727

Rating: 4.7123289 out of 5

Keywords: texas style smoked beef brisket, how to smoke brisket, brisket, smoked brisket recipe, how to make smoked brisket, how to smoke texas style brisket, how to smoke brisket in the oklahoma joes offset smoker, oklahoma joe's, brisket in smoker, brisket in offset smoker, smoked brisket recipe in oklahoma joe's, texas brisket in oklahoma joe's smoker, smoked texas brisket, texas style beef brisket recipe

Id: ENbP0iKMdyc

Length: 36min 5sec (2165 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 30 2020