How to Trim a Brisket | Mad Scientist BBQ

hey guys welcome to mad scientist barbecue i'm jeremy yoder and today i'm going to show you what i think is the best way to trim a brisket for barbecue success [Applause] i've been getting a lot of questions about how to trim a brisket so i thought instead of answering a bunch of questions over and over again i should do a video about how to trim a brisket because i've trimmed briskets in videos in the past as parts of other videos but i've never done one dedicated to just trimming now trimming a brisket the right way won't guarantee you success with your barbecue but trimming it in the wrong way will guarantee failure there are basically three different styles of barbecue when it comes to the mental approach you take to preparing the food there's competition style barbecue there is backyard style barbecue then there's restaurant style bbq competition you're focused on just that one perfect bite restaurant style barbecue you're focused on consistency and a large volume and then backyard barbecue you're focused on making the best meal for you your family your friends for whomever but the people who are going to be at your house eating with you most of the time backyard barbecue falls somewhere in the middle between competition style and restaurant style because if you think of it as a continuum competition barbecue they pull out all the stops to make that one perfect bite restaurant style barbecue they're looking for consistency and to make sure that every slice that comes off that brisket is something that they can sell to customers and backyard bbq usually finds its place somewhere in the middle so let me give you an example when it comes to rubs you have competition barbecue where they're adding all kinds of very complex rubs with msg and you know cayenne or some spice and then they're saucing things and they're dusting things with rub that they grind up in a coffee grinder and then you have restaurant style barbecue where it's very simple with rubs so it's usually salt and pepper or maybe it's lowry seasoned salt and pepper but it's it's very simple in comparison to competition style backyard bbq is usually somewhere in the middle so people can make their own rubs they might find a store-bought rub that they really like but it's not overly complicated this is one of those things where backyard barbecue isn't somewhere in between the two but it's kind of its own animal we're not going to be covering competition style trimming just because it's completely different than backyard and restaurant style barbecue it's very complicated if you want to know exactly how to do it you can click on the card here harry sue barbecue champion he's been on tv he came over and showed me exactly how he does it so you get perfect slices and perfect burnt ends it's an entirely different beast but if you're interested you can check it out i'll also put a link in the description for you but we're going to focus on backyard and restaurant i'm going to show you the variations that i do for both so one will be what i recommend for most backyard cookers and the other one would be how i would trim a brisket if i'm going to be cooking it on a 500 or a thousand gallon offset okay the final things before we get into this number one leave your brisket as cold as possible until you're ready to trim it you don't want to get it out and let it sit for a long time because then the fat starts to get soft and it's difficult to cut through also when it comes to cutting make sure you have a sharp knife so this one is pretty sharp right you don't have to spend a fortune to get a sharp knife this is a mercer bony knife i think it's six inches long it's what 12 13 bucks on amazon if you want one of these i'll put a link in the description but i have spent money on fancy looking knives that had damascus steel and wooden handles and guess what i never use those knives guess what i use all the time this cheap knife okay it works extremely well and if i drop it i don't care it was 12 bucks it wasn't a 100 knife so that's what i recommend so get a nice sharp knife and now let's get the brisket out of the fridge let's get it out of the plastic and see what we're working with before i move on to the video i want to take a chance to thank today's sponsor hellofresh america's number one meal kit and it's america's number one meal kit for very good reason number one is it is incredibly convenient the food just shows up at your door the recipe is included if you follow the steps you're going to have incredible tasting food at the end the second reason is there's no waste with a hello fresh meal kit for instance if you need two tablespoons of sour cream you don't have to go to the store and buy a pond of sour cream and leave it sitting in your refrigerator until it expires and then you have to throw it away you get exactly what you need all included together and third and ultimately most important is the food is absolutely delicious i search out great food all the time and all the meals that i've had from them have been delicious my family loves them too it's a great option the way we use hellofresh makes our lives so much more convenient i cook all the time but a lot of the cooking that i do takes 12 16 hours to make and my family needs to eat and there's only so much barbecue that you can eat anyway so what hellofresh does for our family is gives us a convenient way to make delicious food that everyone enjoys and especially with you know a kid now it just makes life so much simpler and we don't have to sacrifice on the quality of food that we eat so go to hellofresh.com and use code mad scientist bbq 14 for 14 free meals plus free shipping that's hellofresh.com and use code mad scientist bbq 14 for 14 free meals plus free shipping we have our brisket out of the plastic and on the cutting board now so we can get started but there are a couple important facts that you need to know before we start trimming first the side that's facing up right now i call that the fat side why because it's covered in a thick layer of fat the side on the opposite right here this side i call the meat side because there's a lot of exposed muscle here there's of course some fat but not nearly as much as the other side so there are two distinct sides to a brisket the fat side and the meat side and then there are two distinct ends to a brisket we have what we call the flat the thinner part here and the point the thicker part the flat has one muscle and then a layer of fat that sits on top of it the point over here actually has a muscle a layer of fat another muscle and then another layer of fat so you need just a really brief bovine anatomy lesson here so the brisket comes from what would be the chest on a cow right so you can think of your own chest you have two muscles the pectoralis major pectoralis minor but in cattle it's called the pectoralis superficialis and the pectoralis profundus that's not super important nobody's going to quiz you on that if you make great barbecue but what is important is to know that there are two different muscles and so you have to account for them both when trimming so i'm going to break down how i trim a brisket step by step and one thing i've noticed is that pretty much everybody who does a lot of this they develop their own style so they might start on the fat side they might start on the meat side they might make cuts you know wherever even the way they open the plastic i think everybody has developed their own method for so there are a lot of people who are super super good chud's barbecue brad he's amazing he trimmed a brisket blindfolded one of the most remarkable things i think i've ever seen also joe yim he is just a wizard i have some footage of kind of a trim off from a barbecue festival uh and uh he he killed it there he's gonna be grounded i'll make some meat sausage right that's where i make this roll joe it's all so there are different ways you can go about doing it but the principles are all the same so what i like to do to start off with is first i trim off a layer from the sides of the brisket so this long side here and the long side on the opposite end and so the reason i do that is because i want to number one make sure that any oxidized meat or anything like that is exposed and then also because i think that the moist meat underneath will help the rub stick to the meat so if you want to use a binder or something like that by all means go for it i prefer not to i just find it to be messy i just don't really like it nothing wrong with it go for it if you want to but i find that this gives me the best results [Music] also i think that trimming off just a very thin layer from the sides helps me out too because that way i can see how thick the fat is on the fat side of the brisket so it gives me a good idea about how much to trim off next what i do is any bits of fat or meat that are thin and kind of hanging off like this piece right here it's not kind of integral like one whole piece of the brisket i trim that off so this i just don't think it's going to do well over a really long cook time so i just trim this guy off and then any bits of fat like this that's kind of sticking up that's gone any muscle or anything like that that goes [Music] next i start working on trimming off the fat on the fat side here so i'm looking for about a quarter of an inch the idea is that by the end of the cook i want it to render down so that you have this beautiful bark on top of the meat and you kind of have this marriage of rendered fat plus the rub plus the smoke and it makes a delicious bite rather than some thick unrendered fat there so i want to trim off enough that it will render well but not so much that it will all disappear and dry out the brisket so the goal is to have about a quarter of an inch on top of the brisket now while you're trimming i would say try to make long strokes because you want everything to be as even as possible because if you have divots then liquid is going to pool in there and it's going to make uneven bark it's not going to look as appetizing it should still taste really good it just won't look quite as good also if you get a bald spot while you're trimming okay that's okay it's not the end of the world it happens all the time i've trimmed a lot of briskets i still do that you know quite a bit and i try not to but one thing you don't want to do is if you hit a bald spot don't just keep going because you don't want a bald strip on the brisket a bald spot you know with the smoke and the rub and you know 16 hours of cooking it's going to cover a lot of that up but if you have a big strip of balled meat on here it's really going to make a difference you don't want to do that so while you're trimming you can start and then you lift up the fat and you can kind of see where your knife is going if you see that you've hit meat you've gone too deep then stop i would cut that fat off and then move just past the bald spot and start over don't just keep going so i'm gonna start trimming this and i always start on the fat side because the colder the fat is the easier it is to trim so i do that first [Applause] [Music] all right so right here i've been trimming and i can see that i have some meat that's kind of being seen through the fat so i know that if i go deeper i'm going to get a bald spot so at this point i'm going to angle the knife up and make sure i don't go too deep because i don't want to expose any meat [Applause] [Music] so i'm going to keep going until i get about a quarter of an inch everywhere and the one thing you can do is you can kind of poke the brisket and if the fat feels thick then you know you can still trim some more so keep going until you got about a quarter of an inch everywhere then we'll go to the next step [Applause] [Music] next step specifically for backyard smokers because most backyard smokers don't have the same kind of airflow that tends to dry things out what i'm going to do is i'm going to take out some of this fat right here because i want to save as much of this meat as possible so a lot of restaurants they'll come in here kind of at an angle and just take this whole thing down because what they don't want to do is have customers pay for a slice of meat a huge chunk of fat and then a little bit of meat on the underside so for consistency and to make sure that every slice is a slice that they can sell a lot of times that gets trimmed off but for backyard cookers you don't have to operate by the same rules because if somebody comes over they're not going to ask for their money back if they came over to your house for dinner and there's some extra fat on a slice the meat that's on it is still going to taste really really good all right so just kind of dig in here just try to follow the muscle down [Music] [Music] [Applause] this band of meat right here isn't very thick but it's so well marbled that it's going to make delicious burnt ends when you're done with this brisket so backyard smokers keep this thing on some people call it the mohawk there are other names for it too but i've forgotten them i think but if you're doing it in your backyard i'd keep it next we go to the meat side so a couple things we're gonna do we have this big chunk of fat right here now you could try to cave that out i haven't found a lot of success with that usually just kind of compromises the integrity of the brisket so what i like to do is come in at an angle and just work my way down through there and just try to make a good even cut then you have little pieces of fat here on the muscle and if you have a sharp knife and you kind of go flat you can take that off you can just kind of scrape it off almost you might get a little bit of the muscle tissue with it but it's going to be such a small part in comparison to how thick that muscle is that it's not going to make any difference and the reason we take that off isn't because it would be gross or anything it's just when it renders down it actually messes up the bark that you work really hard to create so we'll take that off and then any thick seams of fat we're going to try to trim down any pieces of muscle that kind of got gashed in the processing we're going to take that off as well so we'll clean up this side and then we're almost done [Music] [Music] i also try to remove any silver skin that's on the bottom just for consistency [Music] next up we have basically the final step which is shaping this brisket and we just follow a simple rule i call it the rule of thumb i know it's very creative but basically any part of the flat that is the thinner part of the brisket that is thinner than my thumb i cut off and i don't want any sharp angles or anything like that so i'll just kind of make gentle cuts and then when the meat is thicker than my thumb i stopped making those cuts so let me show you what that looks like right here this is definitely thinner than my thumb so you just make gentle cuts one gentle curves okay that looks pretty good that's still a little bit thin so let's do just a shade more and then i kind of want it to angle in with everything else i don't want any sharp corners [Music] one last thing for the shaping here there is a corner right here that came bald from the processor now there's no fat on top of it to protect it this is lean meat this is thin at the end here too so i'm going to trim that off try to round it out and make it nice and even [Music] [Music] and that in my opinion is the best way to trim a brisket that you're going to use for backyard cooking now if you're cooking on a big offset things are going to be a little bit different and so a lot of restaurant style trimming is going to be based on that now traeger might use the word convection to sell a lot of their smokers but really convection truly matters when you have a large offset and there's a huge amount of airflow also in smaller offsets to a lesser degree but large offsets just huge volumes of air moving through there and because of that and because they want consistency in these slices restaurants will trim more off so this guy that's going to hang out on your backyard offset and make delicious burnt ends unless that guy's going away also a lot of this meat that's probably going to survive a cook on your backyard offset is going gonna have to get trimmed away in the shaping process so this is how i like to do it when i cook on my 500 or if i'm using a thousand gallon smoker or something like that quick and easy take the knife put it at maybe like a 30 degree angle if i'm guessing and just kind of trim this thing down because you don't want anything flopping around so you kind of trim it down and this part always hurts me because look at that marbling you can't tell me that wouldn't have been tasty but for consistency's sake i totally get it so they take that and use that for delicious sausages you could use it for burgers or something like that if you're only doing one brisket it's not easy to get a lot of meat out of it but you may save them for a while and it might be useful to you and the part underneath is so lean and the convection is a potent force in those big offsets that we're going to have to shape that out and trim that down some so i'm going to get in here and start taking it out delicious flavor in this not a lot of marbling so it's going to have to be used for another purpose chili burgers sausages whatever and now we reshape this guy and that's basically the only thing i do differently when i trim my brisket for my large offset and every single slice that comes off this brisket is going to be money it's not going to be ah will it survive one and survive no this is take it to the bank every bite is going to be delicious so if you follow these steps if you make sure you leave enough fat on the top if you trim off unnecessary things if you trim off things that are too thin or little pieces that are hanging on you're gonna have a better product at the end of your cook and for all of you who are out there spending lots of time doing your barbecue make sure that you get yourself started on the right foot so i really hope this helps you guys if you have any questions leave them down in the comments below i'll try to get back to you on those and i hope it helps good luck with your barbecue if you enjoyed the video hit the like button down below and you can also subscribe to the channel and you can follow me on instagram twitter and facebook at mad scientist barbecue i'll see you guys next time [Music] you

Channel: Mad Scientist BBQ

Views: 210,121

Keywords: brisket, bbq, barbecue, how to trim a brisket, trimming a brisket, brisket bbq, smoked brisket, beef brisket, how to trim a brisket for smoking, how to trim brisket flat, brisket trim, best knife for trimming a brisket, yoder, trim, trimming, competition brisket, backyard offset, offset smoker, offset smoker cooking, offset smokers, smoker, trimming knife, texas style, traeger, traeger grill, weber smokey mountain, kamado joe, offset smoker tip, offset smoker temperature control

Id: a03pbmnQIlQ

Length: 20min 51sec (1251 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 30 2021