I Cooked the World's Most Expensive Brisket. Here's What Happened.

hey guys welcome to mad scientist barbecue I'm Jeremy odor and today I'm doing probably the most special thing I have ever tried to cook I've been looking for one of these things for literally years but today I finally have it a Japanese a5 Wagyu brisket if you take a look at this purse Kade it's supposed to be the same cut as what we get in the states but you can see that it's cut a little bit differently so they took out kind of big chunks of fat and with this kind of wag you the marbling is so insane that what is normally you know a well marbled piece of brisket is almost pure fat so the flat looks amazing like I mean there's more marbling in the flat then you could get on pretty much any kind of American steak but I'm gonna try and clean this up and get it ready to put on the cooker and I'm gonna do 275 burnin pecan wood and I'm season with only salt and pepper with a piece of meat this amazing you don't want to ruin any part of it by adding a ton of stuff to it so just salt and pepper and good-quality clean smoke from a clean fire all right to give you a sense of how insane the marbling is in this flat I just cut off the end where I'm just kind of rounding it off so nothing burns that is ridiculous I don't know how to emphasize enough how amazing this is also because this is what you you see that just the sunlight is starting to melt the fat on this thing we'll talk more about that later and why this is special why wag you in particular is special and even more specifically why Japanese a-5 is the rolls-royce of beef but this just gives you a sense and it's unreal I I have dreamed of cooking one of these for a long time and this is living up even to greater expectations than I could have had so the basic process for this brisket is going to be essentially the same as for any other brisket that I do I'm going to trim off the fat on the top so it's not too thick but with this wag you you'll find out when I explain later well you don't have to be too concerned with that but on the bottom side on the underside of the meat I want to trim all that fat off so I get good smoke penetration because with smoke and penetrating and flavoring meat it doesn't really work on the fat you actually have to have exposed meat so the smoke can penetrate and you get a deep clean clear smoke flavor so we're gonna trim this guy up like any other brisket you want to see an in-depth review that process you can check out my how to smoke a brisket video but I'm gonna get this guy ready and get it on the smoker [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] okay now we're trimmed up about as much as I want to do and you have no idea how much it pains me to be trimming this stuff off because this was definitely not cheap these trimmings I have on the cutting board I would estimate that it's at least $100 with a fat and stuff that I had to trim off and that hurts a lot but this is absolutely beautiful me this is the most gorgeous looking meat that I've ever seen on a brisket and it's not even close I mean okay so if the best-looking brisket I've ever seen is here in terms of marbling this one is up here like higher than I can reach it's absolutely insane so we're gonna season it up with some salt and pepper I trimmed the top here to maybe a quarter of inch of fat pretty normal for me and then I tried to trim as much fat off at the bottom as I could without actually digging into the meat so I tried to avoid that and I think the fat will render off on the bottom pretty well so we'll still be able to get smoke flavor and smoke penetration in that underside to try and get great flavor because I wouldn't want to do a disservice to this meat by not cooking it well so at this point all we're gonna do season it up put it on the smoker the brisket here it's pretty long but it's pretty thin in the flat so I got to watch it carefully the last thing I would ever want to do is ruin this not only would it hurt me deep down inside it also hurt my wallet to waste such an incredible piece of meat so here we go salt and pepper 50/50 [Music] as you can see I didn't go too heavy with the rub because this is a pretty thin flat and my thinking is if I over seasoned this I can't go back and I do not want to do that so I'm gonna play it kind of safe do a little bit of seasoning and if necessary we can add a little bit of finishing salt at the end that's not going to be a big deal I think that this is an appropriate level of seasoning I think it's just right so put it on and wait to see the magic happen all right I'm nervous like father-to-be here or something because I cannot wait for this thing to be done it's gonna be so amazing so I'm gonna watch this carefully I'm gonna try not to let the temperature swing more than five degrees either way I'm gonna start it off nice and slow at 250 but after about the first hour I'm going to jump it up to 275 my normal cooking temperature but I'm gonna play it by ear I know I can always up the temperature but what I don't want to do is start too hot have problems that I can't recover from so start at 250 but the main cook temperature will be 275 unless I tell you otherwise okay so the brisket has been on here for a little over well actually almost three hours now so let's take a look at what it looks like and then let's talk about why you now the exterior meat surfaces are starting to look really red which tells me that the myoglobin has kind of been locked in place and getting good smoke flavor on the exterior of the meat we're in the middle of the cook now and this part doesn't get a lot of glory or a lot of talk but you know as a pitmaster what that really means is you're managing a fire so this is what I do for the vast majority of my time so a lot of times when people ask me what I do for a living I will jokingly say I watch fires which is what I do for the majority of my time but let's talk about what wag you is and why it's special earlier we said we have Japanese a5 Wagyu and it's special for basically two reasons number one is the Japanese a5 Wagyu is kind of the top of the totem pole when it comes to fat marbling in the meat so we have USDA select which is not very great then we have choice which is very common then we have prime which is good but when you compare that to the Japanese scale prime is nowhere close to the top it's not even in the same universe I'll see if I can insert a graphic here of a comparison between the two but Japanese the top grade is a 5 and that's exactly the kind of biscuit that we have which means it has absolutely tremendous marbling something that you're not going to find in any other cattle in any other part of the world this is literally the highest quality beef money can buy the thing that makes the marbling in the Japanese a-five special is that they're simply more of it than in any other kind of beef in the world so with a select brisket it'll just be lean meat in the flat with a choice brisket which you might find you know in a lot of places you might see one or two specks of fat in the muscle with a prime risk it might see a few specks of fat this is better marbling than you'll find in the highest-quality ribeye steak in your area probably quite frankly the marbling here is tremendous it's going to be the best marbling we've ever seen look the marbling in Japanese a5 Wagyu beef it's a psychological operation what's happening is Japanese government's try to control American knives you explained to me what happened with this Wagyu beef back when I was a Navy SEAL before I became the governor of Minnesota and wrestled Ricky Steamboat at WrestleMania I knew that there was a conspiracy about this wag you meet all joking aside the simple fact is there is more fat intramuscularly or that is marbling within the meat in Japanese a5 Wagyu beef than in any other kind of beef in the entire world but that's only one part of life so special so here we see the trimmings from the brisket before one thing you notice is just from being out in the Sun even though it's not hot outside it's just the Sun in the morning has turned a lot of this to liquid on the outside so if you look at these gloves are covered in liquid that's not water that is rendered fat the second part that makes Wagyu beef so special is that it renders at a very low temperature which means you don't have to cook it to oblivion for that fat to render and offer moisture in the meat that you're eating and I preached this many times what you perceive as moisture in meat isn't usually water it's usually rendered fat how many of you have had a chuck roast cooked in a crock pot it's literally soaking in water but you eat it and it tastes dry and stringy the reason why is because what you perceive as moisture is rendered fat and this fat renders at a lower temperature than basically any other beef fat and the reason behind that is this you could take a jug of olive oil that's pure fat you could take you know chunks of beef that you trim off a select brisket also pure fat and one is a solid one is a liquid and there's a little bit of kind of biochemistry behind that the reason why olive oil is a liquid whereas you know beef fat is a solid or kind of you know room-temperature coconut oil is a solid is because it has to do with how much saturated fat is present in that fat product olive oil has a lot of unsaturated fat which for our intents and purposes means it's less dense it doesn't pack together as well so if you want to think about what fat is chemically essentially there's a molecule called glycerol and you can think of it as a molecule having three hooks and on those three hooks you hang 3 fatty acids basically long carbon chains that make up that if you have unsaturated fatty acids those chains aren't straight they kind of bend off and are crooked and don't let things pack easily but if they're saturated they're straight and they pack easily and a lot of times they're solids at room temperature so when you have something like olive oil lots of unsaturated fat when you have really hard fat from beef almost exclusively saturated fat then you have something in the middle say like coconut oil which will melt at a low temperature or butter which is Quaeda solid at room temperature but very soft the reason why you fat is special is because it has far more unsaturated fatty acids than regular beef what does that mean that means it melts at a lower temperature it renders and provides moisture or what you perceive as moisture while you eat the beef that's why Japanese beef is highly sought after and extremely expensive the reason people are willing to pay big bucks for this beef is precisely because you can't recreate it any other way and there are a couple reasons behind why it's so special number one is the breed of beef we use the word white you to talk about Wagyu beef of course now a lot of times people will confuse or conflate wag you with Kobe Kobe is kind of a you can think of it as a brand of beef right so Wagyu beef is just the Japanese word or cow so any of the Japanese breeds I think therefore are what you but what makes Kobe beef Kobe beef is that it's grown in a certain Prefecture and it gets certified through a certain process and it's just one particular version of Wagyu beef it just happens to be the most well known so in the United States I think there are only a couple places that actually sell legitimate real Kobe beef so if you see Kobe on something you buy at you know any store or you order online it's probably fake not always but probably fake that doesn't mean it's necessarily better it's just the most well-known brand but with Wagyu beef you can get something that's just as good as any Kobe it's just based on the rating and in this case the a5 rating is the highest rating there is which means we have the highest degree of marbling in our meat and we know that with those cattle it's going to render extremely well you can have amazingly moist meat that you wouldn't be able to recreate by any other means and then lastly the reason that Wagyu beef apart from the breed having just incredible marbling properties the reason it's so special is how they raise them in Japan so they give them massages and they feed them beer and they don't want them to be stressed out they treat them in a way that is all about pampering the animal that you have ultimate marbling in the meat and that's something that we just don't do here in the United States we can grow them ethically you know on a pasture and maybe feed them from grain in the end of their lives we don't have kind of the built in animal husbandry to raise them in the way that they raise them in Japan that's why this is absolutely remarkable now I have a tendency to ramble and I feel like I've maybe been doing that right now because I just gush over you know all the geek aspects of meat and science I love meat I love science and you know to kind of delve into it is a lot of fun for me so if any of that was confusing let me break it down reason number one is special lots of marbling reason number two that marbling melts at a lower temperature and provides moisture to the meat and the reason those two things are present are because the wide you breed are exceptional for marbling and the way they raise them in Japan produces the kind of fat that renders extremely well now earlier I mentioned that might find things labeled as Co baby for Cove a style beef and a lot of times it's kind of a counterfeit I don't want to you know call into question the motives of the people who had named them those things but probably if I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt it's because people associate Co Bay with wag you and in a lot of people's minds those things are synonymous so what they want to do is they want to market their product in a way that is commensurate with how the consumer will view that product so just keep in mind that most of what you see is Co BAE is not Co babies now all that is to say that if you encounter something called Kobe beef it's probably not Kobe beef but you might encounter something called Wagyu beef now there's a lot of leeway so for instance in the United States we have Angus beef a lot of times the only thing that's really required for something to be Angus beef is that the cattle have black hides so Certified Angus beef it has to be black hide in cattle and so it's not necessarily that they're going in and doing DNA tests on these cattle that are Certified Angus beef I'm sure they have some proportion maybe it's a hundred percent maybe it's 92 percent maybe it's a 50 percent maybe it's 36 percent but we don't really know with Wagyu it's also very fuzzy most of the Wagyu beef that you will encounter is a Wagyu hybrid so there are Australian companies that will market Wagyu beef there are a couple places in the United States that do Wagyu beef but almost always they're hybrids I only know of maybe one company that does pureblood wag you and the reason American companies and Australian companies tend to hybridize the beef is because number one there is such a ridiculous amount of marbling in Wagyu beef that's full blood that you don't really miss it necessarily if you've got you know a 50/50 crossbreed with wag you and say Black Angus or wag you and in certain breed of your choice there's so much marbling that it doesn't really matter to the average consumer the second reason is because there are characteristics of those breeds with which they cross the leg you that are desirable so for instance angus grow quickly and there you know hardy breed and the have a tremendous taste so he crossed Waikiki with Angus that's great for a Holstein Holstein actually even though they're typically dairy cattle I I'm kind of familiar with him because my grandfather owned a dairy farm he had tons of Holsteins there they grow very tall so I would assume that these hybrids are larger than other kinds of hybrids and there is tremendous marbling in the Holstein breed itself so by crossing them you get some added benefits and you don't really lose everything in terms of marbling it's still better than anything you're gonna find it's labeled Prime at any grocery store or at most any meat supplier and the last thing I feel like I need to mention about Wagyu beef is at least in my experience there are two things that are different when you cook it aside from the increased marbling and the increased rendered fat number one is the color is different for some reason there's a reddish color the first time I actually cook Wagyu beef I thought I had a smoke ring that you know was five inches thick you know all the way through the point of my brisket I thought this is the most amazing thing that's ever happened I need to do this again but then I realized it was probably just some function of the Wagyu beef having some kind of different chemical composition the second thing that's different about the Wagyu beef is it has a different flavor so what I associate in my head with a beefy flavor isn't something that I would necessarily compare exactly to wag you if a Wagyu beef I would know I'm eating beef but the flavor is appreciably different and as strange as this sounds it tastes less beefy and that could just be because the the palate gets coated in rendered fat and the composition of the beef is a you know a little bit different it still tastes phenomenal I'm still amazing and I would take a Wagyu steak any day of the week but just know that the flavor is going to be different on the color once cooked will also be different so we've been spraying this brisket about every 30 or 45 minutes pretty much every time I add word to the fire I'm spraying that brisket I want every corner to be still moist and pliable so that's what I've been doing half dinegar half water right now we have a great bark on here if you push on the fat it gives its rendered beautiful everything is great so I have the two sheets of butcher paper out I'm gonna spray it one more time with the vinegar water mixture and then I'm gonna wrap it up put it back on the smoker to finish [Applause] all right back on the smoker after eight hours so hopefully we're gonna look at maybe another two or three hours by that point it will be dark when it's done so you may or may not send me pull it off but we will take it inside we will slice it up and we will do a taste test and give you hopefully some good shots the brisket when it's sliced and you can see the difference that Japanese a5 Wagyu gives versus something you might find at your local grocery store okay so this Japanese a5 Wagyu brisket even though it's really special the ultimate test is eating it and so if you take a look at this now we see that the fat on top is all yellowed and started to render down so exactly what we want to see and we have on all the meat parts we see a nice dark bark and if you peel that back a little bit you see red from the smoke ring that would be underneath and so the real test of this brisket isn't how pretty it is when we're cutting it up or trimming it but it's how it tastes and so it's time to do that now all right now to taste this brisket I'm here at my friend Jonathan's house and I've decided to trade him this brisket Japanese a5 Wagyu certified all the way from Japan for a roll of toilet paper and so it only is fitting that we give it a shot together I get the toilet paper he gets the brisket and give him a price of this today this is almost a fair trade I think it's pretty close pretty pretty close pretty close I mean there are people in fistfights at the grocery store right now to get toilet paper haven't seen anybody fighting over brisket yet so I don't know maybe I'm getting that you know the better than this deal regardless I will still get to try this and see how it is so what I'm going to do is I'm going to cut some slices from the flat and then some slices from the plain and one thing that Jonathan pointed out was actually do you want to explain kind of why you think it looks so strange well Jerry Brothers in it was a really funny looking brisket and I couldn't figure out why it was so long and so skinny and it looks like they actually took the the point and the flat and almost filleted underneath between the tube and then flip the the point back over so it's almost like a butterfly at brisket which I've never seen before but it's kind of interesting way of doing it because it means you also get bark underneath the point on that part of the flat that normally is kind of I guess at least in my opinion the least tasty part of the brisket right it's not really exposed to the smoke underneath and it's not really exposed to smoke on top and so what you have is this closed textured a lot of times not super moist part of the brisket that is kind of occupying space and then yeah the point on top that's delicious and like oh this is kind of a space holder underneath yep and then a big chunk of fat that you don't eat into that right I think was trying to regular brisket like that nice I'm up with yeah I've cooked a ton of brisket so yeah I've benefited from most of those like all right so let's let's let's try this one out maybe cut something kind from the middle here [Music] [Music] [Music] now the first thing I noticed when cutting into this flat is we left enough of a fat cap on there that we you know we have some protection on the top of me but we see that some smoke did penetrate through because we see a smoke ring even though it's small on the top the second thing and the most important thing is that when you squeeze this together you see fat glistening and juices flowing out of it that's something that's incredibly rare in a fight if you have accomplished that then you should win a Nobel Prize in barbecue because you are a master and that never happens this is kind of remarkable stuff so at this point let's taste it and find out how it is so the two parts we're going to taste first are I'm gonna take kind of the end cut from the flat and then a slice from the flat see how those turned out if you know the barbecue flavor if the smoke doesn't taste great that's my fault but I want to see what's special about this brisket versus any other brisket you might find in the store all right there you go okay like we should pray first or something this is okay here we go texture is really good he's pretty good for a brisket flat it is yours when you squeeze it you see all this rendered fat I never seen that just not on the flap yeah it almost it doesn't taste like the like the point but the reality is that the monomer sure it feels more like the point yeah that's just know this is crazy to me um I was get really strange all right I want to try this in cut so you what that tastes like ooh you squeeze that even that's what what you see hi there house is gonna be good that was good the Bark's will again the smoke is more mellow than some of the other briskets I've had for dad not bad by any means but there's not as much smoke to it Enders well maybe not as clear signal how long did this one smoke versus one of your numbers yeah before wrapping this was about six hours okay yeah so usually I go eight or nine yeah I just I just didn't want to destroy it I want to be kind of conservative but at this point we're gonna try the most succulent portion of any brisket and on this one it should be particularly good so what I'm gonna do is take a part of this point here and cut it up and see what that tastes like now wish you guys could be here because this cutting board is so saturated with juice like rendered fat that is dripping off the cutting board on to the table and it's gonna be a big mess to clean up but what that tells me is that these bites are going to be incredibly moist and so we're gonna do is gonna try kind of burnt ends from the point of the brisket and so that's usually the most moist part on any regular brisket so this should be a life changing experience rich is very rich it's very Richard couldn't eat a lot of those no you say you can do a lot of that I can eat another one though hmm well all the fat in it just it kind of squishes and turns into nothingness why you're chewing it but the texture still good I mean it's still it doesn't feel like mush right but it feels very very very tender yeah wow that's amazing um I really enjoyed this a lot this is kind of a cool new different experience for me um obviously I've never cooked one before cuz the first time I've ever been able to find one but if I had to do it again if anybody out there is lucky enough to get you know your hands your grubby mitts on one of these briskets what I suggest is smoke it longer before wrapping I would go lower temperature and try to build as much bark as possible because you're not gonna eliminate the moisture inside but you're going to crank up the flavor that you get on the exterior of the meat so with each bite will have huge flavor on the outside combined with the moisture of we marble piece of meat on the inside and that way you'll have the best brisket you can possibly have this is certainly no slouch but if I did it again I think that's how I would change it regardless this is simply the most expensive brisket that I could possibly find and something that I probably won't have many times in my life but I'm glad I had it now and then actually from that one sake this is part of the brisket that I usually trim off when I'm doing my own I don't stuff that I think I have a feeling this is gonna be good get more flavor I get any more salt if anything I noticed the that last bite had better smoke mm-hmm but that would have been mine by commoners I didn't get as much smoke out of this that was actually the best yeah yeah yeah so here when we when it has meat exposed top and bottom see that's what it is though yeah that was way better all right I'm sure that guy that was okay so you guys can fight for the stuff right here in the middle okay all right one more thing wanted to try here we had a part of the brisket right in the middle that's exposed meat on the top and the bottom and so hopefully you get like a bigger dose of smoke flavor and still there's no part of this brisket that you can dry out I mean you could squeeze that I feel like I could get 16 ounces of rendered fat if I squeeze this thing hard enough so let's give a shot that's better the best bite so far superior unspecified so far yeah more smoke more flavor better I don't think it's possible to dry this out I don't think you could even try that beer yeah we'll never try right but yeah hmm ready to keep cutting up right that's pretty good hmm I need to keep cutting that that's pretty good well yeah well I feel like if I keep cutting a too long I won't get to leave with that toilet paper so I got another this beautiful apron I got everything I know that you have these aprons did you know them all right I feel official okay I don't look as good as you but you know that's a line from men in black we make this look good yeah I make it look good I just go along for the ride any happen it works oh well thank you for coming along with the privates bud all right now after trying several different parts of this brisket what are your final thoughts on what's different about this versus a brisket you would buy you know in a Costco or someplace like that the the fat content was clearly different it was even all the way throughout there was no there were no fatty areas necessarily that you have Anessa cut away so the moisture was was the best of anybody I've ever had and I've had a lot of briskets the smoke didn't have as much as some of the other ones but the corner that we got are here actually probably the best flavor of anything on there right it's really hard to find anything wrong with it and even that corner that got beat up with you know smoke and heat was still moist very moist yeah ad way through so I think I was too cautious with this and kind of babied it along too much and I think if I would have gone harder more smoke trying to render the fat more try to build a bigger thicker bark not have been a better choice for me this was a hopefully not once in a lifetime experience maybe a few times in a lifetime but yeah as far as the fat the fat is different in its composition it's different in how it cooks it's different in how its layered through the meat and even the the flavor of the meat is a little bit different so this is something that if you have the time and the money to try it once absolutely % do it just make sure you build an incredible bark because you will not dry it out unless you light it on fire and even then it might still be moist on the inside so it's been a lot of fun to cook this for me I think that just become sane amount of rendered fat in this is something that I'll think about 20 years from now if you have an opportunity to do it I would encourage you to really quick one thing that I noticed well you know we're kind of hanging out it was kind of much on this brisket is that for some reason this fat so that kind of the chemical composition with that may be playing into this I'm not sure but I actually am picking up a lot of smoke flavor in the fat itself typically when I cook briskets the fat doesn't really absorb some of flavor it's the meat that is exposed to the smoke on the exterior for some reason this absorbs that flavor and it's actually super good when you combine a piece of lean meat even though it's packed with marbled fat with some of the fat on the exterior because then you get a hired hit of smoke flavor if you enjoyed this video hit the like button down below subscribe to the channel and make sure to hit the notification though because if you hit the notification bell you get notified every time I produce new content so when new videos come out you'll know that they're out and you have an opportunity to find them and click on them and see hopefully fun and informative barbecue content you can also follow me on twitter instagram at mad scientist BBQ i'll see you guys next time but it's probably because if i'm giving them the minute but probably if i'm giving them the benefit of doubt then a benefit of the doubt alright so then again so what does not become their English setters [Music] I'm just like Bugs Bunny

Channel: Mad Scientist BBQ

Views: 562,331

Rating: 4.7918396 out of 5

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Id: AmTh5NJz5Y8

Length: 34min 25sec (2065 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 19 2020