[matched_content] It’s a step-by-step video on how to smoke brisket for beginners, so let’s get smoking. Okay, it’s the night before you’re going to smoke your brisket, let’s call it Friday. So, grab your favorite beer, open it, and have it on standby because trimming is step one. Get yourself a full packers cut brisket between 10 and 15 pounds, the best quality you can afford. You’ll notice one side has a lot of fat on it, that’s called the fat cap. Start by slicing it down layer by layer until it’s only about a quarter inch thick. You’ll need a sharp knife for this. Now, you may think it’s strange to carve off all that fat you just paid good money for, but there’s a good reason for it. First, we want the fat cap thin so it properly renders and it’s nice and soft and juicy when you bite into it. Second, most people don’t like a huge strip of fat on their brisket slices and they end up peeling it off if it’s too thick. So, we don’t want our guests or our family to have to make that decision. Now, while I’m trimming this fat cap down, let me tell you why I’m smoking this brisket. Because I’m not making it for myself, I’ve been thinking about asking to borrow my neighbor’s Weber Smoky Mountain for a long time now. I’ve never used one before, and I’ve heard it’s great for set and forget smoking, which I’m all about right now. Because as a new dad, I just don’t have a lot of time. And I finally got the perfect opportunity to ask him because he just asked me to smoke this brisket for him. So, the plan is to smoke this awesome brisket for him, and then I’ll ask him to borrow his Weber Smoky Mountain. The perfect plan. Now, moving on, slice the hard fat off one side of the brisket. This stuff doesn’t render down at all, so you won’t want to eat it. But make sure you save it because we’re going to use it in the next step. Now, I slice the corners off the flat side of the brisket. If I don’t, they’ll get really crunchy and dry, and we don’t want that. We want everything to be tender and juicy. When you’re done with that, flip the brisket over and slice off the hard fat on the other side of the brisket. Again, you won’t want to eat this stuff, so get rid of as much as you can while still retaining the general shape of the brisket. You don’t need to carve so deep that there’s a big crevasse in the brisket. If there’s a little hard fat left over, that’s fine. You can just carve it off when the brisket’s done and you slice it to serve it. Now, moving on to the back side of the flat, you’ll notice there’s fat and a translucent bluish film called silver skin. That stuff doesn’t render off, so we want to slice it off. Just poke your knife under the silver skin and try to slice it off without taking too much of the underlying meat with it. You don’t have to get it all off, just most of it. Now, you’re done trimming and you’re left over with a bunch of fat. Do you throw it out? No way! We’re gonna keep it and we’re gonna render it down into tallow. So, step two is to render down your tallow. Place your fat trimmings in a slow cooker and just let it slow cook for the whole day, stirring it occasionally. Eventually, it’ll render down into liquid fat that you can strain into a container. We’re going to use the tallow when we wrap this brisket later on, and it’ll make it super tasty and juicy. Now, while that tallow is rendering, we’re moving on to step three, rubbing your brisket. I like to just use a really simple rub of 50/50 kosher salt and coarse grain black pepper. I shake it onto the back side of the brisket, then I flip it over and I do the top sides and the edges. Then I flip it over again and I give it another coating, and then a final coating on the top side. Now, I’m going to let it sit for at least 30 minutes so that salt can penetrate and season the brisket. You can even do this the night before so all you have to do the next day is wake up and throw the brisket on the smoker. Okay, it’s Saturday and it’s time to get excited because it’s time to smoke the brisket. That’s why we’re all here. Now prepare to drink from the fire hose of knowledge because we’re going to talk about time and temperature. But don’t think you have to retain it all. I’m still going to cover everything later in this video step by step. Now, you can set your smoker temperature between 225 degrees Fahrenheit and 300 degrees Fahrenheit. It doesn’t matter as long as you’re in that zone. There are two exceptions. The first one is if you’re smoking on a pellet smoker, you always want to go fat side down to protect the rest of the brisket from the radiant heat coming off of the deflector plate and the burn pot. And you want to be below or at 225 degrees Fahrenheit. You don’t want to go much higher than that because again, that deflector plate can get really hot, gives off radiant heat, and it can actually cook the brisket really fast and it can burn it if you’re not careful. And two, if you’re cooking on an electric smoker, then make sure every few hours you’re cracking the door open to let that steam out because if too much steam builds up, then it can ruin the bark and cook your brisket way too quickly. Now, whatever temperature you choose, the cook is gonna take about 14 hours to complete. That means six to 10 hours of smoking it, about two hours after you wrap it, and up to two hours of resting. So if you wanna serve your brisket for dinner on Saturday, then that means you’re getting up at around 4:00 a.m. on Saturday morning. If you’re not into that, I definitely am not into that. I wake up around 8:00 a.m. on Saturday so I have a decent sleep. I get up, I casually cook my brisket all day, have a couple beers, enjoy it, and then I finish sometime late at night before midnight usually, and then I just pop it in the fridge. I take it out the next day on Sunday, reheat it for a couple hours, and then I just have it for Sunday lunch or dinner. That’s pretty much how I cook all my briskets these days. Okay, make sense? Probably not, but we’re gonna cover everything step by step later in this video, so don’t worry about it. Now, we’re still on step four, smoking. So I’m putting my brisket on the smoker and maintaining temperatures between 250 and 300. Every few hours, I’m opening the smoker and spritzing the edges of the brisket to keep them from drying out. You’ll probably run into issues during this portion of the cook. In my case, I had to look after my son for most of the day, so it was challenging to run to the smoker every 15 minutes to add a split of wood and also look after my son. Luckily, I had an extra baby monitor in the nursery, so I installed that next to the smoker. That way, I could watch the smoker while I was looking after my son and watch my son while I was looking after the smoker. Now, I’m going to keep smoking the brisket like this for six to ten hours until I see four things. One, the brisket has reached a temperature of 165 to 180 internally. Two, there was a bunch of moisture pooling on top of the brisket, but now there’s not so much anymore. That means it’s dumped its excess moisture and coming out of what’s called the stall. Three, the brisket has a nice dark bark. If you’re burning charcoal or wood, it would be really dark like this. If you’re using a pellet smoker, it might just be a kind of mahogany red because pellet smokers burn really clean without a ton of smoke, and that’s fine. And finally, when you scrape your finger along the bark of the brisket, it shouldn’t come off easily. That means the bark is set and you’re ready to move to the next step. Step five is to pull your family into the backyard and mansplain about everything you’re doing. Be sure to make it all really complicated and let a family member do something like spritz the brisket or throw a split on the fire so they feel like they’re doing something. This will elevate you in the eyes of your family and give them the impression that what you’re doing is quasi-magical and they could never replicate it. Now, once everyone is gathered around the smoker, you want to take it off the smoker and tell them you’re getting ready to wrap it and then pray to barbecue Jesus because we’re about to wrap our brisket and this is a super important part of the cooking process. Now, for step six, we’re wrapping our brisket. Place the brisket on a sheet of butcher’s paper. Now, take that tallow you prepared and spread it over the paper so it soaks in and then pour some on top of the brisket as well. The tallow is doing a couple things. It’s soaking the butcher paper in fat so it seals in the moisture, it’s adding flavor, fat is flavor, and it’s adding moisture without dissolving the bark. You can also skip the tallow if you want to. You can even wrap it in foil, but then you won’t get that really crispy sugar cookie bark. Once the bark is wrapped up tight, put it in an aluminum pan or on a deep tray with some foil to hold the drippings in. Then we’re moving on to the next step. For step seven, the brisket goes into the oven on the middle rack. That’s right, we’re using the oven. The brisket isn’t gonna absorb any more smoke being on the smoker, so you don’t have to waste your charcoal or your wood splits on your smoker anymore. Just pop it in the oven, and that’s how we’re gonna finish it off. I’m setting my oven to 300 degrees Fahrenheit in non-convection mode. The brisket can take a higher heat at this point because it’s protected by that butcher’s paper. So don’t worry too much about burning it or overcooking it. This step is going to take between about an hour and a half to three hours. So after about an hour and a half, we’ll move on to step eight. Step eight is the most important step because we need to do our tests to make sure that the brisket is finished properly. A perfect brisket is cooked enough so that it’s tender and pulls apart easily, but not so cooked that it’s dry and crumbly. So how do we know when we get it to exactly that point? Well, there’s three tests. You start doing these tests around an hour and a half after the brisket is wrapped, and you keep doing them every 30 minutes until you pass all of the tests. Test one: The brisket should be at least 203 degrees Fahrenheit internally. You can use an instant read or probe thermometer to monitor this. We want that temperature high enough so it can render the connective tissue in the meat. Otherwise, it’s going to be tough. Test two: The probe test. Just because it’s 203 degrees Fahrenheit doesn’t mean it’s done. You need to probe into the thickest part of the flat in the middle of the brisket and make sure it probes tender like butter. If you pull your probe out and it gets a lot of resistance (and by that I mean it drags the brisket with it as you pull it out) then it’s not done. It should slide in easily and slide out easily as if you were probing a stick of room temperature butter. Test three is the feel test. You’ll need cotton gloves underneath waterproof rubber or nitrile gloves for this. You should be able to pick up the brisket and it should bend in on itself easily and feels really floppy like jello. If it’s stiff, keep on cooking. Once your brisket passes all three finishing tests, remove it from the oven and place it on the counter for two hours to rest. It needs this time to come down in temperature and reabsorb some of the moisture before you slice into it. I like to wait until it comes down to about 150 internal before slicing. Now, if you’re three to five hours away from dinner time when you need to serve your brisket and the brisket is done, you can put it into a cooler and that will keep it warm and food safe for up to five hours. Just make sure before you put it in the cooler after you take it out of the oven, you open up the butcher’s paper or the foil whatever you wrapped it in and you let the steam vent out for about 15 minutes. Otherwise, when you put the brisket into the cooler right after you take it out of the oven, it could continue to cook and it will overcook. And if you’re like me and you don’t eat your brisket until the next day, then just pop it right in the fridge. I don’t even leave it out on the counter or anything. I just take it right out of the oven and I put it right into the fridge. In the aluminum tray with the butcher’s paper. I don’t touch it at all. And then the next day, I take it out of the fridge, pop it in the oven at about 250 to 300 degrees Fahrenheit, leave it in there for about four hours until the internal temperature comes up to around 165 degrees Fahrenheit. And finally, step ten, slice your brisket against the grain in quarter-inch slices and serve it up to your family or in my case, my neighbor. So in this case, I got to serve up my brisket to my neighbor and he loved it, his family loved it, and I actually got the opportunity to ask him if I could borrow his Weber Smoky Mountain, and he let me. So I was really happy because I’m going to be able to do a video on the Weber Smoky Mountain now, and I’ll be posting that in the next few months for you guys. And if you end up screwing up your brisket, then watch this video on a hundred brisket mistakes that you probably made. And also, join my Patreon. I’ll link that in the description section below. You can ask me any questions you want, get access to a private Discord channel, and I’ll give you all the tips you need to nail your next brisket. All right, guys, happy smoking. [Music] [Music]
