A Hungry Bear

Do you know when I feel the most satisfaction from cooking? It’s not when I really nail a recipe and get compliments (that’s nice), or when I come home from a restaurant and recreate a dish (rare, but also really nice). It’s much simpler than that. The most rewarding thing to me is to be given a request, as in, “can you make this for me?”

This just happened last weekend, much to my excitement. We’re sitting around, me with my food magazines and A with his mountains of matlab code and airplane designs, and he starts telling me about his mom’s barbecue beef brisket, and wondering aloud if maybe I’d make it for him one day? Brisket! I’ve never made brisket! Barbecue! I love barbecue! It sounded perfect. By the time I called A’s mom and got the right recipe, I had already made my first barbecue brisket - that’s how impatient I am. (Now that I have her recipe, I’ll try for brisket #2 in a few weeks and post that too - a barbecue-brisket-off is in the works!)

Note: I did a lot of research and found that, like most barbecue, there are a lot of styles. Most required smoking for 8-10 hours outdoors - this can be modified by charring first on an outdoor grill, then moving to an oven for finishing. Almost all recipes seemed to have 3 key parts: a dry rub, a “mop” applied during the cooking stages, and a barbecue sauce served with the cooked slices of meat. The 2 recipes I borrowed from to figure out a dry rub and mop recipe are this one on Epicurious, and this incredibly helpful write-up on the Eat Real Butter food blog.

Grocery list: 4-6 pound beef brisket, untrimmed with a layer of fat on one side; (dry rub) 2 T paprika, 2 T chipotle chili powder, 2 T ground black pepper, 2 T kosher salt, 2 T sugar, 2 T garlic powder; (mop) 1 bottle beer, 1/2 cup apple cider vinegar, 1/4 cup oil, 1 T chipotle chili sauce; (barbecue sauce for serving) 1 cup ketchup, 1/2 cup molasses, 2 T Worcestershire, 1 T (or more) Tabasco, pinch of cayenne pepper.

A brisket isn’t difficult, it just takes a while. You can either apply the dry rub the night before or the morning of, assuming that you’ll start cooking it in the early afternoon in order to have it for dinner. To make the dry rub, just stir together the ingredients.

Spread half of the dry rub on one side of the meat. Use your fingers or the tines of a fork to press the seasoning into the meat as best as you can. Flip it over, and do the same thing on the other side. Cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate overnight or for at least a couple hours.

A half hour before you start the grill, take the meat out of the fridge so it can come to room temperature. This picture shows why you need to give it 2-12 hours with the dry rub - the longer it rests, the more it soaks in, the salt tenderizing the meat and the juices forming a sort of paste on the outside.

Light the grill and preheat a medium flame. Put the brisket **fat side DOWN** on the grill, over direct heat. Cook it until the seasoning and fat are completely charred, about 30 minutes.  Once the fat side is charred, remove from the flame to a roasting pan - and don’t worry about how ugly it is.  You won’t be eating that part.  Preheat the oven to 275 degrees.

Make the mop - just whisk together the ingredients.

Flip the brisket over so the burned fat side is down. Pour the mop over it, cover with foil, and place in the oven. Depending on the size of the cut, it can take anywhere from 2-4 hours to finish in the oven (till the meat registers 180 degrees). I checked it after the first hour - spooning the mop across the top every time I opened it - and put in a meat thermometer. It only took 2 hours to finish from this point, but a lot of recipes say it can take longer, so be prepared to wait…

Next, make up the barbecue sauce. Just whisk together everything till smooth.

When the brisket is done, let it rest in the pan for 10-15 minutes, so it reabsorbs some juices. Then, move it to a cutting board. Pour the mop from the roasting pan into a measuring cup.

Slice off the layer of charred fat.

Thinly slice the meat against the grain.

To give your barbecue sauce just a little extra smokiness and pull together the flavors, mix in about a half cup of the leftover mop. Put the slices back in the roasting pan, spread some barbecue on top, and return to the oven for a few minutes to rewarm it.

Serve the brisket slices with plenty of barbecue sauce on the side.