Daddio's Easy Tender Brisket

Mark Evans

Ingredients

• 1 Untrimmed Beef Brisket

• 8 Clove Garlic

• 1 Sweet Yellow Onion

• Your favorite dry rub (I use John Henry's East Texas Brisket Rub)

Instructions

Wash brisket and pat dry.
Sprinkle liberally with dry rub
With a food processor, blend onion and garlic into a paste
Smear garlic and onion mix on meat
Put brisket in a plastic sealing bag and place in the refrigerator overnight
Next morning, take brisket out of the refrigerator. Remove garlic and onion mix. Goal is to get meat close to room temperature before you place it on the Egg. So place brisket back in the bag, and soak it in warm water in the sink while you get the fire ready.
Just before you get ready to put the brisket on the Egg, apply dry rub again.

Get the fire started
Place three or four fist-size chucks of hickory or mesquite in the fire
Place the grill on the Egg

(I like using indirect heat but do not have a plate-setter. So I use a pizza stone, a round drip pan and a grill extender instead)
Place the pizza stone on the grill
Place a drip pan on top of pizza stone
Place grill extender over the drip pan
Place the brisket on the grill extender, fat side up
Place the Polder thermometer in the meat
Close the Egg
Try to keep the Egg dome temp between 200 to 225 degrees.
Cook for about 12 hours or until the Polder registers a internal meat temperature of 200 degrees

Take it off the egg and it's ready to slice and serve. Meat has a slight exterior crust with a nice pink smoke ring. It is so tender that your dinner guests won't need a knife. The best compliment from guests is when they are asked if they need any BBQ sauce, and they tell you it's perfect without any!

Notes

Number of Servings:

Time to Prepare:

Ham and Egg

I did this recipe about 2 months ago and got rave reviews. Going at it again for tomorrow night. Heading off to the farmer's market now to buy brisket from the butcher.

IQthere4iam

What size brisket do you try to start with? Is the a way to gauge lb of brisket per person?

Thanks

Daddyo

I'm not sure how important the room temperature is. With a steak, cooked on high heat, you don't want the outside cooked before the inside, so room temp is key. With a brisket cooked at 240, I suspect you can skip that step.

I've always coated my brisket with yellow mustard, mostly to make the rub stick. I don't believe it changes the flavor at all, and you certainly can not taste mustard. H

Have you ever tried a mustard coat?

tommyL

This problem was solved.  Turns out that even thou I calibrated the egg
thermometer last year, It doesn't hold that calibration.  It was showing
35 degrees less than the actual temps in the egg.   Read my final post
below to find out.   I don't know if the egg thermometer is ok or just
needs a re-calibration.  Right now, I don't trust it. (it has moisture
trapped inside the glass of the thermometer.)

THANKS TO HILLBILLY !!  He made me get suspicious enough to recheck the thermometer!

tom

Hi.   I have only had my egg for a year.  I am having a terrible time.   Beef just doesn't work !!

I did a brisket yesterday and followed the recipe that I found here, (not yours, the spices were different).  I cooked the damn thing between 190 and 260 deg F.  FOR 10 HOURS!!   After which I put it (covered) in a boiling water/beef broth bath for an hour in my oven at 200 deg.

I'ts overcooked,  it's burnt on the outside and TOUGH AS A NASCAR TIRE!!!  I mean I have a hard time just cutting it.  I have to force the knife down into it to get past the outer coating!

What I did was cook for two hours at 250.  then drop the temp down to 225 and left it there.   I had a plate setter and even a pan of water on the setter to keep the humidity high.

WHAT AM I DOING WRONG ??   anybody ??  please ??

 

Hillbilly-Hightech

A couple questions - did you cook it direct, or indirect? 

Also, have you calibrated your thermometer?  If not, I'd say DEFINITELY do that.  Look up your altitude - here are some places you can do that: 

http://veloroutes.org/elevation/

http://viewer.nationalmap.gov/viewer/

http://seamless.usgs.gov/website/seamless/viewer.htm

Then, after that, if you want to be REALLY accurate, you need to find the barometric pressure of your area.  You can do that by going to www.weather.com and typing in your city, then clicking on the "Expand Weather Details" section listed right below the first set of weather information. 

Once you have your altitude (in feet), and your barometric pressure (in inches of mercury - don't worry, it's given to you that way by weather.com), then go here:

http://www.csgnetwork.com/h2oboilcalc.html

Also, you can check out the Naked Whiz's website, which gives a LOT of useful information:

http://www.nakedwhiz.com/ceramicfaq.htm#calibrate

Once you find your boiling point of water, then you need to remove your dome thermometer (there will be a clip on the inside of your dome holding the thermometer in place).  Then, get a pot of water & boil it.  Place the thermometer in there & take note of the temp it reads. 

If it doesn't match what you just calculated, you need to adjust it - there is a nut on the back you can hold & then twist (rotate) the outer edge (dial) of the thermometer.  You may need to rotate it left or right, depending on if you need to adjust the temp up or down.  Once you've adjusted, stick it back in the water to verify you've adjusted correctly.  You may need to do this more than once until you reach the proper calibration. 

Also, if you do need to adjust, keep in mind that your newly adjusted thermometer might NOT read "0" when the Egg is cooled down (actually, it shouldn't read 0, it should read whatever temp the ambient air temp is) - but the point is that it, after calibration, it may not read what you think it should when the Egg is off.  But that's OK, because you just calibrated it to read the CORRECT temp for boiling water. 

HTH,
Rob

tommyL

Hi Rob and thanks for offering some advice!! 
Yeah I did use a plate setter and as I mentioned in my post I even had a pan of water to increase humidity (didn't help since the brisket was dried out anyway).

Yes I calibrated the thermometer.   I live 500 feet Above sea level and water boils pretty much around 211.5  So that's not much of an issue.  I do home canning and had to compensate for that a long time ago and found out for an excursion of 2 deg F, it's negligible.
What is really an accuracy issue is how fast you're boiling the water.  So I have this laboratory thermometer (very expensive!! )  and it agrees with the EGG thermometer after a minor adjustment.

If you're talking about that much of an error then the error seems to be mine.   I am having a lot of trouble controlling that temperature and for about an hour it did go up to 270.   Controlling that air intake to hold a stable temp is a very hard thing for me to do.   It either goes up past 250 or drops down to 180 on me.   I don't know why i'm having trouble doing that when everyone else says it's easy.  (grrrr).
I use royal oak lump charcoal.   The people doing competition use that stuff.  and I used soaking wet oak strips for flavoring.

I'm going to fire the egg up again.  I bought another brisket.  This time I'm going to follow Daddio's recipe and keep the egg between 200 and 225 for a day  (i'll have to refuel at least once in that timeframe.)

Thanks for the response!!

Spoon

Tommy,

You said how long you cooked it and the temp range of the cook, but you never mentioned the temp of the meat. Cook by meat temp not time. With brisket you have to give it lots of time to break down the colligen in the meat to make it tender. Were you cooking a flat or a whole packer?
I did a 10+ lbs brisket this weekend and it was on for 18 hours till it hit 195. Then I took it off double wrapped in foil and a couple of towels and stored in the cooler for a couple of hours. That does two things, give it some carryover cook time and the temp comes down slowly and let's the juices redistribute back into the meat. when I pulled it it was easy to slice and pretty tender. There are a a bunch of different methods to try on brisket, see what works for you. I got my info from Bubba Tim and Thirdeye's websites. Try again and good luck

tommyL

Hey there Spoon.   Well most of the recipes here use time.  But I solved the problem with the Hillbillys help.  He made me think about the temperature calibration.   So after reading his post about calibration I became suspicious.  And decided to check that Egg Thermometer again.
I have a digital temperature transmitter which I haven't used in a while.   So I stuck that in the top of the egg and guess what? 

Even thou I calibrated that egg thermometer last year,  It was off by 35 degrees !!  
So I just brought the thermometer inside this morning and stuck 'em both in boiling water and the egg thermometer was off of boiling by 25 deg F.

The digital transmitter thermometer was exactly on.    I can't explain the additional 10 degrees off, but I think I'll be sticking with the digital thermometer until I can get a new egg thermometer.  Or just forget the egg thermometer altogether.  Perhaps they have reliability issues?  (there is moisture trapped inside the thing.

On my second brisket yesterday,  It was much better but was still black tougher than I've seen other briskets. (I was at a BBQ competition last week and lemme tell you, some of those guys had some AWESOME brisket and **I WANT THAT**

The recipe I use has that trick in it to wrap in foil and a towel and let cool slow.   But my brisket is coming out of the egg black and too tough to cut with a knife.   It's that damn thermometer !!!

THANKS FOR THE COMEBACK!!!
Sincerely:
tom

Hungry Joe

Hey there Spoon.   Well most of the recipes here use time.  But I solved the problem with the Hillbillys help.  He made me think about the temperature calibration.   So after reading his post about calibration I became suspicious.  And decided to check that Egg Thermometer again.
I have a digital temperature transmitter which I haven't used in a while.   So I stuck that in the top of the egg and guess what? 

 

I'm not sure where this information comes from but everything I've ever
seen on cooking brisket says to cook to an internal temperature of 190
to 200 degrees. Try this and skip the bath in the oven next time. You
also could try wrapping it in foil for a portion of the cook.

Hillbilly-Hightech

TommyL (and for anyone who suspects their thermometer might be off) - some thermometers are more sensitive than others around the outer ring area (some will "twist" easier than others).  So, if you innocently grabbed hold of your thermometer to move it or spin it to a point where it was "right side up" in order for you to be able to view the numbers, it's possible you could have actually twisted that outer ring & gotten it out of calibration. 

It's usually a good idea to check it if you start having problems with temps - the cool thing is that it's a quick & cheap check, and an easy enough fix!!

So, I'm glad you fixed your issue - now ya can get back to cookin' & postin' some yummy food pics!!!! 

dan

Thanks for the post., 

've been cooking on eggs for over twenty years and have just recently had an issue with ribs and butts on for long periods of time and still not up to my standards for Eggseptional food. Just bought an internal thermomiter and guess what? 159 degrees internal on a 4lb briskett after 8 hours at ???240 degrees???

 

Thanks for the advice.