Texas Style or Oven Brisket Part 2

Table of Contents

Why This Recipe Format?

explain that this is going to be a very thorough document that covers a lot of ground, in hopes it can guide people rather than just give them a one-stop "recipe"

• • Concepts to Understand

    • Time, do you have it?

    • Meat temperature, point A -> B, the goal

    • Meat stall

    • Crust/bark, wrapping options

    • add others as encountered

  • Items and Ingredients Needed

  • Meat Selection

  • Heat Selection

  • Results Selection

  • Prep

  • Cooking Process based on Heat Selection

  • Resting

Concepts to Understand

Time

This is your first and only chance to walk away. Brisket is a time sink, honestly if you have a good barbecue place nearby that sells whole brisket, you can likely pick it up for $90-130 for approx 8-10lbs of brisket. This is a bargain, even though you probably don't think it is. 

Brisket and other dense meats [chuck, plate ribs] generally require about this much time per pound of meat per the following methods:

• hot and fast - 1 hour per pound

• low and slow/moderate - 1.25 to 1.5 hours per pound

The table below is aimed at showing you what your brisket itinerary will look like based on a 8 to 9 pound brisket. Remember some of these times can overlap, like you can be seasoning and resting your brisket while pre-heating. In the next section we'll cover the finish line, where you want to end with your brisket.

All of the information in this guide is aimed at giving you the toggles you should consider to achieve this goal. Some quick examples:

• If you get the meat to final temperature too fast, it may be dry inside.

  • If you get the meat to final temperature too slow, it will be juicy, but you may have broken down the connective tissue so much that it falls apart into mush, this makes a good chopped brisket sandwich, but not sliced brisket

Now that we've covered how brisket doesn't just cook in a straight line, we'll go over what is famously called "the stall." Understanding the stall is how you manage both your patience and also how to approach certain types of meats.

Meat Stall

The chart above in "The Goal Line" is a twisted dark fantasy, brisket never cooks that consistently in a straight line. Your journey will likely look like this.

This graph above is the ever so famous bbq "stall" and it's what happens when the meat starts getting really warm to where the internal juices are moving around and are looking for a place to get out. Here they are trying to get out of the meat (and become drippings hopefully in a pan below).

Why does the temperature cool off if it is hot in the pit and the meat is cooking? There's some really great scientific answers on it. The terminology is called evaporative cooling and Amazing Ribs has a really great explanation on it here. However my favorite way to communicate this process to people is to think about how when it's hotter outside than your body is and you sweat. When you sweat you cool off despite it continuing to be hotter outside. If you didn't sweat when it is 105f outside, your body would continue to get hotter and hotter and hotter until it reached 105f. The act of sweating causes air and other reactions to allow your skin to cool off and it cooling off protects the internal flesh (you) from continuing to rise in heat.

This is what your brisket is doing (and also many other large dense cuts of meats do this as well, chuck, pork shoulder, etc).

There isn't much else to know about the stall, except there's ways to speed it up, we'll discuss those later in this write up when considering temperature changes, what to wrap your brisket in, or just accepting it. 

However to overcome the stall, the following two ingredients are needed for success:

• Patience

• Consistent temperature in your smoker or heating appliance

Low and Slow vs Hot and Fast

Crust, Bark