texas barbecue brisket

The Old Country Wrangler barbecue pit arrived a few days ago. My first cooking was to make smoke a whole piece of brisket in Texas style which I learnt from Aaron Franklin's videos. No sooner than I picked up a butcher pack of whole brisket I realized I have a major challenge on hand. What am I going to do with more than 5 lbs of beef when it is done?

Invite neighbors and friends to help polish it off. Bad idea. Preparing the biggest meat I'd ever cooked in my life in a new preparation method in a brand new piece of equipment involving many hours tending to wood fire is a recipe for disaster when you have hungry guests may be disappointed.
this piece of brisket weights in near 7 lbs is the smallest piece in the store; it is a US prime grade and is not cheap

 there is a thick layer of fats on the "top" side

 i trimmed of the excess fat but leave about 1/4 inch to be render during the smoking process

i trimmed off more than 1.5 lbs of fat

 equal volume of black pepper and kosher salt for the dry rub

i just eyeballed the amount of rub without measuring it

 i followed Aaron's technique and it is really easy with very little waste
 pretty proud of how little waste

For the smoker I didn't want to rush in and buy all sort of temperature measuring devices. I improvised my multichannel thermal couple thermometer. I have one thermal couple inserted into the thickest portion of the brisket and 2 channels monitoring the smoking chamber's temperature. The reason I have 2 channels for the chamber was I had some problem with the thermal couples and their temperature reading do not agree. No time to trouble shoot it I made do with taking the average of both.

I started smoking from 9:30 AM. I really had no idea how long it would take for this relatively small brisket. I initially thought it may take about 10 hours by keeping the chamber temperature at about 250F. I would mainly relying on the internal temperature reading of the brisket to tell me when it is done. Still I was essentially flying blind without any prior experience.
the gold plug where the two thermocouples enter the lid of the smoke chamber is just a cognac cork

Just a hour before pulling the brisket from the smoker I got cold feet. I ran to the store and bought some ingredients as backup in case my brisket turns out to be a total flop. I also bought a dozen of oysters to make grilled oysters as appetizer.

I pulled out the brisket an hour before serving to let it rest before cutting into it. It took a merely 6 hours. We have 6 people for dinner including myself for the Sunday dinner. It was sunny with relatively mild temperature  for a spring afternoon. We ate in the backyard under the plum tree that is just at the end of the blossom.

The brisket turned out quite good albeit a little dry on the thin end. It is however very similar to the one that I tried at Kreuz Market.
Kreuz's BBQ meat - the piece furthest is the brisket

I prefer eating Texas style BBQ brisket without sauce. However I made a small batch of sauce in case my guests prefer to eat with sauce. I think every one enjoyed the brisket and there was more than enough to go around.

I had a handful preparing and hosting the dinner so I didn't take any photos.
here is the left over piece of may be 1.5 lb.

As the experienced pit master would tell you, it is very hard to get the whole piece of meat evenly cooked due to the difference in thickness and fat content. The thick side of my brisket was not as dry because of the extra thickness as well as the fat.

thin slices for snacking - you can see the smoke ring; you really can taste the essence of the beef flavor best without pouring barbecue sauce on it

i decided to order a temperature gauge from Amazon

After some thinking on how I would need to monitor the temperature of the grill and the food I decided on this 2 channel wireless thermometer.

Having use the Wrangler Old Country barbecue pit I am very happy with it. There is very little smoke leak around the doors and it is quite easy to tend to the firewood and maintain the desired temperature. In this brief experience I learnt it is very essential to monitor the chamber temperature at the right places and you can almost cannot have too many monitoring points because there is significant temperature gradients. Preparing a tough cut of meat with long smoking time is essentially an integration of time and temperature. The higher the temperature the shorting the cooking time. Too high the temperature the tough meat tissue would not have time to break down and you end up with a piece of tough and dry meat. There is really no substitute for experience gained by trial and error. The quality of the smoke brisket also depends heavily with the piece of brisket itself and the selection available to a home cook is very limited.

I am looking foreword to make a lot of andouille sausages with this smoker.

Update March 26:
One reason I didn't have the temperature gauge nor the wireless 2-channel thermometer is I didn't want to rush in and buy things that prone. I am all too aware of problems with consumer grade measurement instrument in their inaccuracy, and worst poor reliability. I read up the 1 star customer feedbacks of the Ivation wireless thermometer on Amazon. Many experienced failure or gross inaccurate of the temperature probe. While $59.99 is not a lot of money I decided to not risk being disappointed. Still $59.99 is 1/10 of the barbecue pit. I managed to cancel the order. For now I plan to just live with my multichannel thermocouple thermometer. I just need to replace the thermocouple wires and it will give me the most accurate and reliable measurements any cooks can wish for. A properly made thermocouple has many advantages over probe type sensors. Thermocouple itself requires no calibration. It has low thermal mass. It is typically much more accurate than probe type sensors. It can withstand very high temperature and can be replace with minimal cost when damaged. The down side of thermocouple thermometer is the meter cost is often out of the reach of average consumers. Mine is a discarded lab equipment that I picked up from trash long time ago.

In case you wonder why I make such a big deal about the temperature accuracy and I am not. I am all too aware of the huge temperature gradients in any cooking vessel (in this case the smoke chamber and where you place the sensor in the meat). I want to know the error magnitude of my measurement equipment and having a temperature probe that are questionable to 10s of degree (not uncommon with consumer grade) if you are unlucky make for a very useless add-ons. You can certainly work around it once you gain some experience with the setup and mentally compensate for them. If I were to buy a thermocouple meter the 2-ch Fluke 52 II ($300) would be my choice. For brewing coffee you do need very accurate control of temperature and a good thermal couple will help you dial in your work flow and technique. For all sorts of project a multichannel data logger would be really nice to have around the house...