If I count helping my dad cook steaks on the charcoal when I was growing up, I have been cooking steaks the wrong way for over 60 years!  Maybe not the wrong way, but certainly not the best way.  Over a very hot fire I would sear the steak for 2 minutes on each side.  Then depending on how think the steak was, I would either keep turning it every minute or reduce the heat by moving it higher off the coals or a cooler spot on the grill for it to finish cooking.  Since I like my steak Rare/Medium Rare (bright rosy red interior) when I did it right I would have a little crust on the steak but, if it was a bone in steak, either the meat next to the bone was VERY rare or the steak was only slightly pink at the edges.  Thin steaks were very hard not to overcook and thick steaks were even more difficult not be charred on the outside and raw in the middle.

I got pretty good at determining when the steak was done the way I liked it by poking the steak with my finger and seeing what resistance I got.  A raw steak provides very little resistance and as it cooks that gradually increases.

Articles by two celebrity chef’s that I think very highly of, Jose Andres and Michael Symon, got me interested in trying a totally different way to cook steaks and I am now a believer that tempering the steak under low heat and then finishing it with a reverse sear is a much better way to cook a good steak.

Tempering the steak under low heat lets it cook very slowly and that breaks down the connective tissue so that steak becomes very tender and very juicy.  The first time I did this was with a dry aged ribeye steak that was 1 ½” thick.  The ribeye is two steaks.  On one side of the bone is the tenderloin, what is used for Filet Mignon.  On the other side of the bone is the strip steak which has great flavor but not known for its tenderness.  Filet Mignon has been given high status because it is the most tender cut of the beef.  But it really has very little flavor and and is not really a premium cut of steak. Many restaurants serve it with a strong sauce like Bearnaise to cover the lack of flavor.  When I tempered this Porterhouse steak at 250° until it reached 100° internal temp and then reverse seared it, the strip steak was almost as tender as the filet side, and it still had all of that great strip steak flavor. 

And the tempering the steak slowly also retains the juices so the steak is very moist and more flavorful.  In that old style of cooking steaks, I would have to let the steak rest for at least five minutes for the juices to retreat back not the meat before slicing it or the juices would run out on the carving board and the steak would be dry.  If the steak has been tempered and then reverse seared, it can be sliced immediately as the low temperature cooking kept the juices always inside the meat which I find to be another benefit of this approach. 

I have tried three good ways to temper a steak for the initial cook and three good ways to do the reverse sear at the end.  I will cover each of them with pictures below and then I will finish up with some thoughts on how thick a steak should be, grass fed vs grain fed beef, and dry aging. 

Tempering The Steak

The goal here is let the steak cook slowly to an internal temperature of 100°.  If you like your steak medium or medium well, you might let the internal temp go higher before taking it out.  Since I only cook my steaks to Med Rare, I don’t know what that internal temp should be for Med Well but I suspect you can Google search and find that.  If you like your steaks well done then we probably have very little to talk about.  You should cook them to the way that you like and I am not criticizing, but that taste profile is very different from mine so I don’t think my suggestions will have much relevance for you.  

I salt and pepper the steak and then begin the tempering process.  Lightly coating the steak with olive oil will let the salt and pepper adhere to the steak better but I like to brush it with a light coat of Dijon mustard instead of the oil.  That also lets the salt and pepper adhere well to the steak and the mustard adds a little flavor to the steak.

This method of cooking the steak is all about the internal temperature and not cooking so many minutes per pound or minutes per side.  An internal temperature probe is a requirement for this.  At the end of this post I will talk about the two internal probes that I have if you need to get one.

Grilling – If you like to grill your steak, either on a gas grill or a charcoal grill, you can do both the tempering of the steak and the reverse sear on the grill or use one of the other ways to temper it and just do the reverse sear on the grill.  In the picture you can see that I have my charcoal all in the front half of the grill and my steak is on the back side on an elevated rack.  My Kamado lets me cook at three different distances from the coals, as well as letting me put a divider in the fire box so the coals are only under one half the grill.  This gives me lots of options on cooking temperatures and I have this steak at the highest level off the coals and it will take about 30 minutes for a 1” thick steak to get to the target internal temperature. 

I could do the same thing with my gas grill by having the gas low or off one segment of the grill.   But for me the gas grill is just the equivalent of taking the oven/broiler out of the kitchen.  It is more fun to cook outside, and my wife is happy for me to be out of her way in the kitchen so I do use my gas grill when I don’t want to go through the time and effort of getting a charcoal fire ready to cook on.  It will add grill marks, but it really does not impact the taste of the steak.  Cooking over big lump oak hardwood charcoal will add some flavor to the steak and so a charcoal grill is the much better choice than a gas grill when you are cooking a nice cut of meat.  I could also put some wood chunks like pecan or hickory on top of the charcoal and close the Kamado lid to add some smoke flavor during the tempering but we prefer to use smoke to only provide an accent to the flavor of some dishes, so I don’t sue any smoke when I am tempering my steaks.  If you really like smoke flavor, that is another reason to try this approach on your charcoal grill. 

Oven – This next picture shows the steak tempering in the oven at 250°.  This also is usually about 30 minutes for a 1” thick steak but that time will vary so I go totally by when the temperature probe tells me it has hit the target temp.   The rack that the steak is on I got to grill ribs.  It lets me put four racks of ribs on the grill at the same time.  It also lets me stand the steak up with it resting on the bone. This lets the low oven heat flow around the steak and cook it evenly.  It also warms the bone so the meat next to the bone is cooking, not cooled by bone and staying very rare.  If you don’t have a rack that lets you stand the steak up, you can lay the steak down on a rack in the sheet pan but if you just put it directly on the sheet pan instead of on a rack the down side will cook faster due to the contact with the metal and that uneven temperature is not good. 

You want about 30 minutes for that slow cooking to break down the connective tissues in the steak.  If your oven is getting it up to 100° in less than 25 minutes you should lower the cooking temp to 225° or even 200°.  Letting it cook for 45 minutes at 200° is much better than 20 minutes at 250°.  More on that in the final way of tempering the steak below. 

Sous Vide – This is the wildest way to temper the steak and probably the most controversial.  It is also probably the best way to do it if you can get comfortable with putting your steak in a baggie and dropping it into hot water.  The Sous Vide fans are very vocal on how great this method is for steaks and they have a very good case.  I probably should do a whole post on Sous Vide, but I am still a beginner in this mode of cooking and don’t feel qualified yet to talk about the ins and outs and individual preferences.  But I did Sous Vide a bone in strip steak and I think it is an excellent way to very effectively temper a steak.  I welcome the Sous Vide fans, and opponents, to weigh in with comments on this mode of cooking.

Sous Vide is French for “without air” or vacuum sealed.  You put the food to be cooked in a sealed plastic bag and suspend that bag in a bath of circulating hot water at a temperature you set, generally between 100° and 200°.  You can put spices in the bag and they will add flavor to the protein being Sous Vide.  I had a sprig of Thyme in the bag with my steak and I had it in the Sous Vide for 60 minutes at 125°.  If you are not at all familiar with Sous Vide, in the above picture the round black shape in the upper left corner is the Sous Vide unit and it is clamped onto the inside of the large plastic bin.  I set the cooking temperature on it and it heats the water to that temp and keeps it circulating so the temperature stays constant.  I put my steak in a zip lock bag sealed and suspended into the water with a large binder clip holding it in place.  I worked hard to get all the air out of the bag when I sealed it but any air in there would be heated and cause the bag to float so the steak would not be under water.  I clipped a second large binder clip to the bottom of the bag to weigh it down so it stayed fully submerged.

Because of the very low cooking temperatures, the cooking time is longer.  You do need to plan for that but it is just a few minutes of prep time and then you walk away for about an hour and can work on other things so not a big deal unless you are doing something last minute.  The longer cook time at this low temperature allows for even more of the connective tissue to break down so the steak will be very tender and being sealed in the bag means no juices evaporate during the tempering process. 

You are not boiling the steak.  The water would have to get up to 212° to boil and you are just at 125°.  If you left the steak in for 3 hours the internal temp would not go above 125° because that is how hot the water bath is, but mentally I’m still not ready for that long a time.  I want it at 100° so I can take 4-5 minutes to reverse sear it and get a very nice crust on the steak with it being between 125° – 130° when I carve it.  An hour worked very well for tempering the steak Sous Vide.

Reverse Sear The Steak

What makes a steak very special is when it has a crisp, thin dark bark or crust with juicy meat just inside it.  The reverse sear lets us get steak to that appealing color and can add that bark.  The three different ways to reverse sear discussed below have different effectiveness on getting that crispy bark. 

One of the concerns I had was the transition from the tempering when I needed to get the cooking temperature up very high for the reverse sear.  Depending on which method you use, there can be a lag time.  For me the biggest lag time is getting the charcoal grill up to very high temp for the sear.  But the steak can sit for a while on the counter while you get to the cooking temp you need for the sear. The internal temp might increase a little while it sits, but not that much because it is pretty low to start with.  Even if 20 minutes is needed to get a really hot fire, the steak might start to cool but the searing process will quickly get it to the desired end temperature.  Because the internal temp probes are not recommended for temps above 500° and my Kamado can get over 700°, I take the temp probe out and do the reverse sear at 2 to 2 ½ minutes per side.  That is getting the steak to the bright rosy red that I like as you can see in the several pictures where I turned one of the slices up to show the doneness. 

Grilling – I talked about the grill as the first method for tempering the steak so the first alternative I will cover is reverse searing it on the grill.  As noted above, you want to make what ever adjustments your grill needs to the vents and the charcoal levels to get it to blazing hot.  In the first picture you see a nice Tomahawk steak at the end of the tempering cycle.  It has just a slight brown color, not very appealing to look at.  The second picture is when it was on the very hot Kamado for about 2 minutes per side and it is dark brown with a nice bark.  The third picture shows it sliced with meat a lovely shade of red and very moist and juicy. 

In the tempering process I had the pan with the steak on the standard wire grill racks that come with the Kamado.  For the reverse sear I use heavy cast iron grill grates that I bought for the Kamado which creates some very good grill marks.  I can really do lots of different things with my Kamado. My gas grill just gets to 600° so it is not doing much for the reverse sear so I either use the charcoal grill or one of the two approaches with a cast iron fry pan discussed below for my reverse sear.

This next picture is a strip steak at the lowest cooking level over a bright red fire with some flame licking the steak.  This was a thinner steak so I only did it one and a half minutes per side so it was not as dark as the Tomahawk steak but still with some bark and just the right level of doneness. 

I can use the charcoal gill for the reverse sear if I did the tempering in the oven or Sous Vide.  I schedule to get the fire to its highest level just when the steak is finishing the tempering process and then take it to the grill to be seared.  I get the open flame and a little of the hardwood charcoal taste just using the grill for the reverse sear.

When I have a bone in steak I first cut it off the bone when I carve it and then cut slices perpendicular to the bone about ½” thick.  I then reassemble the slices around the bone and serve it family style.

Broiler – If I can’t use the grill for some reason, typically weather, I can do the reverse sear under the broiler.  I can lay the steak down on a rack in a sheet pan and flip it at about the 2 minute mark, depending on the thickness of the steak.  But I will get much better results if I preheat my cast iron, or carbon steel, fry pan under the broiler and then drop the steak in the very hot pan and again flip it at about the 2 minute mark.  The broiler will not give much of a bark on the steak but the fry pan will do a much better job of that. 

Butter Basted Cast Iron Fry Pan – Not the healthiest alternative, but probably the one that really gives the best final product is doing the reverse sear in a cast iron or carbon steel fry pan on the stove top where you can butter baste it.  When I do this, I melt the butter in the pan and get it very hot.  I then add a couple of sprigs of thyme, or rosemary, or tarragon and a very large clove of garlic that I have slightly crushed with the flat of my chef’s knife, leaving the skin on.  The skin of the garlic and the stem of the herbs have a lot of flavor but you don’t want to chew them.  In this case they are flavoring the butter and get thrown out at the end of the cooking proves so leaving them adds to the flavor.  The first picture shows the steak just as it comes out of the tempering and is being added to hot pan with the butter and herbs.  The next picture Beth took of me basting the steak with the herb butter.  I tilt the pan to get a pool of the butter and use a large serving spoon to baste each side for 1½ to 2 minutes depending on the thickness of the steak.  This produces a great bark on the steak.

When I take up the steak I let it rest for a minute while I pour the hot butter into the drip jar.  I then add ¼ cup of beef stock and ¼ cup of red wine to the pan, with the herbs and garlic still in it, and scrape the pan to get all the residue from the steak.  The picture shows that wine sauce reducing down to about half the volume, and I then pour it through a strainer into a bowl to remove the garlic and herbs.  I serve that alongside the carved steak so everyone can add what they want to their steak.  I can do the same thing if I use the cast iron pan to sear the steak under the broiler but it doesn’t have the butter that is left clinging to the pan and the herbs to add to the flavor. 

Two thoughts on the sauce:

• If I don’t have open beef stock available to me, I don’t open a new can or carton just for ¼ cup.  I just double the red wine to make up for it. 
• I don’t cook with expensive wine.  In my earlier blog post on Red Table Wines for Under $15, I talked about having one of those inexepnsive wines to cook with and then drinking a nice bottle of wine made from the same grape, cabernet sauvignon or pinot noir usually, with the meal.  As long as i am cooking with the same grape as I will be drinking, I can keep the nice bottle just for drinking.
• All the volumes and timing here are for a 12-14 oz steak cooked Med Rare for two people to share.  Adjust accordingly if you are cooking larger steaks or a want a different level of doneness. 

Other Thoughts On Steak

How thick should a steak be – I believe the best steak is when you have one steak large enough for everyone to eat their fill.  If you have more then 6 people, or some huge eaters, you might need to go for a second steak.  Assuming you have a source to have a steak cut to the size you want, a thick steak will be much more flavorful and juicy than a thin individual steaks.  If you have to deal with what the supermarket has available, look for the thickest steaks they have.  In the old way of cooking steaks by first searing them, it was very difficult to cook a very thick steak to the desired level of doneness.  By tempering it first for as long as it needs to get the innermost part of the steak up to 100°, you don’t have that problem.  For a steak over 2″ thick maybe you want to go to 110° internal to end up Med Rare after the Reverse Sear.

Grass fed vs grain fed beef – When I was growing up cows grazed on grass and then went to be slaughtered.  The cattle farmers realized that they could add significant weight to the cow, and therefore make more money from the sale, by having the cows fatten up on corn so grain fed beef became the norm on the supermarket shelves.  Beth and I were on a trip to the Caribbean a few years ago and had a steak dinner and both of us remarked how good the meat tasted.  Beth said it reminded her of the steaks she had as a child.  We asked and were told that it was grass fed beef that came in from South America.  Grain fed beef will be fatter and that can make them more tender, but grass fed beef has much better flavor.  If you have a chance to get grass fed beef, I strongly suggest you try it.  You may have been raised on grain fed beef and don’t want a different taste and that is fine.  I will take grass fed over grain fed every chance I get. 

Dry aged beef – Dry aging is a process that ages the beef before cooking and that aging breaks down that connective tissue and makes the steak much more tender.  Some of the great steak houses like Peter Lugers in New York dry age all their steaks for at least several weeks so they don’t need to do the tempering process to server tender steaks.  Beth has dry aged some beef for a few days in our refrigerator and even that short time made a noticeable difference.  In my earlier blog on how Bobby Fly cooks steak I mentioned that some of the large Harris Teeter stores have dry age units that keep the steaks for at least two weeks before they will sell them.  They get a very premium price for the dry aged steaks but they will cut them to order for you and the taste is worth the price premium.

Internal Meat Thermometers

I have two internal meat thermometers that I can put in for the full cooking process and see the internal temp on my cell phone any time I want it.  I have had both for several years and this is a rapidly changing technology so there are probably newer, better products on the market now.  I think the important things are:

• To be able to get the temp on your phone.  I am fine with Bluetooth, I am not going far enough away where I need it to be wi fi.  I am also OK with the probe having a cable back to the monitor unit.  Both Bluetooth and wi fi can have limits of not being subject to temps over 400° so the units where the probe is cable connected to the monitor which sends the data to my phone can work at higher temps.
• At least two probes are needed for many cooking sessions, three can be good sometimes.  When I am cooking in my Kamado I want a probe in the protein being cooked to let me track the internal temp and I want one on the cooking surface right next to it telling me the cooking temperature that the meat is getting.  The big dome of the Kamado can have different temperatures and the external one is at the top of the dome and generally different from what the temp is down on the grill rack.  If I am doing two pieces of meat, I may want an internal probe in each of them, especially if they are different sizes so that would call for three probes. 

For my outside coking I use a ThermoPro Wireless Meat Thermometer with 6 probes.  The model I have is no longer for sale and I don’t remember the model number.  The TP930 appears to be the current model closest to what I have and it comes with 4 probes.  I don’t think I ever used 4 probes so this would be my choice if I needed to replace what I had now.  I have had several generations of ThermoPro and been happy with their products.  I recently put probes into ice water and boiling water and found that the readings were 4 degrees higher than they should have been.  I now factor that in and add 5 degrees to the temp I am looking for and cook to that reading on the device.

In the kitchen we have a MEATER Plus Smart Meat Thermometer.  On the plus side it is totally wireless so no cables are coming out of the oven.  The user interface is also very good.  The device has two sensors.  One at the end of the probe where it goes into the meat to give the internal temp and the other at the top where it gives the cooking temp.  If I put the desired end internal temp into the ap on my phone, it will tell me approximately how long it will take to get to that internal temp based on the cooking temp that it is getting.  It also has let me know that my oven is generally 8-10 degrees cooler than the temperature I select when turning on the oven so I now set the over for that higher temp so the actual cooking temp is what the recipe called for. The two negatives to this product are that the charging station needs to be just a few feet away from the probe when it is in the oven and that it should not be used at temps over 400°.  Both of those are show stoppers for my outside cooking but OK for the kitchen oven.  It is on the expensive side at $100.

I hope you found this blog of interest and let me know your thoughts after you have tried tempering a steak and then reverse searing it.

We are in the heart of summer BBQ season and this blog is a tutorial on smoking beef brisket aimed at those who have not done this before or did not get good results when they did try it.  It is for smoking a 4-5 lb. brisket, either the point or the flat, on a Kamado type grill but with suggestions for adjusting it if you want to try a whole brisket that is 12-16 lbs and/or use other kinds of grills.  All the terms used like point, flat, and stall are explained below.  Much of the information in this blog comes from the Aaron Franklin video on smoking Brisket –https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VmTzdMHu5KU.

Basic rules for brisket

1. Cook to the temperature , not to the clock.  This is important enough that it gets several mentions below.  Brisket must be cooked until at least an internal temp of 200° and 205° is optimum.  The most common mistake that people make in smoking a brisket is to use some recommended guide of minutes per lb.  The result is generally something that is almost impossible to chew instead of breaking apart in your hands. 
   • A 4-5 lb. brisket will usually take at least 8 hours to cook, more depending on how you handle the stall, and then an hour to rest before slicing.  If you want to smoke a brisket to eat that day for dinner, you should plan to start your file in the Kamado grill at 7:00 AM so the temp is stabilized at 250° by 8:00 and the meat can go on then.
   • Brisket will keep warm and ready to eat for several hours if wrapped in a warm towel and put in a Styrofoam cooler.
2. BBQ is a cooking technique, not a sauce.  To be considered BBQ the protein needs to either be grilled over an open flame (not a gas grill) or be smoked for part of the cooking process.  Adding a sauce labeled BBQ to a piece of meat does not make that BBQ.  Sauces primarily accompany the protein (meat or fish) and people can add the sauce to their plate if they want.  Some dishes call for a sauce to glaze the protein as part of the recipe but for brisket the sauce is generally served on the side at the table.  My Hot & Sweet Sauce recipe is at the bottom of this blog. 

Kamado Recipe

This recipe is for smoking beef brisket on a Kamado style grill.  I have a Kamado Joe but this should work equally well for a Big Green Egg.  It should not be difficult to adjust this recipe for other types of smokers but I suggest looking at some smoked brisket recipes for that style grill and adjusting this recipe based on what other recipes are calling for.  The Kamado style grills use ceramic heat deflectors to create an indirect head environment.  Offset smokers like a Traeger already have that indirect heat so all references to deflector plates can be ignored.  Doing a smoked brisket on a charcoal kettle grill like a Weber is very difficult because of the long cook time, difficulty in maintaining a 250° stable cooking temperature, and adding additional charcoal creates fluctuations in the cooking temperature. 

Brisket 101

A full beef brisket is made up of two different muscles that overlap.  The biggest one which has a rich layer of fat running through it is called the point.  The thin one is called the flat.  Interestingly, the flat is often the last to hit the 205° desired internal temp even though it is much thinner than the point.  A full brisket is about 12-16 pounds which is a lot of meat and needs a lot of grill surface to hold something that large.  Many stores will sell just the point or just the flat. 

The grain on the two muscles runs in different directions and you need to slice brisket against the grain.  If you smoke a full brisket, after the 1 hour resting time you want to cut it to separate the two muscles.  To do that below are the directions from www.bbq-experts.com:

1. First, identify where the point and flat are on the brisket.
2. That fat seam is called “the nose,” and that’s where you want to start separating the two.
3. Follow the fat seam as it curves back and under the flat.
4. Keep lifting the flat with your non-cutting hand and slicing through the fat seam until the point tapers out.

You can also do this to create two smaller briskets and smoke the point and the flat at different times, freezing the one that you want to do later. 

Cooking Time:

The challenge for brisket is to make it tender enough to enjoy eating.  Smoked brisket needs to cook for a LONG time at a low temperature to break down the connective tissue so that the meat easily pulls apart in your hands.   Even a small brisket, 4 lbs., will take at least 8 hours to get to the right temp to come off the grill.  A full brisket can take 16 hours and some people smoke them overnight.  If it anything other than a small brisket, I will cook it the day before I serve it to have enough time for it to get to the right temp and then rest for at least an hour.  I slice it and refrigerate the slices overnight because getting the whole brisket warm enough to serve and them slicing it is a real challenge.  I generally do a 4 lb. brisket because I don’t have that many people to feed and it is very preferable to eat it the same day you smoked it.

As a result of the long cooking time, smoked brisket is always at the well done stage.  The analogy is beef stew where again tough cuts of beef are cut into cubes and cooked for a long time as part of the stew so them become tender. 

I strongly encourage you to use so many minutes per pound ONLY for rough planning.  The brisket needs to keep cooking until it hits at least 200⁰ internal temp regardless of how long that takes and 205⁰ is the ideal target.  Anything less than that temp will mean that the meat will be very tough and not at all enjoyable.  It needs to cook at 250⁰ for many hours to break down all the connective tissue so it can pass the key test for brisket.  When you cut a slice of the brisket and hold it up in your hand it should be so tender that it folds over you hand and you can easily pull a bite sized piece off the slice with your fingers.  The brisket needs to be that tender to enjoy eating.  Using an internal probe that constantly tells you the internal temp is the best way to do this.  I use a unit with up to six probes so I can have one on the cooking surface next to the brisket letting me manage the temperature to be 250° at the cooking surface.  The temperature gauge in the dome of the Kamado is a long way away from the cooking surface and will often show a very different temp than the probe at the cooking surface.  I use another probe in each piece of meat being smoked to track their internal temp. Using a handheld probe that you poke into the meat requires you to open the Kamado every time you want to find the internal temp which is not good for your cooking time and you don’t know when The Stall starts or ends or just when it hits that target 200 -205⁰.   For full brisket plan on about 1 ¼ hours per lb.  3-4 lb. brisket – 7-8 hours at 250⁰.  Smaller cuts take significantly longer per lb.  But cook to the internal temp, not to the minutes per pound.

Slow cooked smoked meat like brisket and pulled pork have something called The Stall during their cooking.  Generally, around 160⁰ of internal temperature that temp will not change for up to a few hours and can even go down a few degrees.  Science has determined that juices have come to the surface of the meat where they evaporate, and that evaporation has a cooling effect that slows down the cooking.   You have two choices to deal with The Stall.

• Factor it into your timing for the cooking.  When I am doing a smaller 3-4 lb. brisket, Ican just let it keep cooking through The Stall and plan that it will be at least 8 hours on the grill and another hour to rest before eating the brisket.  Getting the meat on the grill before 8 AM means I can have it for dinner that night even with The Stall.
• The Texas Cheat – when you hit the stall, take the brisket off the grill and wrap it in foil sealing it and put it back on the grill.  The foil seal takes away the ability to evaporate so the cooking time can be an hour or two faster than just cooking through The Stall.  You can also wrap it in pink butcher’s paper if you have a roll and tie it with twine.  The heat is low enough that the paper does not catch on fire.  When I am doing a larger brisket, the cooking time is long enough that I use the Texas Cheat and when I don’t want to get up really early i will also do it for a smaller brisket. There is no taste impact.  It got the name Texas Cheat from when it started to be used in BBQ competitions. Since I keep a temp probe in the brisket the entire cooking time, I found it better to wrap around the probe than to try to reinsert it into the right spot through the foil or paper.  When the internal temp gets to 195°, take the brisket out of the wrap and let the surface dry out and crisp up a little while it gets to the 205° final internal temp.

I use Hickory wood for the smoke.  About six chunks, 2-3 inches on a side. small wood ships are not good for this long smoking process. I saw a very good write up that soaking the wood in water is not good for the smoking, so I don’t do that.  Oak or Pecan is also good with brisket.  The fruit woods like Apple and Cherry are pretty mild for brisket.  Mesquite is a matter of taste.  It will give the strongest smoke flavor but not everyone wants that strong a smoke taste and some people are allergic to Mesquite.  I don’t use any Mesquite.  Hickory is the heaviest smoke that I use.  According to Chef Michael Symon, the meat will absorb smoke flavor until it gets to 140° internal temp but after it gets to that temp, it does not absorb any additional smoke.  You could even move it to your kitchen oven at 250° once it gets to that temp if you have issues like weather that make keeping it on the grill difficult. 

When the internal temp is at 180⁰, or when you take off the foil if you used the Texas Cheat, you can do a probe test with a skewer or fork to check that the meat is starting  to be tender in every portion of the brisket because the probe goes in easily.  The thinnest portion of the brisket maybe the last to be tender.  Keep cooking until the brisket is totally tender, when the internal temp comes up to 200 – 205⁰.

Dry Rub one hour before putting on the grill

1/8 cup each of kosher salt and ground black pepper for a 4 lb. brisket.  This is the standard for Texas style brisket, which is generally considered the home of the best brisket.  Adjust accordingly for larger briskets.  Shake well in a container to mix them thoroughly.  The heavier salt will sink to the bottom so reshake periodically to keep the mixture even.  Pat the rub on all sides of the brisket.  Sprinkle it across the brisket, not making a crust to cover the meat.  Does not need to be rubbed in.  Put the rub on an hour before it goes on the grill and let it sit on the counter to come up to room temperature.  The picture shows the brisket with the rob on it. 

Use a drip pan under the rack that the brisket is on.  Put 1 cup water and ¼ cup apple cider vinegar in the drip pan.  I sometimes add a thickly sliced onion but I don’t think that it really adds much flavor. The picture shows the multilevel cooking environment I can set up with my Kamado. the white circle are the deflector places over the coasl creating an indirect heat. they are in th elowest position so just the smoke comes up around them. The drip pan is on the racks in the upper position and I have the temp probe for the cooking tem there as well. The brisket goes on the upper rack above the drip pan. I can also use the upper rack to do larger amounts of food like multiple tacks of ribs in cone cooking. The drip pan should be a throw away aluminum pan because the residue after 8+ hours of cooking will not be removable or useable for anything.   

The grill should be lit for an hour before the meat goes on the Kamado so the ceramic is uniformly up to temperature.  Adjust as needed for the smoker you have to get it to a stable 250⁰. 

Add the hickory chunks and put the deflector plates in place and close up the smoker until the smoke runs clear.  The heavy white smoke that comes out initially can add an unpleasant taste so wait a few minutes for the wood to start to put out clear smoke and then put the drip pan on the accessory rack, put the racks in place in the upper position and then put the brisket on the rack with the fat side and close the grill.  For all BBQ the fat side of the meat should be closest to the heat source so I put the brisket fat side down. 

Keep the cooking temperature where the beef is sitting on the rack as close to 250⁰ as possible for the full cooking time.   The thermometer on the Kamado is up at the top of the dome and not representative of the temperature down where the brisket is cooking.  I use a second probe on the rack right next to the brisket to monitor the cooking temperature and have both probes sending me the internal and cooking temps to my phone.  I can then adjust the two vents to get the 250° cooking temp that I want.  There is no need to open the grill any time during the cooking.  That will only slow down the cooking on a Kamado.  No need to mist or baste the brisket during cooking.  If you want to do the Texas Cheat and wrap the brisket when it stalls around 160°, you need to open the Kamado to do that but close it up while you are doing the wrap.  When meat is at least 200⁰ internal temp (205° is better) and fully tender, wrap in foil and hold for an hour and then carve.

Carving the Brisket

Slice across the grain with slices about 1/8” thick.  The grain runs different for the thin part of the brisket, called the “flat” than it does for the thick part of the brisket called the “point”.  If you have the full brisket, separate it into the two muscles so you can carve each against the grain using the approach mentioned above.

Not thin slices like sliced meat from the deli.  The slices should be about the thickness of a pencil. 

Test – does a slice fold over when held and easily come apart with a tug of the hand.  That is a perfectly cooked brisket. 

BBQ Sauce for the brisket

For most BBQ the sauce is an accompaniment that is added at the table by each person in the amount they want and, if several sauces are offered, the style sauce they want.  Not everyone agrees and the most argument for having sauce on the meat during smoking is about ribs. For Texas style brisket, no sauce is ever added during the cooking.  Below is the recipe for my Hot & Sweet sauce that I serve with my brisket.  Adopted from Aaron Franklin’s excellent YouTube video on brisket.  I prefer to make the sauce the day before I smoke the brisket.

½ cup – good for 5-6 people.  Really good sauce so no problem if you have some left over.

1 cup – larger group eating a larger brisket and some sauce for left over.

Ingredients:

Heat – you can use any relatively mild chili powder or combinations.  Ancho adds some smokey flavor.  Chipotle adds some depth.  Habanero adds a lot of heat so be very careful with it if you add that to the mix.   Add to get the level of kick that you want but you can’t really go backwards to make it less spicy.  You need to let the sauce simmer for at least 15 minutes after adding any chili powders to get any idea of the impact.  It will only be the next day where you will taste the real heat, generally a little less kick that shows up a little later in the taste.  I don’t have measurements if you want to use different chili peppers instead of powder so I can only say add to taste and again, that taste will evolve considerably over time.  The goal of this sauce is to get the upfront sweet taste first and have the heat kick in later to get the hot and sweet taste. 

Sweetness – Goal is to get the upfront sweet taste first and have the heat kick in late for the hot and sweet taste.  Less sweet than most store-bought sauces.

Approach:

In a stainless-steel pot melt the butter and cook the onions in the melted butter.  Aluminum pans may react a little with some of the ingredients so stainless steel is recommended.  When the onions are translucent add the other ingredients and, using a very large wisk, combine them together.  Let simmer for at least 20 minutes and taste.  Correct to your taste buds and let simmer a little longer and then remove from the heat. 

Three choices:

1. Save as is with the onion making it a little lumpy. The finer the chopped onion, the less this is a problem.  This is what I generally do.
2. Put in the blender to liquify the onion.  If you use any chili peppers instead of powder blending is recommended
3. Run through a strainer to remove the onion chunks 

For breakfast this morning Beth made a Bacon & Leek Quiche using some of our homemade bacon. It was delicious and would be equally good for lunch. Beth used Joanna Gaines’s recipe from her excellent Magnolia Table cookbook and you can find a youtube video of it under Bacon & Leek Quiche Joanna Gaines. There were a number of recipes for bacon and leek quiche but this is the one she used and it was excellent. The bacon flavor was distinct but not dominating, probably because my bacon was so well made.😁

I always try to give attribution to the author of the recipe, including their cookbook if we have it. I also check that their recipe is posted on the web before including it in a post. Even when we make some significant modifications, I think it only fair to give credit to the person whose recipe we started with.