Beef Heaven….It’s No Bull!

I have climbed to the top of the mountain…Praise the Lord!

What on earth am I talking about?

Recently I made and tried the beef sensation of the millenium…I kid you not! Texas style smoked beef brisket! “But that is the cheapest cut of beef”, I hear you cry. I can only tell you that this is something that can only be described as totally mind altering. It is the most tender piece of meat I have ever eaten and had the most flavour. I am now going to talk you through it.

You start of with a brisket:


You can see that there is a fair amount of fat on this meat. You want to leave on as much as possible. This is because as it cooks, the fat melts and bastes the meat and keeps it moist.

and some spice rub:

This rub was taken from eGullet and is called colKlink’s spice rub and can be found on the eGullet forum.

You then generously rub the spices into the meat:

The meat is then placed into a smoke oven or a BBQ with a smoke box:

The recommendation is to use a hardwood like hickory or mesquite. I used a combination of redgum:

and hickory:

You then need to smoke the meat at a temperature of around 100 degrees centigrade for a long time. How long I hear you ask? Until the internal temperature as measured with a temperature probe reaches 100 degrees centigrade. On a 5kg piece of meat, this could take up to 12 hours!!! So be prepared!

Why so long and at such low temperatures?
Beef Brisket when cooked quickly is a very tough and fatty meat which is what makes it a relatively cheap cut of meat. This is because it contains alot of fat and connective tissue (whose main constituent is collagen). When collagen is heated above 68 degrees centigrade, I begins to convert into gelatine which we all know is soft. The high amount of fat serves to keep the meat moist. Therefore, if we slowly smoke the meat at a low temperature, we allow it to convert all of its collagen into gelatine and melt all the fat to baste the meat and keep it moist and the addition of smoke adds a great depth of flavour. The result is a piece of meat that is so tender and moist, you can cut it with a spoon and with flavour that is so intense, words cannot sufficiently describe it!

Straight out of the oven, this is what it looks like:

and cut the inside of the brisket looks like this:

I served this meat with Marks, South Carolina Mustard BBQ sauce and bacon cornbread, (both recipes of which can be found at www.egullet.com) and an “Arkansas ‘slaw” which was from Steve Raichlen’s BBQ USA. Everyone raved about the food. The only way to describe this meat to anyone reading who is uninitiated is that it has the tenderness of a perfectly braised lamb shank and it has the intense ‘beefy’ flavour profile of beef jerky.

Finished and served up it looked like this:

There are recipes all over the web for this. I intend to post my own at some point in the future. To anyone who hasn’t tried this and considers themselves a meat lover, you really dont know what you are missing!!