Part 1: Barbecue Beef Brisket Texas Style – The Meat and the Salt

This weekend, we have our yearly neighbourhood grilling and BBQ event. Last year I prepared smoked baby-back ribs. This year my goal is to prepare Texas style Brisket 🙂

2.5 kg Raw Beef Brisket

I went to my butcher to get the pre-ordered beef brisket: 2.538 kg raw meat, with a wonderful thin fat layer separating the two muscles:

Raw Brisket Side View

That’s a lot of meat, but we there will be a lot of guests too. And I expect the meat to shrink to about half of the original weight.

I will try several new things for this time, compared to the way I did it so for (see My First DIY Smoked Beef Brisket: Day 1 – Preparation and My First DIY Smoked Beef Brisket: Day 2 – the Way and the Result).

Brisket is a piece of meat from the steer chest area, between the two forelegs:

Brisket (Source: Wikipedia)

That muscle has to support most of the weight (60% according to Wikipedia) of standing/moving the cattle, so that muscle has a lot of connectivity tissue. So it has to be cooked correctly to make it tender. That meat is sold at low price: chicken or pork is not expensive here, but Brisket is even less expensive here (around 20 CHF per kilogram). The other beef meat usually is three to four times more expensive. So for that price I can afford a BIG piece for the price of a steak :-). The catch is: if not cooked right, it will be like wrangler’s leather chaps. IF (big IF!) cooked right, it will be tender, juicy meat with a nice bark.

So far my experiments (see “My First DIY Smoked Beef Brisket: Day 2 – the Way and the Result“) were running OK, but I want to get to the next level. One of the different things is that I’m not going to use a rub with salt: the meat get salted, then put into the fridge for several hours. I will rub it just before putting it into the smoker the next day.

I trimmed it (removed excessive fat) and salted it with Sea Salt, about half a tea-spoon per pound of meat:

Salted Raw Brisket

Packed it back into butcher paper and it is going to rest in the refrigerator until early tomorrow morning. During the night, the salt will penetrate the meat. The salt should magnify the flavours.

To be continued ….

Happy Salting 🙂