8/8 Smoked Brisket

Since I'll finally be getting my own kitchen back in just a couple days (for the first time since the end of April), I figured it's high time we get this blog up and running again. Now I'll certainly have to adjust my cooking to a slightly reduced budget and more importantly an unpredictable schedule. Plus I'll have to find out where all the good food stores are... But that should all make it that much more fun. In any event, for now I'm still in Boston and feeding the entire family, so here we go...

So this one was quite simple, though time intensive. I started off by looking through recipes to gather some ideas on how to smoke this half brisket. Here are a few conclusions I drew:

1) Virtually every recipe uses a spice rub, however not a single spice rub mix is the same.
2) Most recipes suggest refrigerating the brisket overnight with the rub on it. Probably helps, but I've decided it's not critical.
3) Some Texans like to put an open can of beer in the smoker in order to provide humidity. Seems like a waste of a perfectly good beverage to me.
4) Internal temperature needs to come up to about 180 or so for the brisket to be done however cooking times and temps were all over the board and my grill doesn't have an internal thermometer anyway.
5) Some recipes say to flip the brisket while cooking, others say not to. For obvious reasons, I chose the latter option.

With that in mind I made a spice rub which I could not duplicate if you paid me to - essentially taking whatever spices from the spice cabinet that seemed like they could be tasty. Cinnamon, curry, paprika, chile, cumin, coriander, garlic powder, salt, pepper, cayenne, oregeno are the ones that I can remember right now - there were at least a few more.

Now apparently some people have "smoke boxes" for their wood chips. I'm not sure what a smoke box is, but I'll bet it's roughly cube shaped and allows smoke to escape. Since I do have aluminum foil however, I made a little aluminum tray for the hickory wood chips. Now I paid 3.99 for a small bag of Weber chips at Whole Foods. That probably means I got ripped off 4 times over. It also means that wood chips are cheap, so don't be afraid to use them. (A small bag is enough for 2-3 smoking "sessions")

After soaking the chips 30 minutes, I got them smoking on the right side of the gas grill (burner on low) and placed the rubbed brisket on the second shelf of the left side of the grill (burner turned off). Why the second shelf? I don't have an answer. Seemed like a good idea. I also placed a can of water on the second shelf to provide humidity. I'm skeptical that this did anything, but if the Texans do it, it must be good... Finally I placed the thermometer probe into the beef to help me figure out when it was ready and that's pretty much it folks. After that it's just wait and drool for four hours.

As I'm sure you can tell from the pictures, the final product was rather delicious. Sure there's room for improvement, but I'd happily eat this on a daily basis! Oh and I know you're all wondering whether that second picture makes a great desktop wallpaper. Well it does.