(upbeat music)
- [Aaron] So I'm putting the brisket on right now.
We've got a fire box on this side, cook chamber,
smoke stack.
This is a real tiny smoker so the way I'm putting
this one on is I've got the fat on the top side.
There are two types of people in this world.
One is fat side up, the other half is fat side down.
I like it fat side up.
I always put the point towards the fire
because it's got more fat, it's got a little
bit more insulation right there.
So the fire is going to come up here,
it's going to come across here, underneath,
on top, swirl around, do all kinds of stuff
then go out the smoke stack.
I've got the flat, it's by the smoke stack.
There's going to be a high concentrated heat
right here so I'm going to have to be really
careful not to burn that.
One thing there's a big fire and it's a small cook chamber.
I'm going to put a water pan in here.
That's going to keep a lot of moisture in the
cooking chamber, it's going to help it not burn
quite so easily.
We've got fat on top, point towards the fire,
flat towards the smoke stack, water pan in there
to keep it moist.
Shut the lid and watch it fire for a long time.
(upbeat music)
So how long is a long time?
Well long enough to drink a beer.
Long enough to need a koozie for it too.
(upbeat music)
And talk about brisket.
A good rule of thumb to go by for how long
a brisket is going to cook is generally about
an hour to an hour and 15 minutes per pound.
For this brisket, I always kind of calculate
about 12 hours.
If I'm going to serve it at 5:00 PM, I'm going
to start it at 5:00 AM.
The smoker I'm using for this one is really, really
small in comparison to what I normally cook on.
I'm going to try to keep it pretty low, about 250 degrees.
I'm going to keep it really, really steady
and I'm really going to watch the fires
and make sure that they stay clean.
If you were cooking a lot of brisket or a lot of meat
on a big cooker, it's going to take longer.
The more meat you cook, it takes longer, there's no way
around it.
There's a little term people throw around, it's called
if you're looking, you ain't cooking and that's
very much true.
If the lid's open, you're losing heat, you're losing smoke.
It's going to take a certain amount of time to recover
that heat, and that really gets people in trouble a lot
of times.
When they're getting impatient and meat's not cooking
on time, dinner's about to get served, people are showing
up to the house and it's just not ready yet.
You keep on checking it, you keep on checking it,
but the truth is you're just shooting yourself in the foot.
At the end of the day, it's going to take as long
as it's going to take and you can't rush it.
Good barbecue just takes a while and just got to be patient.
That being said, there's a balance between spritzing
and mopping, and actually opening up the lid.
If you've got to check it, do it as little as possible,
and when the brisket starts looking a little bit dry
on the surface, you can hit it with a squirt bottle
and you can mop it or whatever.
But you really want to try to avoid opening up the lid
really, really often.
The biggest key to having a good brisket, or a good
rack of ribs, or a good chicken, or good anything
you're cooking on a barbecue is fire management.
The last thing you want to do is have fluctuating fire.
You don't want it to get too hot, you don't want it
to go low, it's going to add a lot of cook time.
I guarantee that if you keep a good, steady temperature
it's going to cook way faster and more consistently
across the board.
One of the things to fire management, you don't want
a dirty fire, when you burn a dirty fire that means
that you're choking off the oxygen supply to it
and it's going to create a lot of creosote.
It's going to get bitter, it's going to be over-smoked.
If you look at your smoke stack and you see that
it's just pouring out just gross looking smoke,
you need to open it up, you need to maybe think
about what kind of wood you're using.
Different woods burn differently.
You don't want to use green wood necessarily for
certain types, you don't want to use overly cured
wood for certain types.
You really want to be able to look a the smoke
stack and see clean heat coming out of it,
not a lot of smoke, especially with an offset
cooker too, when you shut off the air supply,
you're shutting off the air flow to the cooker
and you need a certain balance of radiant heat
versus convective heat and all that kind of stuff.
That really comes into your cooker and just knowing
how well it cooks, knowing where the hot spots are,
knowing how to manage your fire and all that stuff.
So that's a lot of experience that will eventually
go into that.
But those are some pretty good guidelines to go by.
There's a lot of different ways to retain moisture
in a brisket or anything else you're cooking.
One way that I really like is to have a water pan
in there, I always keep a water pan unless the
humidity is really high, and sometimes it gets
like that here in Texas.
But elsewhere it may not, always keep a water pan.
Other ways are spritzing, mopping are the two main ones.
Spritzing generally means that you've got some type
of thin liquid in a squirt bottle, like a little
squirty spray bottle, I like that.
It could be water, it could be apple juice,
you could put hot sauce in there, you could do
apple cider vinegar, white vinegar.
Anything you want, the world is yours.
A lot of people think it adds a lot of flavor.
I use it more to keep meat moist and to keep stuff
from burning.
Another method is mopping and that essentially
is just some type of liquid, it could have onions,
garlic, oil, butter, all kinds of stuff.
It literally means a mop.
You've got a pot, it's staying hot, you stick
a mop in there and you mop the top of the meat.
I don't like to do it, I think it's messy,
you've got to clean a pot, you've got to clean
a mop, and it just makes a huge mess in the cooker.
I'm not really cooking that kind of barbecue
so it's not my thing.
So to wrap or not to wrap?
A lot of people claim to wrap briskets,
a lot of people claim to not wrap briskets.
I really try not to wrap but sometimes you just have to.
What that accomplishes is it retains moisture,
it's going to help it cook a little bit faster.
If your meat is getting a little too smoky,
you're going to want to wrap it or if it's
also getting too dark and certain woods tend
to get dark a lot faster than other woods.
So you could either burn a really clean fire
and not wrap it, you could use butcher paper,
or you could use foil.
Here in Texas using foil is called a Texas crutch.
I don't like to use it but it's going to retain
a lot of moisture in there, it's going to steam itself,
and you could really cook a lot faster.
If you were getting in trouble and maybe your brisket
wasn't going to get done on time, you could wrap it
in foil and really accelerate the cook time.
It really comes down to taste, if you want it smoky,
if you want it dark, if you want it moist.
It's kind of a trial and error kind of balance.
So if you think to wrap, go for it and see what happens.
(upbeat music)
Another thing to be mindful of is a little thing
called the stall and that really messes up a lot
of people that are trying to cook brisket.
But if you know it's coming, it's really not
that big of a deal.
The hotter you're cooking, the less it's going
to affect you, the lower you're cooking, the more it's
going to take to get passed that hump.
The brisket is going to be cooking, it's going
to be going up, and when it hits about 160 to 170
it's going to stop, and that's where the stall happens.
It's tightening up, it's squeezing out the moisture.
Along with that moisture is going the heat.
That's the stall and then it's going to keep going up
and you've got to think of it kind of like a train.
It builds up so much momentum, depends on how hot
you're cooking and how quickly it's cooking.
But if you're going hot enough and fast enough,
if your fires are steady, it's going to be like
a train, it's going to have momentum, it's going
to hit the stall, and it's going to plow right
through it and keep going.
That's how I like to think of it.
That being said, when the stall has to happen,
it's going to be a while before it's done.
Don't pull it off yet, it may look pretty,
but it's not ready.