I don’t have the time or inclination to write a long article on the merits of Barbecue Cuisine or why I believe that Texas-Style Barbecued Beef Brisket is a dish befitting royalty. That’s because I’m too busy cooking Texas-Style Barbecued Beef Brisket, and eating like a king. Be thankful I found the time to write this article.

For those who don’t know it already, BBQ is a process of cooking using low temperatures (about 200° F), indirect heat and wood smoke to cook food very slowly. If you’re putting the food over the heat source, you’re grilling. Yes, in the vernacular, a BBQ is the get-together as much as the cooking process, but we’re talking about the process.

My tool of choice for BBQing is my Smokintex Electric Smoker. I’ve discussed this beauty in previous posts, and in the summer it really gets a workout. I know that I may draw the ire of the purists who say that BBQ has to have a wood fire, but I’ve got a busy family life (with a wife and 4 kids) - I BBQ in an electric smoker, and I’m not ashamed. If I had the time to tend a wood fire for a day, I just might. These days, convenience rules. Call me a Good-for-Nothing City-Slicker, I don’t care.

The ingredients for a good BBQ Brisket are very simple: 1 untrimmed, first-cut beef-brisket. That’s it. You can try for the whole brisket (and I have before), but the first cut is more manageable. They usually weigh about 10 pounds. That’s about 8-9 pounds of meat after the fat is trimmed away, but you won’t be doing that until you’re done cooking. All that fat is going to be basting your brisket. It takes about 3/4 pound of meat to feed a hungry adult, so I’m cooking for about 10 people. I made this particular hunk of beef for a family get togther last week.

Saturday Night
It took about half a cup of dry rub to cover all the surfaces of the meat. I use a recipe from Smoke & Spice. Pretty standard affair, with paprika, salt, pepper, chili powder, cayenne pepper, sugar, garlic and onion powder. You’ll note that I trimmed off the tip of my brisket. That’s for space constraints. I’ll be cooking that on the shelf below the big piece, so it can catch the drippings. I put the meat in a plastic zipper-lock bag, and refrigerated it overnight. Make sure you know which side of the meat is the fatty side - it’s harder to recognize after the rub settles in.

5 AM, Sunday Morning
Half an hour before you start smoking, you need to take the meat out and let it come to room temperature. This helps cut down on a bitter tasting compound, called creosote, from adhering to the meat. While the meat was warming up, I went out to prepare the smoker. The floor of and smoking box of the smoker were covered with heavy-duty aluminium foil, to facilitate cleanup. I added 5 ounces of oak to the smoker’s smoke-box. (I purchased a 50-pound sack of oak firewood a few years back, and I chop off a few blocks when I need it for BBQ. Hickory or Mesquite are also good smoking woods for beef, but I like the subtle taste of oak. Yes, at 5:15 in the morning, I was choopping wood logs with an axe and hammer. That’s devotion!) I put a few pieces of charcoal in there because the smoker manual said that I would get a nice smoke-ring on the meat that way. It didn’t work out that way, but it didn’t hurt.

At 5:45 in the morning I put the meat into the smoker. Of course, I had my trusty thermometer probes stuck in the meat. I set the thermostat to 220° and closed the door and went back to sleep.

While we’re waiting for the meat to cook, I’ll give you the recipe for my family’s favorite BBQ side dish. We call them Aunt Ellen Beans (Aunt Ellen actually was a guest at this meal), but you can just call them Enhanced Baked Beans. This is one of those guideline-recipes, it never comes out the same, but it’s never bad:

• Canned Baked Beans - we use the large cans of Bush’s Vegetarian Baked Beans. Sometimes Heinz’s
• Onions
• Ketchup (always Heinz)
• oil for frying

Peel and chop as many onions as you wish (proportional to the amount of beans you’ll be making). Fry them in a small amount of oil, until they are as done as you’d like. We usually go for browned, bordering on burnt. Add the beans to the onions and stir well. Add a few squirts of ketchup and stir well. Heat and serve.

Of course, you can make this with any proportions you want, and I’ve never been dissappointed. What can go wrong?

Sunday Afternoon
By about 6:00PM, the brisket was ready. What’s ready? 210°. That sounds awfully high for beef and you’re right - that’s way overdone. But there’s a rationale. You already know this factoid, but here’s the explanation for the rest of you.

Brisket is a very tough meat, full of connective tissue and the like. If you cooked it to the normal temperature that you like your meat at (145° for medium rare), it would certainly be edible, but it would take a lot of chewing. When brisket is brought up to 210°, the juices have all been cooked out of the meat, but the collagen in the meat has just finished melting. Collagen is the gelatinous substance in meat, and brisket has plenty of it. So while you’ve cooked out all of the juices, the meat is now bathed in collagen juciness. Trust me, it’s better this way.

I took the meat out, and put it on my cutting board. Time to trim off the fat that’s been basting the meat.

Slice the meat thinly, across the grain, and serve with your favorite BBQ sauce, warmed up. My favorite way of eating this is a big brisket sandwich, slathered in BBQ sauce with a big dollop of extra-creamy coleslaw in the sandwich (sort of a tribute to the Pulled Pork Sandwich). Oh, man, is that good eating!

The Fourth of July is coming, and I hope that you’re planing on making a BBQ. It’s an American Tradition. If you end up cooking some real barbecue, let us know!