Successful BBQ pork butt and brisket is science (2018)
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
1. Not all beef/cattle are created equally. You must start with a high quality brisket. Just because it is a prime grade brisket is not enough. We tasted brisket from many farms and we centered on Creekstone Farms.
2. Not all smokers are created equally. Test the extremes including low-slow (12-15 hours) vs fast-high (8 hours). We found offset is good for low-slow, but gas powered is better for fast-high.
3. Not so secret: you must rest the brisket for 12 hours in a warmer after it is finished cooking. This gets the fat rendered inside, so you can get those grooves / mountains and peaks within the meat. This also achieves the most tender brisket.
4. Before wrapping with butcher paper, we put beef tallow on the brisket. This creates a juicier product for us.
5. Injecting and/or putting brisket slices in broth never worked for us. Instead of tasting like juicy brisket, it tasted like "brisket and broth".
6. We trim a lot to get a more even brisket with consistent height, and use trimmings for other products. Consistent height means your flat lean side won't dry out by the time the fatty point side is cooked.
1. What factors to look for when seeking "high quality brisket, but also...?"
2. When to use which low /v/ high
3. warmer at what temp? Tented in foil? just an oven? open flame/coals? or special equipment?
6. What do you do with the trim?
Thanks - would love to taste yours...
1. High quality brisket to us is taste and tenderness. Taste is beefiness, smokiness (not too strong, but present), right amount of salt taste, and a good bark (here you will have opinions, between "soggy" bark and "crusty" bark). Tenderness is it must bend on the finger and you can eat it with just a fork.
2. For us low-slow is for offset (ie; traditional bbq pits) and fast-high is for gas powered (ie; Southern Pride Smokers). Reason is gas powered smokers create a lot of air/wind, thus drying the brisket faster than a traditional offset smoker. The verdict is that offset smokers make a better product (ie; because it's low-slow, which you can't do with gas powered smoker).
3. I believe we are warming at 160 F but don't remember.
4. We don't do tented foil, but there are lots of youtube videos claiming otherwise.
5. Flame/coals, don't know enough about this.
6. We don't have any special equipment other than really good gloves to carry hot brisket around when wrapping.
7. You can cook the trimmings separately and use them for sandwiches (since you don't need a clean looking slice) or use it in beans. You can also grind it to create products like sausages or burgers. See this video https://youtu.be/H-_ok8WGb4k?t=236, look at how thick the trimmings are.
I am full, currently - but now my mouth is watering.
On the beans front, my official beans recipe is this whiskey bbq beans. But I like whiskey, so YMMV. https://grillinfools.com/blog/2015/06/11/my-spin-on-oklahoma...
How’d you end up on HN and/or how’d you end up in the BBQ game?
Guess nobody considered the patties were still chock full of (much more) beef fat, but oh well. (Properly deep fried fries retain only a few grams of oil vs upwards of about 500% more in a single, lean McDonald's patty.)
Rinse out a reasonably sized beer cooler with boiling hot water to warm it up, then put the wrapped brisket on a towel in there, and close it. It'll hold it's temperature and finish in there.
Amazingribs is one of the worst sites for learning brisket cooks. It fools you with pseudo-science and big talking. If you want a reliable simple method that will never fail you then go with Aaron Franklin’s system.
Case in point, amazingribs recommends injecting broth.
If you want to get fancier then go ahead, but most folks won’t know the difference.
I’m always so curious when I see the sheer diversity in backgrounds and interests on HN, especially when not directly related to tech.
That is, there is an audience, so far not very well served, for good information.
Soooo, HN can attract people who want good information even if they run BBQ restaurants and don't read about neural networks, the latest microprocessors, or the question of P versus NP. Sooo, we have some evidence that some of the audience so wants good information that they are willing to jump over a high fence into Techy-Land with issues of cache concurrency in multicore processors or distributed databases to get their information.
Part of the future of the Internet, then, is (A) generating such information and (B) helping people find from all that information what they like.
You, sir, are a hero. mostly for the brisket though, not any of the other stuff. Which brings me to your point #1: You are correct, but leave off an important fact: No matter the grade or source, if properly cooked there is not such thing as a bad brisket. There are merely lower grades of amazing.
My primary complaint about brisket is that somewhere around '07/'08 people started realizing that a properly cooked brisket was the most underrated piece of meat on the market. This drove the prices form $2-$3/lb to north of $8/lb.
My ground burger blend is equal amounts chuck (SRF wagyu if available), brisket (flank if I can't get brisket) and oxtail (very challenging to cut all the meat off the bone but absolutely worth the work). I use a Kitchen Aid grinder attachment and grind coarse.
Best burgers ever.
I've not tried to grind more than two or three pounds at a time.
In the Mad Scientist BBQ, he suggest to wrap it twice and also put beef tallow into the second wrap. One wrap is to get through the stall, and then a fresh wrap for the rest. Maybe that's worth an additional list item.
For everybody who wants to get going with BBQ, watch these channels:
Mad Scientist BBQ - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCselvHbb5ah0sEqZrFa-7nA - just fantastic video production
Harry Soo - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC4dtbTXdvjo272b5x_mxRBw - Harry keeps winning 1st place in all BBQ comps he participates in.
Texicana BBQ - https://www.youtube.com/user/MCglobalvision (he is Aaron Franklin's pitmaster)
I can vouch for it being very tasty.
I'm in the UK too.
If you want to get started tomorrow for like 100 pounds, search youtube for clay pot smoker.
If you want to get it right the first time and you don't want to work hard, just buy a good quality electric smoker. Like the large (22 inch) Weber Smokey Mountain. The others are too small for whole briskets.
If you want to earn your stripes as a pitmaster, buy an offset smoker. They're cheap, but don't cheap out. Get a heavy one. Someone else mentioned Oklahoma Joe's - that's my smoker. Prepare to spend a lot on charcoal and wood. If you want to throw huge bbq parties this is your best option because it's big enough for multiple briskets.
A great option is a Big Green Egg or a knockoff. Expensive to buy but cheap on charcoal and wood and holds temperature all day.
Salt and pepper rub. Oak or hickory or pecan wood. Get a good grilling thermometer.
I've had Franklin's. You can make it just as good with any of the above options.
It's sad how many places still do this. I love brisket and this basically ruins it in my opinion.
Question: What temp is your warmer? Also, do you leave the brisket wrapped when it is resting in the warmer?
And definitely yes, keep it wrapped at all times when warming.
I've had much better luck with Weber Kettle techniques than with any other devices, including a BGE, which I think is pretty overrated.
Pity that finding a full brisket, let alone with the fat cap intact, is a hard feat in Australia. And very expensive if you do.
That's a ridiculous state-of-affairs. I will keep looking for full brisket sources.
I think cows are big so a lot of places won't break down a full one and the briskets already come with the flap removed, last time I asked they said it wouldn't be simple to provide (I'm in a major city). So I tried the half brisket but it didn't have enough fat cap either, tasted OK but was too dry/tough. I'm sure there is one who can provide it somewhere, or by mail order.
I recently got an old Traeger smoker, and I've done one pork butt, and two picnic roasts on it so far. They're definitely in a different league, but it does take much longer.
Since I happened to take a mid-cook photo of the last one I did: https://imgur.com/a/FYyFJ83
When I was a wee goat, I took immense pleasure in an oven we had that combined microwaving and convection baking. The directions on a frozen deep dish apple pie was something like an hour. And microwave+convection was something like 30 minutes. And it was totally passable for a baked-only pie.
[1] https://amazingribs.com/more-technique-and-science/more-cook...
The trick is to cool the meat down between initial cook and smoking. Smoking is basically a reheating process with added flavor.
https://www.seriouseats.com/recipes/2016/07/sous-vide-barbec...
But if you shred and sauce it right that bbq pork is great too!
I was inspired to figure out a good way to smoke/cook BBQ on equipment I had from an Alton Brown Good Eats episode.
Sous vide to cook. Chill in the fridge overnight. Smoke for an hour or two.
It's gets you about 90% the same results without needed to keep the smoker perfectly dialed in.
You Suck At Cooking is weird, but has some delicious food ideas and is fairly fun, if you get into his humor.
Kent Rollins makes some amazing food, and is super wholesome. His slider recipe is one of our favorites.
Nat's How I Reckon is profane, and funny, but also "Anyone can make good food", but also just has good technique to pass along.
Both on the website and in his book, he has a real gift for presenting cooking information in a way that is comprehensive yet also very approachable and easy to understand.
3 hours unwrapped, then 2 hours wrapped with butter and sauce, then 1 hour unwrapped.
Presumably then, not only will wrapping in foil at the 170°F mark skip the stall, but it will also result in moister meat since you're not losing all that water to evaporation?
Years ago, I figured out that essentially steaming pork ribs and then finishing them at high heat resulted in the juiciest tender ribs I'd ever had. (As well as being much faster.)
I know the concern with wrapping pork and brisket in foil is in not having a bark... but can't that be somewhat alleviated by finishing it off at high temp without foil, once it's hit the desired internal temperature? Or is there something uniquely special about a "slow-cooked" bark that's worth the overall loss in moisture, that high heat can't accomplish?
Most of the “moisture” you notice in the final product is from rendered fat, not water content. Though of course you don’t want the meat to dry out, which is why all long cooks should be accompanied by a water pan.
Brisket bark is not at all the same as the pork rib char you’re referring to; it’s the product of hours of reaction between smoke, salt, pepper, and fat on the surface of the meat. I agree on ribs though, I think the steamed + grill finished rib style outshines most smoked ribs!
Generally you wrap around the time of the stall or when the meat has developed enough bark. For a brisket, this tends to be in the ~170° range.
Humidity is a major factor in shortening the stall, because the stall comes from evaporative cooling as the meat loses moisture. If you keep a large water pan at the hottest spot of your cooker, this makes the stall dramatically shorter because there will be less evaporation in a humid chamber.
I will reiterate that for a brisket, the flavor you’ll get from wrapping in butcher paper is far superior to that of a foil wrap. I live in Austin and have tried all of the best brisket around here. Anything wrapped in foil (i.e. Snow’s) is in a tier far below the best places (Franklin, La Barbecue, Micklethwait), every one of which wraps in butcher paper. There’s a reason for that! The aluminum foil really does inflict a distinctive pot roast flavor from the steaming of the brisket, a flavor that does not occur with butcher paper wrapping.
Beyond that, the other most important advice (noted elsewhere in this thread) is to allow a very long rest period after the cook, ideally 12+ hours at around 140-145°. This is what causes the brisket to really relax and the rest of its collagen to melt without drying out. My brisket cooks these days use a schedule similar to Franklin: cook all day, aim to finish just before bedtime, and then rest in a low warmer all night for lunchtime bbq the next day.
Pork butts are a very different beast and none of the above advice is applicable there, except the importance of a water pan.
I’ll also add that I was originally doing a cook all night type of schedule. It was fun to do a couple of times, but the sleep loss isn’t great. The cook all day / rest all night schedule is a lot more fun and gets a better result too!
Millions of people are aware of the exploitative conditions endemic in smartphone factories thanks to the volume of reporting done on the issue over the last decade. If sales are any indication, said millions are quite comfortable in their purchasing decisions.
=== Qualifications
From age 5 to 22, I was in Memphis. I was there again from age 30 to 32.
At ballpark 8 ounces of pork BBQ a month, that would be
(1/2) * 12 * 20 = 120
pounds of pork BBQ consumed.
Dad often took me to the annual Winchester-Western gun show with fantastic shooting by Herb Parsons. Also featured was pork BBQ -- paper plates piled high with it, with coleslaw, potato salad, and some bread -- cooked overnight on racks over a temporary dug pit maybe 2 feet deep, 4 feet wide, and 50 yards long with smoldering wood, likely hickory.
With the BBQ contest Memphis in May, Memphis has some claims to significant, competitive pork BBQ expertise.
The Nathan Myhrvold winning efforts at Memphis in May contribute to the level of expertise.
Now I'm in East Tennessee, another area for serious pork BBQ.
And I've cooked my own versions of pork BBQ off and on for over 20 years.
=== Theory
From various readings, there is a theory of "low and slow" meat cooking including BBQ:
Part of the theory is that the meat fibers themselves are always tender. When meat is tough, the cause is collagen. So, to make tough meat tender, melt the collagen, and can do that at 165 F, a temperature that is also commonly regarded as high enough for food safety.
If get the meat fibers much above, say, 180 F for too long, then the fibers will shrink, expel their water, and become dry and brittle, that is, not succulent.
Generally, 212 F for very long is too darned hot. In practice often can get by with cooking meat at 212 F, that is, boiling it, if (A) the meat is quite tender and (B) don't have the meat at 212 F for very long.
So, my best guess is that BBQ is from cooking "low and slow", and the "low" is about 165-170 F, and the "slow" is several hours, until the meat is still juicy and quite tender, i.e., succulent.
=== Most Recent Trial
This HN OP is timely: On
Saturday, April 3rd, 2021
I bought a fresh "boneless pork butt" of 8.9 pounds, $21.72. That piece is also called Boston Butt. It is the shoulder of the hog.
I have a rack of stainless steel wires that can be adjusted to the shape of a V and a rectangular covered granite toasting pan
19.5 x 12.88 x 7"
=== Cooking
So, I put the pork on the V rack in the bottom of the roaster, inserted a meat thermometer into the pork, put on the top of the roaster, and placed the whole assembly into a pre-heated 225 F oven.
At 2.5 hours later the meat thermometer read 165 F. Then I reduced the oven temperature to 170 F and cooked for another 8 hours.
Then it appeared that the meat was quite tender and the fat, collagen, and water were in the bottom of the roasting pan.
=== Chopping
East Tennessee pork shoulder BBQ is pulled pork as mentioned in the OP. Here the fibers of the pork are separated via pulling with, say, two forks.
In West Tennessee, e.g., Memphis when I was there, the pork is coarsely chopped.
So, with a cooking fork and a cooking spoon, I moved the chunks of the pork one at a time to my cutting board and used a French chef's knife with a 12" long blade to coarsely chop the pork and used a spatula to shovel it into two covered plastic containers, each with 2 quarts of volume.
=== Yield
The weight of the final BBQ was
2,205 grams
and the volume, loosely packed, was about 4 quarts.
The raw weight of the pork was
8.09 * 16 * 28.3495 = 3,670 grams
so that the yield was
100 * 2,205 / 3,670 = 60.1%
which is surprisingly high.
The bottom of the roasting pan had about 1.5 quarts of liquid with about 5 fluid ounces of fat. Chilled, the fat did not become solid, and the liquid did not gel.
=== Cost per Serving
A generous serving of the BBQ is 8 ounces or
8 * 28.3495 = 227 grams
so that the total cooked weight of
2,205 grams
has
2,205 / 227 = 9.7
servings for
21.72 / 9.7 = $2.24
per serving.
=== Serving
In the cooking I added no salt, pepper, BBQ rubs, or other seasonings.
For serving, I warm in a microwave oven and add some bottle BBQ sauce and some bottled hot sauce.
=== Changes
(1) The boneless pork butt -- from the cutting to remove the bone -- had the meat falling apart in several pieces. In the future, I will buy only the bone-in version and cook it with the bone in.
(2) The 8 hours at 170 F may be too long -- shorter cooking might yield meat that is just as tender but more succulent, i.e., more moist.
(3) Generally I prefer to do pork BBQ cooking with a picnic pork shoulder. That cut is really from a front arm, has the elbow joint inside, and is usually sold with some of the skin still attached. With this cut, the meat may remain more moist as it melts out its collagen.
=== Extras
I have plans to do beef stew starting, NOT with relatively tender and expensive beef chuck roast but, with, say, beef bottom round roast. And I hope to save money by stepping down from USDA Prime and Choice to USDA Select or Cutters and Canners.
Retired dairy cows might be a good source, and once I called around to some packing houses and asked what happens to such cows. The short answer was "think fast food". The offer was to buy boxes of 50 pounds at a time! Maybe someday I will and have beef stew for family and friends for months!
A. Escoffier has a remark that the beef from older animals has better flavor. So, US fast food is getting the beef with the better flavor!
So, right, I intend to cook the beef at 165-170 F and NEVER let the stewing liquid boil (as long as the beef is in that liquid -- boiling later to reduce the volume to concentrate and strengthen flavors, sure).
Put the pot of stew in an oven at 350 F, or 225 F? Let the meat "simmer"? NOT a chance! Instead, 165-170 F and NO MORE.
Pork BBQ is often served with coleslaw. My recipe is to shred a head of green cabbage and then soak the result to desired wetness with just bottled Ranch salad dressing.
I did all that in a covered roasting pan in an oven.
But even on a grill, if have the internal temperature at 165-170 F, an air temperature on a grill of 170 F will, bingo, keep the meat internal temperature at 165-170 F.
Never heard of a "circulator".
I have no smoker or cooking source that generates smoke from wood products.
I have no interest in entering BBQ competitions -- Myhrvold already did that and wrote lots of documentation on what he did in cooking.
My main goal in cooking is just food good on some balance of nutrition, flavor, preparation time, and cost. In that, for my time, etc., a pork shoulder on a rack in a covered granite roaster in a good electric oven in a good kitchen stove is a good option.
Sure, elements of flavor include salt, pepper, vinegar, lemon juice, smoke, caramelization, Maillard browning, umami, often carried by fats, etc.
But to simplify things to save me time, my working hypothesis is that, if in the end I want good flavors from smoke, sugar, lemon, vinegar, apple juice, tomato, brown sugar, molasses, capsaicin, etc., then I will add those just before eating. For Malliard browning, sugar caramelization, the coveted burned crisps, those are only for the external surface and, thus, just a small part of the total volume which to me means that, due to the time and effort required to get them, I can do without them.
If I want something better than the BBQ I've been getting, then I will turn to other directions from America, France, Italy, Austria, etc.
E.g., one path to a good sauce is some good beef stock (or just a can of Campbell's Beef Consomme), heavy cream, Dijon mustard, Worcestershire sauce, salt, and pepper, with some Mailliard browning from deglazing a pan fried steak with the beef stock.
Astounding things can be done with good Kirschwasser, heavy cream, cherries, and chocolate!
American cherry pie with a lard crust is tough to beat. Similarly for apple.
My family recipe for Thanksgiving turkey with stuffing in the turkey is terrific: The recipe was intended to make lean, wild turkeys moist; on current grocery store domesticated turkeys the recipe is magnificent overkill!
I like BBQ pork, but the notes I gave here are about a far as I care to go with the subject.
Are you on amphetamines, or do you just have so much time and inclination to sit down and write all you do? Frankly, I am in awe at the quality of your posts.
Teach me your ways. Please. What tricks to living a good, dignified, and alive life have you found?
What do you do to stave away the soul-killingness of the world? How do you keep your morale up so high?
Dear god, man where do you get the mental energy? Are you akin to Kant's 40 cups of coffee a day eccentricity?
Illegal drugs? NEVER. Caffeine? Not anymore.
Not everyone likes my writing at HN, Disqus, or anywhere else. I have no interest in getting paid for writing, and that is good because my audience would be tiny.
For your other questions, early on I looked for sources of information I could count on and settled on math, physics, and parts of the rest of science. From that I guessed that in principle things have rational explanations; later I concluded that in much of life finding such explanations is too difficult. In particular, if get very far away from math and mathematical physics, then rational explanations get difficult to find.
But difficult to find does not mean the explanations don't exist. So, knowing that there is a rational explanation, even if can't find it, can help filter out some really sick explanations as look for an effective, even if expedient, response.
So, for another source of security, I settled on some of the common US business explanations of the role money: In practice in life in the US, if can make some money, then many other issues of security and rationality become less crucial. How to make money? There are lots of lessons here on HN.
For a "dignified" life, I concluded that somehow there is a lot of junk out there, in two words, pop culture. So, I try to avoid it. We can avoid pop culture -- there is a lot of just terrific stuff out there, back to Newton, Bach, etc.
A lot of really terrific, historic stuff has happened in just the last few decades:
So, one day I heard about quasars -- the explanations sound about right and are astounding. It appears that the super massive black holes needed for quasars formed quite early, earlier than we can explain so far.
Similarly for the 3 K background radiation -- wild stuff that we can see that far back.
Then there was Guth's inflation -- more amazing stuff.
Kolmogorov's foundation of probability and the resulting theorems -- astounding.
Atomic clocks that can detect the effect of general relativity from moving a clock from the floor to a tabletop -- more amazing.
Then we got DNA as the source of genetics -- how come we were so lucky to uncover that? Then how amazing it is -- essentially all of life on earth is from just DNA; there are no alternatives. Amazing.
Then we got the Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) -- again, how could we be so lucky?
Then we got the Human Genome Project that from some clever cutting into pieces and the PCR mapped the whole human genome. And now we can do that quickly and routinely.
So, when Covid was sequenced, one pharma firm had a vaccine three days later -- we've risen several levels above the apes.
Gravitational waves? You must be kidding. Or, were until we detected them from colliding neutron stars, black holes, etc. And what could be done with an array of space based gravitational wave detectors is mind bending -- as in how could any such thing be true?
Then along came digital computing. Each new machine looked like a step up in technology. A decade or so of such steps looked like a step up in civilization, The Ascent of Man(kind), etc. For $100 I bought an AMD FX-8350 processor, 64 bit addressing, 4.0 GHz standard clock speed, 8 cores, and about 35 times faster than all six of the IBM mainframes we had for general purpose use at IBM's Watson lab.
Digital communications was at about 110 characters a second, but at that time some Bell Labs people were developing tiny solid state lasers -- amazing little chips. Now we can bring 1 Gbps data rates to individual desktops.
Computing and communications may be the new steel and steam or better.
We have a dichotomy: (1) With what we know about the standard model of physics, astronomy, and cosmology, it all looks very rational and solid, from a lab on earth to some electron finding a proton 13 billion years ago and 13 billion light years away. (2) When we get past the standard model of physics and the associated mathematical physics to human life and civilization, rationality is tough to find. The standard model of physics is a case of exquisite perfection; human life and civilization are fraught with irrationality, little in science, frustrations, massive disasters, and riddled with imperfections. An incongruous juxtaposition.
But, we are at a special time -- where we can understand the physical universe via the standard model from the present back 13.8 billion years, back nearly to the beginning. Amazing.
Your post was like a poem -- advertently or inadvertently -- singing to my soul.
I can now find peace with this reminder of what must be done.
Thank you.
I'd say that if you like East Tennessee pulled, you will also like West Tennessee chopped at least nearly as much -- there really isn't a lot of difference.
For me, its that thinner tangy vinegar based Carolina style for pulled pork. For brisket, I prefer the Memphis style sauce. I will say I have recently had some of the Alabama white sauce on chicken and found it more compelling than I would have expected. Not my favorite, but sort of interesting. My goto though is still Carolina style.
By the way, the first time I had pulled pork was southwest of Jackson near the border, so it is not just in the east.
[0] https://www.tasteofhome.com/collection/regional-barbecue-sau...
Second, the natural (and normal) world is full of predators that eat meat. Consuming other animals is one of the more normal things we do. Certainly a lot more normal than standing around typing into this phone.
I will certainly agree however that large scale meat processing needs reform in some of its practices. I won't argue that.
What age are they killed compared to their natural lifespan? How do you kill them without causing any fear or pain? Do you dehorn, castrate or brand them? With anaesthesia? Do you keep mothers with their children?
I'm sure their situation is better than industrial farms but this shouldn't be the baseline to compete with.
> Second, the natural (and normal) world is full of predators that eat meat. Consuming other animals is one of the more normal things we do. Certainly a lot more normal than standing around typing into this phone.
You could justify murder and robbery with this so this isn't a good yardstick of how humans should act.