FAIL! First Brisket- a timeline of events

[terriblecook91]

Hello,

I woke up this morning and decided it was time to face my fear and attempt my first "low and slow" cook in my 4-week old weber kettle.

945am  we jump in the car and head to the local store and I picked up some "mesquite wood chunks"

Stop at my local butcher and bought a 2kg brisket (obviously not a full brisket, this appealed to me as its only my wife and I and our 15-month-old daughter)

1030am- Set up the "SNAKE" method and place wood chunks every few inches.

11am- and the brisket is on, I at the time took a punt and decided to place fat side down- I should have checked but mustard and rub were all over me so I ran with it, I had a drip tray with apple juice.

* I had 1 Igrill probe into the thickest part of the meat aswell as the igrill ambient probe.
* Grill sitting between 110-140C throughout the cook

brisket reached an internal temp of 65c and I wrapped it. this happened quite quickly and it was at this time I thought perhaps my probe wasn't reading correctly. I decided to put in another probe on the other side of the brisket and the temp matched so I proceeded to wrap with foil and return.


345PM hits and my brisket is at 92c and apparently done, this didn't sit well with me as it felt like a short cook, it was, however, a small brisket and my first!

I wrapped it in foil again, wrapped a towel around and placed in the oven for safekeeping.

500pm I unwrapped and served.  the brisket had a great smoke ring but that was about it lol. it was quite dry and definitely wasn't as tender as you would expect a brisket to be.

the positive out of this is I'm no longer scared of temp control on the kettle, it certainly wasn't as hard as I thought.

I'm going to attempt another one (of similar size) next weekend and would love some help and advice to improve it!

thanks

Terriblecook

[SMOKE FREAK]

Doesn't look dry to me.
After my first brisket fail I switched to chuck roast. It's more forgiving and just as tasty.

[michaelmilitello]

Did you vent the foil and allow the cooking to stop before you wrapped in towels?


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[HeavySmoke]

If it was dry and tough that usually means you needed more cook time. If the brisket is dry and kind of crumbly then it cooked for too long.

I've ruined my fair share of briskets and the most helpful advice I can give is to throw all your clocks out. Trust the brisket more than a certain cook time or temp. When you can probe the meat with no resistance, you can pull it off the grill and rest it. (Resting is sometimes disputed for brisket but my rest cooks have always turned out much better)

Sometimes the meat is just weird and doesn't turn out, and sometimes it takes 5 hours more than you thought it would.

I hope your next one works out better.

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[cigarman20]

  There is certainly a learning curve on brisket. I've only cooked four.

  The first was a small flat that was bear jerky tough. The second was a full choice packer from Walmart. Better but on the dry side (according to my critics who doused with ketchup).

  The last two have been prime packers from Costco.

They both had very long resting periods due to coming off the grill late into the evening. Basically wrapped in a towel and dropped into a cooler. Temp slowly dropped to 140F overnight and sliced in the morning.




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