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| As they say, don't bury the lede. Well here it is! |
I wanted to document a fun experience I had this weekend to cook a beef brisket point via a new method I read about on Serious Eats. Many thanks to Kenji Lopez-Alt for the procedures and inspiration!
First I acquired a meduim-sized point-cut of beef brisket. Well actually I acquired an entire brisket and separated the point muscle, but that's another story for another day. I failed to weigh it after the butchery, but I suspect after trimming off the hard fat I had about 4-5 pounds of point. I made a rub of salt, pepper, and a little bit of pink curing salt and applied it in copious amounts to all surfaces of the meat.
Then it went into a vacuum bag:
and into a hot water bath at 155 degrees.
After covering the top of the pot with plastic wrap to prevent evaporation, I let it sit for 30 hours. For good measure, I flipped it once, halfway through cooking.
The next step was to place put it in an ice water bath for 30 minutes to chill the internal temperature back down to 40 degrees. The meat is cooked at this point, but I want it to spend enough time in the smoker to get some nice flavor, and if I smoked it still hot from the water bath it would dry out long before the smoke had time to penetrate. (Sorry, no pic of the ice water bath, I was distracted...)
While the brisket in the bag was chilling, I set up my smoker and got it to 220 degrees. This is a little lower than I would normally smoke a brisket, but I didn't want it to heat up too quickly (as the meat is already cooked). Once the meat was thoroughly chilled, I stuck a probe thermometer in the thickest part and put it in the smoker:
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Here it is after smoking for about 30 minutes!
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I served it with a side of pasta salad to a happy family:
In all, it was an amazing experience. I can't wait to try combine smoking and sous vide for other barbecued applications!
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