Brisket Success Rate Up to 50%

I'm now 2 for 4 on briskets. The first one I ever made was dumb luck as I didn't completely know what I was doing and cooked to a temp rather than probe tenderness, yet still managed a pretty good brisket.

The next two I had a dangerous blend of irrational confidence, blissful ignorance, and knowing just enough to get myself in trouble.

I had been doing more reading, though, and yesterday I applied that knowledge and assumed nothing. I did a terrible job capturing the process, so you'll only get the two pictures, but it turned out great. It could have been a tad more moist, but that is being picky, as it was quite good.

I learned a lot from this thread about just what I was cooking and how to identify the parts of the brisket.

http://www.bbq-brethren.com/forum/showthread.php?t=57882

You can see in the "before" picture where I placed a couple of toothpicks. I did this to identify the general region where I would be checking for probe tenderness, since I'm still learning briskets. The rub was mainly salt and pepper, with a light sprinkling of garlic powder and Montreal steak seasoning.

I can do better, I know, but I can do (and have done) significantly worse:

Right as it went it:


The one picture I thought of taking after we had started cutting in to it:


Lots of good info on this board. I'm no expert, but after doing some reading here and having this successful cook, I've at least talked myself back from the edge when it comes to doing brisket.

Thanks for looking.

defence18 said:

And there's lots of good brisket on that board! Looking good. Funny, I stumbled across bigabyte's tutorial last night when searching whether or not to trim the fat cap. I insta-bookmarked it!

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I forget when I stumbled across it, but I had the same reaction. There is info in that thread that I just never really found elsewhere. Combine that with the other brisket threads on here and the input you find in them and you have a pretty nice foundation for tackling the brisket challenge.

sliding_billy said:

Maybe it is just the angle of the pics playing tricks on me, but at 1st glance it looked like you were probing the point.

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It does kind of look like that from the pic. Stealing from a picture in bigabyte's thread that I linked, those toothpicks are in somewhere between the "F" in "FLAT" and the left-most green border outlining the flat. I adjusted slightly to where I felt was the thicker part of the flat.