Epic Superbowl BBQ Bash: The Meat

Ian has been studying the art of brisket making non-stop for the past month. He has called my brother in law (the ultimate brisket-er) about 10 times, cross referenced with my dad, and looked at every online recipe known to man. Here's the dry rub he came up with:

2 tsp seasoned salt
1 tsp black peppercorn
1 tsp white peppercorn
1 tsp garlic powder
1 tsp onion powder
1 tsp paprika
1 tsp sugar
1 tsp vinegar

Armed with the most researched rub ever, we went out to Marczyk Fine Foods Inc., the most fancy-pants grocery store in Denver. I fell in love with the grocery store on sight - it had 3 kinds of foreign cheese I had never even heard of. That is what I want in a grocery store, unknown, probably unpasteurized, dairy products. The butcher at Marczyk did a beautiful job at trimming down all the fat off our brisket, making it nice and lean. However, according to the 50 sources Ian checked with, you want up to an inch of fat all around the brisket to juicy it up. Sadly, the fancy pants Marczyk butcher didn't know that. Lesson one of the BBQ adventure: don't buy fancy pants brisket, you want the gross, cheap, nasty looking kind. On the plus side, we will pay much less for the next one.

10 lbs of beautifully inappropriate brisket

After about 10 minutes of moping over our too-trim meat, we mixed up the rub recipe and started marinating the brisket. To do this, we combined everything but the sugar and vinegar in a bowl, then massaged it into the meat. It was hands on, up to the elbow messy, just the way I like it. Then you sprinkle half the sugar on one side, followed by half the vinegar, flip and repeat. We kept it wrapped up in the fridge over night, then Ian got up bright and early the next morning to get the grill going.

For those who don't know, grilling on a charcoal grill in the cold is somewhat difficult, but manageable once you get the heat roaring. However, brisket smoking takes a low, steady heating of 200-250 over 8-12 hours. Thus, no roaring heat, and not as much success in the cold. But, Ian battled the elements and kept the grill going between 350-200 most of the day.

After a while we got concerned that the smoker itself might not get that hot since it is in a different section than the thermometer and is closer to the cold ground. So we brought the brisket into the oven for the last 2-3 hours to make sure we didn't food poison 20 guests. Lesson number two: try to wait for a warmed day to smoke meat.

After about 12 hours of effort, we had brisket. Unfortunately, there were a bunch of people over by the time it was done so I didn't snap a picture of 10 lbs Ian's labor of love, but I did take a picture of the last leftovers, sliced up for sandwiches.

4 out of 5 on the Yum scale

It ended up being a little dry initially (lesson 1 - don't try to be fancy), but the flavoring was great. The best part was the leftovers. Somehow "resting" for a day [does it count as resting if it is over 30 minutes?] intensified the seasonings and made it even better. And since we only made it through about 5 lbs of brisket during the party, we got to make all sorts of brisket leftovers throughout the week. Yummy!