Brisket In Action

You know what I mean!

Mark Brown

May 4, 2023

I haven’t made a brisket in awhile. The last time I made it I simmered it to make Mexican pulled beef. That was a couple of years ago. For a special occasion I decided to break out the meat curing skills I learned years ago. On April 2nd I bought a 16.5 pound brisket from a nearby grocery store and started to put a cure on it a few days later. I know I stated why I don’t make a lot of briskets anymore. It’s still the case. They are still damned expensive. It was still worth doing for this occasion.

Curing a piece of meat will give it another layer of flavor on top of what was already there to begin with. With beef, a cure has to be aggressive to bring that next dimension. I normally cure with a sealed bag. I wasn’t able to locate my Foodsaver so I had to cut the brisket up into 4 sections. I took the point off of the brisket and cooked it by itself and made a pulled beef out of it for personal use. The muscle fibers of the point run perpendicular to the flat. That’s part of why briskets take so long to cook. Getting both muscle groups be done at the same time is sometimes impossible. It’s a main reason why I don’t get bone in pork chops with both loin and tenderloin on them. Once the point was taken off the brisket I broke the flat into 3 mostly equal portions and removed some of the fat, mostly the kind on a brisket that doesn’t render in the cooking process. I proceeded put my pickling salt on each chunk then my pickling spice. I did manage to clear out a lot of whole spices that had been sitting in jars for awhile. I just don’t use all spice berries, coriander and fennel seeds a lot so they’d been just sitting around. Time to order more spices.

One of the chunks of cured brisket sat in the fridge in a ziplock bag until April 29. I was always planning to make one portion of the flat to be corned beef and the other 2 to be pastrami. The difference between the 2 finished beef products is that that pastrami is smoked and corned beef isn’t. The smoke is what gives pastrami that little bit extra flavor to take it over the top. What readers will notice in some of these pictures is that the finished product doesn’t have that signature pink interior color found in commercially available corned beef and pastrami. I don’t use pink curing salt when I brine or cure meats.

The special occasion I mentioned is a family party on May 6 so I intended on getting the smoking done on the remaining 2 parts of brisket during my first week of vacation in May. The first 2 days of the week (May 1 and 2) were too windy to use the smoker. Smoking is all about fire management. Learning barbecue requires someone to learn a lot of different skillsets. Fire management is really high on that list of things to learn. Responsibility, in this case when to not start a fire, is a necessary part of of that learning process. May 3rd was a perfect day to break out the smoker. I got about 3 hours of smoke on the chunks of brisket, along with a few hours on some pork tenderloins and pork chops for dinner, before finishing in the oven inside my 8 quart French oven overnight. Overall, it took about 13 hours.

In terms of flavor, both the corned beef and pastrami I made are quite salty. The former much more so than the latter. The flavors are layered and they linger for a minute or two in the mouth after eating in both meats. I think used a bit too much salt on the cure. Breaking the brisket into 3 different chunks led me to cure each one on its own. Just more things to learn. I know how to get around the salt re-heating and such. This is definitely snacking meat, not sandwich material. It is very powerful juju.