Any cons to a hot'n'fast brisket?


 
Troy S

Troy S

TVWBB Fan
Every time I've heard someone mention doing a hot'n'fast brisket, there's nothing but good things said. Everyone seems to rave about doing them. I saw the hot'n'fast brisket article on here about smoking 2 1/2 hours to 165-170, wrapping for another 2 1/2 hours until 200-203 and then resting. What's the catch? I still see most people doing them low'n'slow. I bought some pecan wood chunks yesterday and I'm wanting to do a hot'n'fast brisket soon, but are there any cons or cautionary tales from anybody in regards to this method?

Link for anybody who has not seen it: http://virtualweberbullet.com/brisket4.html
 
Back in July I did that recipe on smoke day on my 18.5 and it was perfect. Ran a steady 365 and followed the directions. Very moist and tender I wouldn't do it any other way.
 
I still go low and slow, unwrapped. My observation is that the marbled fat in the point takes a good amount of time to render to the 10W-30 deliciousness that makes a brisket magical. BTW, pecan is a good choice for brisket.

Jeff
 
I'm with Jeff on this, but I do wrap with butcher paper. I haven't tried hot and fast so I couldn't tell you the drawbacks. Most people who go that route seem to love it. I'll probably try one at some point. I would guess that the window for doneness would be much narrower.
 
JohnB SOFL said:
Is it that the HnF briskets need to be rested longer for the carry over heat to finish the job?
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Actually IME the carry over heat on HH butts or brisket can and will overcook or dry it out.
If you follow the rules and take it to probe tender ( I don't temp anything once in foil ) Then you need to unwrap and vent it briefly, then wrap it back up and let it rest.:wsm:

Tim
 
long explanation is that a brisket gets to be tender by breaking down the connective tissues between the muscle fibers. This breakdown is a function of time at temperature, or temperature over time. To illustrate, let's imagine that you could instantly raise the internal temp of a brisket to exactly 200 degrees and could hold it there. It might take an hour for the tissues to render at that temp. IF you did it at 190, it might take 2.5 hours. At 180, it might take 4 hours. Remember, I'm not talking chamber temp, but rather, internal temp.

Of course, when you throw a brisket into your smoker, the internal temp doesn't instantly jump that high. It will be sub 40 degrees when it first goes in and will slowly inch upwards one degree at a time. For sake of simplicity, let's look at 10 degree increments. It might spend 1/2 hour at between 40 - 50, another 1/2 hour between 50 and 60, then next 1/2 hour might see it accelerate up to 80, another 1/2 hour it's up 100, etc, etc, etc. As the internal temperature increases, the rate at which the connective tissues break down accelerates. This continues right up until the stall. Once the evaporative cooling has finished, the internal temp starts to rise again, but this time the rate of increase slows down if cooking at a lower chamber temp. This is because you are close to reaching an equilibrium point as the internal temp is getting closer and closer to the chamber temp. At a higher chamber temp, the rate of temp increase will be faster.


All that is the long way of saying that the tissues break down (and the brisket gets tender) faster when cooking at higher chamber temps. And yes, the fat renders nicely as well.



A kind of inverse illustration would be to picture melting a block of ice. If you put it in a 40 degree fridge, it will take a long time to melt. If you put it on the counter at 70 degrees, it will melt quicker. If you put it in a pan and in the oven at 350, it will melt a lot faster.
 
I find this confusing. For ages, brisket was the cut nobody wanted because the normal approach of cooking at 325F left you with a tough piece of meat. Then somebody, probably by accident, stumbled on the idea of cooking it a long time at a low temperature, and Texas BBQ was born. If you can accomplish the same thing in a fraction of the time at 375F, why did this not become common knowledge when people were trying to do something with this otherwise useless chunk of meat cooking at 325F? Certainly BBQ restaurants across the country would be interested in cutting hours off their cooking time if the results at 275F and 375F are identical. Something seems out of whack here. Has most of the BBQ world bought into some myth about having to cook at low temps when countless collective hours of BBQ time could have been save by running the temp up to 375F?
 
JayHeyl said:
Has most of the BBQ world bought into some myth about having to cook at low temps when countless collective hours of BBQ time could have been save by running the temp up to 375F?
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Low & slow was the way that brisket was historically cooked to make it tender, but along came the "Texas Crutch" (foil) to accelerate the low & slow cooking process, and then someone found you could crank up the cooking temp combined with foiling or covering the brisket and achieve just about the same result.

From a competition BBQ perspective, on any given weekend the team winning 1st place brisket may be cooking low & slow or hot & fast, so that tells me you can make a good product both ways if you know what you're doing.

Why anyone or any restaurant chooses one method over the other is personal preference, tradition, that's the way we've always done it, superstition, marketing, etc. People divide into foil and no-foil camps just like they do briquet vs. lump charcoal, sauce vs. no sauce, water in pan vs. empty pan, and so on.

At least that's my take on things. :D
 
I want there to be something as a low and slow guy but most scientific discussion seem to break down as I read more into it. I think the science of how meat cooks isn't completely developed. We know collage breaks down due to different processes and has some curve with temperature and time. Enzymes play a big role. Fat rendering is another important part of what makes the meat taste good. We dont want the fat to have rendered out before the collagen breaks down. Fat rendering has some temperature curve. Most explanations throw all this at you and then make a conclusion that may or not make sense based on what they already thought.

Some part of cooking temp has to depend on your equipment. Some of it must depend on the grade of meat. I go by what I know works for me and what I enjoy doing.
 
Perhaps the key here is the foil/paper wrap. I'm fairly certain that back when the low and slow approach was developed rolls of aluminum foil weren't readily available on store shelves. Without the wrap, hot-n-fast probably results in a dried out hunk of meat. That's why it was abandoned as an approach to making brisket edible. By the time foil was readily available, the low-n-slow approach was well established as "the" way to BBQ brisket, and it's been only recently that people have begun to experiment with radically alternate approaches.

Obviously this is all speculation, but I can't help wonder why hot-n-fast didn't become the obvious approach all along.

This also makes me wonder if I've been pointlessly losing nights of sleep when smoking pork butt. If this technique works for brisket it certainly seems like it should work for pork shoulder as well.
 
I agree with Jeff as what he stated is my exact personal preference, right down to his choice of wood. Love Pecan smoke with brisket. I love the low and slow approach and enjoy that special day tremendously, even if it requires me to get up in the middle of the night to get things kicked off. The only time I would consider hot and fast with a brisket is if I was under severe time constraints, in which case I would probably not go with a brisket cook in the first place. Again, just my personal preference.
 
I have cooked one brisket hot-n-fast.
The brisket was tender and moist.
It tasted more like a roast beef than a smoked brisket.
I greatly prefer the taste I get by cooking low and slow.
 
I love age-old arguments. You can sit around a cooler of beer and debate until the cicada stop chirping. This is one such argument. Within a few miles of here we have a guy who sous vides his brisket for 45 hours and finishes it for 7 in the smoker (tender, but tastes like steak), The Salt Lick smokes low and slow until almost done, then wraps in plastic and refrigerates, then reheats for about 2 hours on the open pit. Black's roasts in an oven then finishes in the smoker. Franklin wraps in butcher paper. Valentina's uses mesquite in a smallish trailer-mounted offset. If you understand and master your technique, it's all good.

Jeff
 
Charles H. said:
I have cooked one brisket hot-n-fast.
The brisket was tender and moist.
It tasted more like a roast beef than a smoked brisket.
I greatly prefer the taste I get by cooking low and slow.
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On your hot and fast, did you foil wrap it by chance ?
 
Here's one to throw a wrench into things. "Lo and slow @225" is a relatively new thing for brisket. The old school guys down at the German markets did them at 300+.
 
DaveW said:
On your hot and fast, did you foil wrap it by chance ?
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Yes I. Foiled it.
I forget the timing, but cooked with full load of charcoal that was started with a full chimney of briquettes poured over the top of the pile.
All vents open 100%.
I don't remember what the cooker temperature got up to.
During the time frame I did the hot/fast cook I would have wrapped in foil when the internal temperature hit 170 deg.
Then continued to cook wrapped until it probed tender.

It was pretty good, just not very smoky.
 
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