Brisket Flats are Killing Me


 

Barry Fantle

New member
Tried a 6.8lb flat over the weekend. i cooked with the smoker at around 300 degrees. then when brisket reached 165 or so, i foiled. the temp then reached 190 very fast. it still did not seem done though. is it possible the thermometer is giving a false reading once it is foiled? it never seems to get tender enough. any help is appreciated.

thanks

barry
 
Barry these are things that work for me. 1st I cook around 250 and pull the brikset when my thermo pen goes in with little resistence. Internal temp might be 190-205 before I take it off the smoker. Hope this helps.
 
me also, the few times my heat got high on me i thought it did more damage then good, but there are other people that have good luck w/ high heat and I bet they could help you. your pen could be wrong but really your looking for tender anyway just like you said, I'm not comfortable at high heat, 235-250 or so for me, but only because it has treated me well and I didn't see reason for change (yet). good luck.
 
<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-title">quote:</div><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-content">the temp then reached 190 very fast. it still did not seem done though. </div></BLOCKQUOTE>
Do not temp high heat briskets after foiling. Temp readings are immaterial and have nothing to do with 'done'.

Water transfers heat very efficiently. Moisture gets trapped in the foil when foiling occurs and this moisture heats much more quickly trapped in this environment. This moisture transfers heat to moisture around it and to the solids (meat, etc.) next to it. This efficient transfer is why foiled meats cook more quickly. It is also why a therm can show a much higher internal not long after foiling.

'Done' must be determined by feel. My high heat briskets take close to 4 hours total. (I do not temp at all. I foil ~2.5 hours into the cook. You can temp this first phase if you wish. Then turn off the probe.I cook ~325 lid unfoiled, 350 foiled.) I check for tender about 10 min shy of 4 hours and gauge it from there. 10-20 more min is usually all any need.
 
This thread and this one will give you a better idea of the flow and intervening variables.

Hope this helps (and don't worry about internals!).
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thats interesting about the temp of foiled meats. I foiled a brisket at the 4 hr mark and after another 3 the internal was 205. luckily the probe told me all I needed to know before registering a number because it went in with little to no resistance.

The other thing that I was thinking about was the breakdown of the meat. Can you have a "done" internal temp without breaking down the meat fully because you got to your "done" temp too quickly?
 
Yes, and that is my point above. On high heat cooks 'done' temps come fast--but the meat is not done.

Internal temps have little to do with done--even for low/slow cooks. It is not the temp that causes done, it is the time. A particular temp might correlate with done but it does not cause doneness. For every person who low/slows to a 205 internal I can show you another who only goes to 195--or 192 or 190.

This is why I am constantly suggesting to people not to use temp as any sort of concrete indicator; it indicates nothing but the internal temp which, again, might happen to correlate with tenderness but has little directly to do with it. Focusing on temps rather than tenderness is the cause of most tenderness problems in brisket and butts, though butts have a much wider tenderness window (with ribs it tends to be cooking a particular number of hours and expecting tenderness--rather than just testing for tenderness directly).

For low/slow cooks temping might indicate a time to check for tenderness or, as many cooks discover when they repeatedly use the same variables (meat size and grade, cooktemp, et al.--or as close as possible), that a particular temp can indicate a time to pull and rest, that the time in the foil during the rest will take the brisket to tender. Though it appears that temp has a causal effect this is not the case. It just happens to indicate the point where, all variables being as equal as possible, the cook has learned he can pull the brisket and it will finish nicely while resting. This is a perfectly valid approach of course. It is one, though, that I find many newer cooks have a harder time mastering because it appears that the focus should be on temp. It shouldn't. Though it can be handy to use temp in this way, it often takes much trial and error to figure out what temp to pull at which will then equal tender after resting in foil. Imo, it is much easier for most cooks--and quicker--to focus on tender as being the point to pull.
 
Kevin,
You must live this stuff. I dare say that many of us wouldn't mind you getting a show on food network or some such so we could learn more about the fine art of BBQ. Until then I will keep a notebook handy. Thanks for the info-
 

 

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