serving for a group/party - when to slice? serving tips?

[Phillip Moore]

I'm going to be cooking for my daughter's first birthday party and we are having about 20-22 people over for a party starting at 11:30am, so I'm serving lunch. This is the largest group i've ever cooked for.

My plan so as not to be frazzled on day of party is to smoke the briskets the day before during the day, and re-heat the morning of the party. I'm new to the WSM so I'm not confident enough that I can hit an over night cook and have the briskets be done by noon and also be delicious.

I've seen conflicting suggestions about when to slice the meat.

Option 1, which I kinda like is to slice the brisket after its done and rested and then re-heat it the morning of the party already sliced in the oven, wrapped in foil with a little bit of liquid added to the pan.

Option 2, which I can see might produce a better final product, would be to put the whole cooked briskets into the fridge and re-heat them whole the morning of the party, and then slice.

Can anyone offer suggestions which way might be best? I've never done the re-heat in oven already sliced method. And how long would it take to re-heat 2 whole briskets and at what temp would work best?

My plan in either case is to get some steamer tray things to try to keep the food warm. I got a bunch of foil steamer inserts from Costco, but they didn't sell the actual steamer bits.

My planned menu is brisket, pulled pork (which i've already cooked and frozen), potato salad and baked beans.

Thanks for any suggestions!

 

[TravisH]

I like Option 2 better. Pre-sliced brisket drys out too much when reheated.

Have you considered an overnight slow cook starting about 10:30pm?

Or a High Heat cook? Starting "meat on" at 6:30am, it should be ready to slice by 11:30am.

 

[Paul K]

If you want to have the brisket cooked the day before, slicing it in advance is fine. The key here, is to make sure you've let it rest thoroughly before slicing. If you don't, when you slice into it, you'll lose a lot of juice, What I would do is finish your brisket in foil so that you capture as much juice as possible. Save that juice and separate the fat from it. When it's time to reheat the meat, combine the juice with beef broth if necessary (so you'll have enough). Pour this over your sliced brisket and warm it in foil covered pan. You only need to heat the brisket up to about 120 which is a good serving temp.

Paul

 

[Mike R. (Heyworth)]

For parties like this, with a relatively small group of people, I do an overnight butt, and then high heat the brisket the morning of. Your butts will get a great rest while the briskets cook, and while the brisk is resting, you can pull your pork (HA, that's kinda funny...) and then slice the brisket hot and fresh. Did this for a party of 50 two weeks ago, people there thought I invented BBQ. It's a real crowd pleaser to have everything hot and fresh, instead of re-heated. I hate re-heating, just a personal thing I guess, but I don't do it for anyone but me and my wife with leftovers.

 

[Phillip Moore]

My party is next weekend, so I'm doing another practice brisket in the morning (love it when practice is so delicious!), a test run to see if I can get it ready before noon without being frazzled. I'm going to try the HH method, which honestly I know works because i've done that many times before I even had a WSM. My wife suggested that I also try to see if I can get the house cleaned before the party start time as well as cook brisket. We'll see...

 

[Paul K]

<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-title">quote:</div><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-content">My wife suggested that I also try to see if I can get the house cleaned before the party start time as well as cook brisket. </div></BLOCKQUOTE>
Yeah, that's the downside of the HH method: too much time on your hands

Paul

 

[Phillip Moore]

I tried a high heat brisket this morning, a 13 pound whole brisket from Costco, heavily trimmed. I rubbed it the night before cooking, with basically cook's illustrated's texas brisket rub, but as I ran out of paprika from my last brisket, I left out the paprika and substituted a little ancho chile powder and a little bit of onion and garlic powder added.

I put brisket on at 8:08am. My heat fluxuated quite a bit and I never got it to settle down. It ranged from 300 to 400 and even 'HH' higher than either the lid or my ET-73 could measure. Eventually it was on the downward direction so I went out and cracked the door a little. Well, I had some malfunctions with the ET-73 stand, it kept stickign to the lid and coming off when I took off the lid, so I ended up just kinda hanging it from the handle.. which did't work so well:

I ordered a new one and went to home depot and got pieces to build a little stand off bracket like this one

At about 2 hours in I foiled it, and checked on it about 90 minutes later and it was very nearly done, so I wrapped it back up and let it go another 30 minutes. I don't know if I left a little hole in the top and it evaporated or what, but I had almost no juice at all in the foil packet, just about a 1/2 cup of fat that I couldn't separate any juice out of. So, my bbq sauce i was making kinda of suffered for lack of meat juice.

But, even with all these tribulations.. this was the best brisket I have ever cooked. It is a similar method to how I cooked on my weber kettle, doing about 2 hours on grill and finishing in oven , but this turned out a lot better. I'm sold on this method.

 

[TravisH]

Did your ET73 actually come in contact with the body?

If not, and you're seeing that kinda heat, I don't think that bracket is going to help. Notice how close the top of the ET73 is to the lid.

 

[Phillip Moore]

Yeah, it fell down from where I had it and was resting against the body of the WSM against the probe plug. The probe mostly completely disintegrated (I noticed the meat probe stopped transmitting temperature, is what made me go out and look). I think the bracket will solve it and make the transmitter be completely independent of the lid.