Texas Beef Brisket by Mike

With the nice weather, the recent string of non-bbq related topics, and the Final Aporkalypse less than two months away it was time to get down to serious business and throw some meat on the smoker. This weekends project was a beef brisket and a side pork ribs just for the hell of it. I woke up Saturday morning and decided it was time to pick up a new Weber kettle grill just to be frivolous. The doinky grill that was already at my house just isn't going to cut it anymore.

Brisket
I've tried several times to smoke brisket with little to no luck as it always turned out dry. However, I saw some nice looking cuts at Earth Fair that had a nice layer of fat and also decided I'd try placing it in a shallow foil pan in an attempt to keep in the juices. On Friday afternoon I rubbed the brisket with 1 T kosher salt, 1 T ancho chili powder, 2 t cane sugar, 1 t fresh black pepper, 1 t cumin, 1/2 t onion powder, and 1/2 t garlic powder and refrigerated it in a big Ziploc bag overnight. At the same time I rubbed the rack of ribs with a mixture I had made for the Superbowl ribs. Saturday around 11 I fired up the smoker loaded with mesquite and put the brisket on at 12:30 pm. The smoker maintained pretty much dead on 215 degrees and I took the brisket off around 7:30 pm. This picture was taken around 6pm. I should have noted what the internal temp was but I got lazy.





This turned out much much better than previous attempts and I credit the properly cut brisket and the foil pan to some extent. Also, I basted with a 50/50 mixture of apple juice and bourbon about every hour.





Ribs
These didn't turn out as good as I would have liked so I'm not going to go into much detail. I tried out the Stubb's brand of charcoal I found at Lowe's and I think it burned much hotter than I anticipated. They were a wee bit overcooked and a wee bit is more than you would think :). These were cooked on the new Weber and I never bothered to check the cooking temperature. The asparagus I threw on at the last minute turned out well though.





Yum!
I mixed a standard bottled BBQ sauce with some NC style vinegar sauce and served my brisket over a slice of crusty French bread. Thanks to Marion for the amazing potato salad. I went for a subtle yet elegant garnish...can you see it?