For a long time we had questions about dry aged Brisket. Competition BBQ -ers swore that it improved the taste and texture of the meat.
Well time has come for us to find out for ourselves: Here is a typical 6.5lb brisket flat, which is a tougher and leaner brisket muscle.
We broke it out of the Cryovac and sealed it into UMAi Dry:
Put it into the fridge for aging. We gave it 3 weeks and at the end it transformed to this:
We took it out and peeled back UMAi Dry bag:
We then had a dilemma wether to trim off the hard bark or not. We decided to trim:
Ou of the original 6.5lb. We had about 1 lb of moisture loss and .5lb of trim, so we ended up with a 5lb 21 Day Dry Aged Brisket. We used a Beef Q-Rub from the Wayzata Bay Spice Company.
We rubbed on the spices and put it into a ziplock bag and placed it back in the fridge for overnight marination. The downstairs neighbor is a 6lb ribeye going for 60 days.
A friend offered his Traeger grill in exchange for a piece of the action. We have never previously used a pellet smoker. We smoked with a blend of hickory and cherry pellets.
We set up the temps on the grill to give us about 225F cooking temp:
A big lesson was that the temp controls on a pellet grill were not at all like on your home oven. They wandered all over the place and you had to watch the settings to avoid flame outs and excessive pellet feed.
But this beast generated plenty of smoke:
We took the internal temp to 154F (which took 3 hours) and then used what they call “Texas Crutch“, which is simply taking the Brisket off the grill, placing it on some aluminum foil and adding some liquid to help raise the internal temperature faster and retain moisture. In our case we added some apple juice and beef broth mix.
For internal temp measurement we used a nifty gadget we discovered called iGrill thermometer that displays the temp on our iPhone remotely using bluetooth. We took the Brisket off the grill when the internal temp reached 197F. This took 3 hours.
We then placed the foiled brisket into a towel and cooler for 1 hour to FTC (foil towel cooler)
Then it was time for a party:
This experience was very rewarding. The Brisket was very tender and juicy. Our “tasting panel” was very pleased with the results.