BBQ Brisket

Method

1. score30 min
   cold from the refrigerator, sharp knife, fat cap down to about 6 mm
   brisket trimmed — hard fat removed, the cap evened to about 6 mm, and the thin edges squared off. Trim it cold, when the fat is firm enough to cut cleanly. Leave that 6 mm: it renders slowly and bastes the flat, while a thick cap never renders through and simply blocks smoke and rub from the meat underneath
2. cure240 min
   rub applied heavily on all surfaces, uncovered on a rack, refrigerated 4 hours to overnight
   + salt + coarse pepper (+ mustard as a binder, + paprika, + garlic powder, + brown sugar) pressed on generously, then left uncovered in the refrigerator. Coarse pepper matters — fine grind burns over twelve hours and turns acrid. The uncovered rest both lets the salt work inward and dries the surface into a tacky pellicle that smoke actually adheres to; a wet surface sheds it
3. smoke360 min
   110-120°C, fat cap up, thin blue smoke not white, until 74-77°C internal
   brisket smoked until the bark is set and dark and the internal temperature reaches 74-77°C, roughly six hours. Aim for thin blue smoke: thick white smoke deposits creosote and makes the bark bitter. Below about 135°C the collagen has time to convert to gelatin before the muscle fibres wring themselves dry, which is the entire reason this cut is cooked this way
4. steam180 min
   wrapped tightly in butcher paper (or foil), back on, until a probe slides in freely at 96-99°C
   + wrapped (+ a splash of beef stock) and returned until a probe enters the thickest part like room-temperature butter. Somewhere around 70-75°C the temperature stops climbing for hours — the stall — because evaporation from the surface is cooling the meat as fast as the fire heats it. Wrapping stops the evaporation and pushes through it. Probe feel beats the thermometer here: 96°C on one brisket is done and on another is not
5. rest90 min
   still wrapped, vented 10 minutes then held in a cooler or oven at 65-70°C, 1-4 hours
   the brisket rested at least an hour, and longer is better. This is not carryover management, it is part of the cook: gelatin and rendered fat that are liquid at 99°C need to cool and thicken enough to stay in the meat, and a brisket sliced straight off the smoker loses a startling amount onto the board. Vent it for ten minutes first so it stops cooking, then hold it warm
6. slice10 min
   against the grain, pencil-thick, flat and point separated first
   across the grain into slices about the thickness of a pencil. The grain runs in two different directions in the flat and the point — separate them at the fat seam and cut each on its own axis, or half the brisket is sliced along the grain and eats tough no matter how well it cooked. Slice only what is being eaten; the rest keeps better whole