Fat Side

I'm not embarrassed to say that editing and uploading these pictures makes my mouth water. This was our best brisket yet, and I have finally committed to keeping a "Smoking Diary" to keep track of our best meats, and the blunders to be avoided. The way that we're going, I'm going to have a booklet of PURE GOLD in a few years! And I might weigh 800 pounds, but it would be totally worth it. I cheated on the store-bought mac and cheese and dinner rolls, because after babying this brisket for eight hours, it's hard to worry about anything more.

This was a 2.7 pound brisket that I bought from Giant Eagle. I don't think there's any sense in spending more money by going to a specialty meat store, since brisket isn't a great cut of meat, anyways. So until we open a gourmet smoke shop, supermarket meat works just fine! We preheated our smoker to 200 degrees (we've found on the electric smoker, going lower than the recommended 225 seems to work best), and popped the brisket on at 9am, fat-side down. I had rubbed this baby down the night before, and we let it come to room temperature before starting to cook. We found it rose in temp quickly, then held at 156 degrees for most of the day, which caused us a bit of panic. Apparently, this is completely normal for a brisket to rise quickly and hold its temp, but knowing that doesn't make it any easier to not mess with!


We let it cook for about nine hours, hoping the temperature would rise to 185, but it just never got there. So this was super moist, but a touch chewy. Next time, we plan to cook at 210 degrees, and I may change it to fat-side up. I've read through smoking forums that recommend both ways, no one seems to have solid evidence as to what is consistently best for the fat side. So, stay tuned! I accept the challenge of the brisket.