The Key To A Great Brisket Always Starts With Great Trim Job
What's a trim job? Well if you have to ask, you can't afford it.
The more I cook barbecue, the more I get people who are excited to tell me about the barbecue they're cooking themselves. It's great because I know if that person has a wife or a girlfriend, they sure as shit don't care to hear about the meat they're smoking. So I'm very happy to provide the service of being genuinely interested to hear about what they're cooking and how they're doing it and every little minor detail they're going over.
The one thing that everybody is always the most excited to be cooking their first brisket. But it's also the one that people seem to stress over the most. Which makes sense. You're spending a ton of time and a lot of money on a piece of meat, you want to make sure you don't fuck it up. So anytime somebody asks me for tips on how to make sure they don't ruin their brisket, the answer is always that the trim is the most important step.
Think about a brisket like it were an NFL roster. You first pick up the brisket from the butcher and it's a training camp roster. You've got your studs at the core of the roster, sure, but there's also a ton of fat to trim before you get down to that 53-man roster. And if you didn't cut all those scrubs before the season started, the team would suffer. The same thing goes for a brisket. If you just took a brisket straight from the pack, seasoned it up and threw it on the smoker, the end result would be pretty miserable. It wouldn't cook evenly, you'd end massive amounts of fat, You'd have Jake Fromm taking meaningful snaps. No bueno.
So while I've already done a brisket video before, I figured it wouldn't hurt to do another solely focusing on how to trim your brisket. The most important thing to keep in mind is that you're looking to make sure that the whole thing cooks evenly. You don't want any parts of your brisket that are going to crisp up and get too done while you're still waiting for other parts to finish. Get a nice even trim going across the whole thing, make sure you take out any hard fat that's not going to render down, and treat yourself to a nice sharp knife. You deserve it, king.