Brisket Primer - Everything You Wanted to Know About Brisket

Amarante ↓

Wed, Sep 25 2024, 3:19 pm

An excellent guide to cooking brisket whatever recipe you use.

I am going to try the 300 degree advice

How to cook tender, braised brisket, plus tips for buying and storing

If you’re gearing up for the Jewish High Holidays, which begin at sundown Oct. 2 with Rosh Hashanah, the two-day Jewish new year, there’s a chance you might be preparing brisket for your celebratory meals.

Brisket became a standard at Shabbat and other holiday meals, particularly for Jews of Ashkenazi descent, in part because it was seen as a lesser — and therefore more affordable — cut of beef in Europe and early 20th-century America, according to Gil Marks’s “Encyclopedia of Jewish Food.” Today, the dish’s prominence extends well beyond the community that helped popularize it.

But making a brisket for the High Holidays, or any other important meal, can feel like a gamble: Will the brisket be meltingly tender, or will it be stringy and rubbery? Here’s what you need to know about buying, prepping and cooking brisket to put you on the path to success.

What is brisket?

A pectoral muscle of the cow, the brisket covers the breastbone, between the foreleg and the short ribs. You get two briskets from each animal. Because cows have no collarbones, these muscles do a lot of work, bearing roughly 60 percent of the animal’s weight, cookbook author Meathead Goldwyn told me a few years ago. This load on the muscles results in ample springy connective tissue in and around the muscle fibers, which is what makes the cut so tough while raw. Cooking the meat slowly and at a low temperature breaks down that connective tissue, which helps the meat become tender as the tissue transforms into collagen and turn satisfyingly chewy.

Which type of brisket should you buy?

A whole, untrimmed brisket weighs about 14 pounds, and in the United States, it’s often divided in half and sold as two cuts: First, or flat, a leaner, squarish cut; and second, or point or deckle, which is thicker, fattier and more flavorful.

If you’re at the meat counter and don’t know which cut you’re looking at, here’s what to remember: A flat cut is relatively uniform in thickness (it’s flat, get it?), while the point cut is thicker in the middle than at the edges, reminiscent of a hill. While the point can be trickier to fit in your Dutch oven and slice thanks to its irregular shape, the flavor and texture imparted by the extra fat in this cut is well worth any hassle. If you have enough space in your refrigerator and a large enough cooking vessel, you may choose to buy a whole brisket with both the flat and point, but home cooks usually opt for one or the other. Even if you buy a whole brisket, Goldwyn still recommends separating the two cuts because the grain on the flat side runs in a different direction than the grain on the point and will require slicing against the grain in another direction.

Of course, as with most things in life, quality matters. Goldwyn recommends seeking out the best-quality brisket you can find and afford, such as USDA Choice, USDA Prime or wagyu. Select a slab with the most visible marbling. If there’s no label on the brisket, it’s likely USDA Select, which has less marbling and flavor.

How to cook brisket

Once you have your brisket, the next step is to decide how to cook it. As barbecue fans know, brisket lends itself well to being cooked in a smoker — another low-and-slow option — but for the High Holidays, it’s traditionally oven-braised in a flavorful liquid containing readily available pantry ingredients, such as garlic and onion powders, tomato sauce, ketchup, broth, carrots and onions. For one example, see the Traditional Brisket recipe in our archives.

While recipes offer a range of moderate cooking temperatures for oven-braised brisket, you have the best chance at tender meat if you go with 300 degrees, according to the Cook’s Illustrated book “The New Best Recipe.” Higher than that, and the braising liquid surrounding the brisket can come to a boil, which will dry out and toughen the meat. Oven temperatures lower than 300 degrees add unnecessary hours to the braising time. You’ll want to check on the brisket halfway through cooking, and if you see a lively simmer of the braising liquid, lower the heat a smidgen, and check again in a bit. You want to see small, gentle bubbles throughout. To ensure the meat is cooking at the right temperature, an oven thermometer can make the difference between a brisket to remember and one you want to forget.

Goldwyn likes to take it a step further, recommending a meat probe thermometer with a cord that connects it to a digital display. When the internal temperature of the meat reaches around 200 degrees — don’t let it go above 205, Goldwyn says — the brisket is ready. Some probe thermometers can even be programmed to alert you when the meat reaches a specific temperature. You can also check on the doneness of the meat by inserting an instant-read thermometer into the thickest part of the brisket.

How to cook brisket in advance

You’ll need about 4 hours to cook a 5-pound brisket in roughly 3 cups of braising liquid in a 300-degree oven. With brisket, or any large cut of meat or poultry you’re cooking, it’s important to focus more on the internal temperature and not the time, as the latter will vary depending on size and the temperature of the meat when it goes in the oven.

Additionally, brisket benefits from resting after it cooks. If you’re able to plan ahead, cook the brisket up to 1 month in advance, then cover tightly in the roasting pan and freeze until it’s time to reheat and serve. If you can, make the brisket a few days in advance of Rosh Hashanah, and let the meat sit in the sauce in the refrigerator. I usually divide the brisket between 9-by-13-by-2-inch ovenproof dishes and reheat, covered with foil, in a 300-degree oven for 45 minutes to 1 hour.

For additional flavor, Goldwyn recommends salting brisket the night before you plan to cook it, which allows the salt to penetrate and season the meat. You can also rub the brisket in freshly ground black pepper or other aromatics, but, unlike salt, they will not go farther than the surface of the meat. - Obviously not necessary for kosher meat