Smoked Brisket (thanks Myron Mixon!)

A few months back, I was fortunate enough to take a weekend class with Myron Mixon - the "winningest man in BBQ" and a regular on pretty much any show about bbq that you'll come across. The class was life-changing, because for the first time ever, I understood the fuss about brisket. His brisket was juicy, smoky, tender -- honestly, just having a taste of what brisket should be was worth taking the class alone.

The problem with brisket is that it doesn't scale down very well. But it's a long weekend and I was feeling ambitious. On the menu this Sunday was a green salad with pamesan tuiles and garlic bread crumbs, smoked brisket and ribs, Myron's very awesome potato salad, and chocolate meringue cookies (nope, not a Myron recipe).

The salad was simple - oil and vinegar. Made it fancy with parmesan tuiles (top left of bowl) - simply taking a spoonful of parmesan and frying it up. Fancified it even more by draping the cooked and still hot cheese across a spoon handle to make it curly. Here's a straight forward recipe of how to make tuiles here. It was also topped with panko crumbs sauteed with minced garlic.



Here are the smoked meats. In the front are smoked ribs that I cooked alongside the brisket (in the back of the picture). I'm not a competition cook so I definitely don't work as hard at precision as others, but I do what I can to draw within the lines when it comes to the basic techniques. Here is Myron's recipe for brisket - which is very close to what he showed us during the class. The key is in the injection which keeps the meat moist during a fast cook. I made a version of the injection with a couple spoons of "better than boullion" beef base dissolved in water -  it needs to be salty, taste it and if it's just a hair over palatable in terms of saltiness, you're good.

In a future post, I'll do a detailed recipe and pics on ribs and a few tips for making tasty bbq without all the hassle. Note the beautiful smoke ring on the ribs - see, I don't skimp too much.

The verdict on the brisket was that while it was moist, it could have benefitted from more smoke - will try smoking it out of the pan and waiting a bit longer until wrapping in foil (I wrapped at 160 today and kept it on until 195). As evidence, it definitely didn't have the requisite smoke ring (part of the reason I hid the slices behind the ribs). But compared to my past attempts at smoking brisket, this wasn't entirely disappointing but it was nowhere near Myron's masterpiece. The final douse of reheated, degreased juices definitely helped a lot.

To accompany the meat, there was a potato salad. During his class, he served an amazing potato salad. This recipe is close but not exact. The salad he served didn't have eggs and it tasted like it was a little heavier on sour cream. But the recipe is close enough and solidly yummy.

Finally, a very un-Myron recipe -- meringue cookies! I had some egg white left over from a molten chocolate cake recipe and what better than meringue. This is a great recipe that I slightly augmented based on comments to reduce the sugar to 1/2 cup, also whirled the sugar in the food processor prior to adding to simulate superfine sugar. Since the food processor was out, I also chopped up the chocolate chips a bit so they blended in better. I also winded up baking it to a full hour to get the crispness I wanted.

And another Sunday done and eaten.