2-22 Smoking Brisket

Smoking Brisket on the Gas Grill

We live in Texas where there are lots of barbecue places and Larry and I have tried many of them. Each of the places are known for different meats such as beef ribs, sausages, pork, turkey, chicken and brisket. Even the grocery stores got into the barbecue business. On holidays our HEB stores have a meal deal where you buy one of their fully cooked briskets and you get five items free to go with it. The brisket is seasoned and smoked with hickory, mesquite or pecan. It's sold by the pound and you can get it sliced or not. We also used to travel to surrounding towns for barbecue at places like Southside Market in Elgin, Black's in Lockhart and Cooper's in Llano and we also like Rudy's Country Stores, they have locations through out Texas. We use to buy brisket fairly regularly but when the price of beef went up the price of brisket got quite expensive and we switched to other meats. The other day Larry went on the internet and researched how to smoke a brisket using a gas grill. There was a ton of information but he decided to try a process put out by Franklin's barbecue in Austin. A raw brisket can be bought very reasonably in our local grocery so we bought a brisket and today we decided to try smoking it on our gas grill. The items you need are wood chips of whatever flavor you want, grill, chip holding tray, water, salt and pepper, and thermometer. The directions told us to keep the grill temperature between 225 to 250 and cook the brisket for 10 -12 hours, our brisket was smaller than most and we cut it in half so we initially cooked it for seven hours. We removed the brisket from the grill and sliced off a couple of pieces, we found it to be a bit tough so back on the grill it went for another three hours. This time the  brisket was very tender. I went to the internet and did a little research on how long to smoke brisket. The people that do it a lot said that it varies from brisket to brisket. They said you can have two identical brisket and one will be done in 8 hours and the other one may take 16 hours. They said that usually when the brisket is tough it is under cooked. The meat should register 195 - 205 degrees. It was fun smoking brisket on the grill. We now have to work on improving the flavor, while the brisket was tender and moist it had very little smoke flavor. It appears our wood chips were not getting hot enough to produce the required amount of smoke.

Tray for the wood chips

The wood chips soaking in water

Brisket smoking on the grill

The finished product waiting to get carved

In the evening we started watching a serious on Amazon called The Americans. It stars Kari Russell and Matthew Rhys who are two undercover Soviet spies in the US near the end of the cod war. We enjoyed it.