Barbecue is good for us.

Ladies and gentlemen, the British pork industry has something to tell you, and it goes a little something like this.

Amen.

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Don’t let the lack of postings here fool you. The winter months have only marginally slowed down the pace of our BBQ lifestyle. Someday I’ll get around to posting some pictures and thoughts from a recent trip that Tamar and I took to Dallas. But for now I’m sharing some glamor shots – meat porn, if you will – of the first brisket I cooked on the new smoker a few weeks back.

In short, I’m very pleased. It was a 9lb (give or take) beast that I cooked for about 8-8.5 hours. I dry rubbed it with a simple mix of salt, a lot of pepper, dried thyme and dried oregano. I followed a technique that lets the brisket smoke open for about 4 hours. The you wrap it in aluminum foil. It’s not air-tight, so you still get smoke penetrating, though probably less. The benefit is you get more of a roasting effect and it makes the thing darn tender. And tender it was – most, flavorful, nice smoke ring.

Unfortunately, a lot of the meaty joy was counteracted whe I committed a cardinal brisket sin. I sliced it the wrong way. I sliced with the grain instead of across the grain. It matters. A with-the-grain slice has more integrity since the fibers aren’t broken – it will seem tougher even though the meat is moist and tender. Cut across the grain (or on a diagonal) as every good BBQ place does, and all of a sudden it seems to fall apart, fork-tender. Oh well, live and learn.

Here’s the time lapse version of the cooking process.

Beginning:

Middle:

End:

Yum.

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