This is the job the rub was built for. Coffee, cocoa and brown sugar need hours at low heat to turn into bark. Put them over a hot fire and the sugar catches long before anything good happens. At 110C they have all day, which is the whole argument for coffee on beef.
Brisket is two muscles. The flat is lean and slices clean. The point sits on top of it, fatty and marbled, and it is the better eating. Ask the butcher for a whole packer with the fat cap still on. A trimmed flat on its own will dry out and no amount of patience fixes that.
None of this is difficult. It is a long day of doing very little, and one decision at the end about when to stop.
12 to 14 hrs, plus 2 hrs resting. Serves 10 to 12.
Ingredients
- 5 to 6kg whole brisket, packer cut, fat cap on
- 8 dessertspoons Plateit Café Mocha Rub, most of a 180ml jar
- 2 tbsp American mustard, as a binder
- Ironbark or red gum chunks, a good handful
- 1 sheet unwaxed butcher's paper
- Water or beef stock, for the water pan
Method
- Trim the fat cap back to about 10mm and square off the thin end of the flat. Fat left thicker than that never renders, it just sits there.
- Smear the whole brisket with the mustard. It is a binder, not a flavour. You will not taste it.
- 8 dessertspoons of Plateit Café Mocha Rub over every surface, edges and sides included. Press it in. The rub already carries salt, so do not add more.
- Uncovered on a rack in the fridge overnight. The surface dries out and the bark sets better for it.
- Smoker to 110C with a water pan underneath. Wood on. Brisket in, fat cap up, point end towards the heat.
- Five to six hours, until the bark is dark and does not smudge when you touch it. The internal will read somewhere around 70C and then stop climbing. That is the stall. It is meant to happen and you cannot hurry it.
- Wrap tight in butcher's paper. Paper lets the bark breathe. Foil is faster and comes out softer, and you lose the crust you just spent six hours building.
- Back on until a probe slides into the thickest part of the flat with no resistance at all, around 95 to 96C. Another four to six hours. The number gets you close. The probe is the truth.
- Rest it wrapped, in an esky with a towel over the top, two hours minimum. Four is better. This is not optional and it is where most home briskets are lost.
- Separate the point from the flat along the fat seam. Slice the flat against the grain at pencil thickness. Cube the point.
Do this: Cook to feel, not to the clock. Two briskets of the same weight can finish three hours apart and the probe is the only thing that will tell you which one you have.
Burnt ends: toss the cubed point with another dessertspoon of the rub and a splash of the resting juices, then back on the smoker in a tray for an hour. They are the reason people volunteer to help.
