Update: Sous-Vide Brisket

Update: Sous-Vide Brisket

Photo Via TastyMemoir

Check out my previous post on sous-vide brisket here.

As far as the update goes, I made another brisket a few weekends ago. I kept the recipe exactly the same but changed a few important things:

1. Add a stick of butter to every 2 pound serving of brisket. Put the butter right in your Ziploc bag with your bacon--the extra fat is completely necessary. 
2. Lower the cooking temperature to 141 degrees Fahrenheit and cook for 48 hours. I cooked mine for 36, and it needed a little more time. Still brine as before, but this time you'll get a much more tender and gelatinous piece of meat. 

I didn't take any pictures, but look up any generic BBQ picture from Google and you'll see what I saw. What is so remakable to me is how I completely ignored Thomas Keller's method for cooking brisket sous-vide... he cooks at 145 Fahrenheit for 48 hours. From now on, I'll just default to anything he's already done and save myself the trouble. Keller is king. Let it be known, this is the be-all end-all recipe for sous-vide brisket... now let us never speak of this again.

- Adam from Tipped Mixology 

The Almost Perfect Sous-Vide Brisket

Photo Via http://www.newyorkjets.com

The Almost Perfect Sous-Vide Brisket

Not quite the final say on sous-vide brisket, but definitely a step in the right direction for all technological foodies out there!

Okay, what do I mean by this statement? A quick search of sous vide brisket on your preferred search engine will yield a ton of results from foodie blogs, magazine articles, and sous-vide forums all asking the same question: how do I cook my brisket sous-vide? What's frustrating for a home chef trying their hand at sous-vide cooking is the sheer number of different responses to this question all claiming to have the correct answer and most of which are dead wrong. A little background:

Sous-vide cooking, for those of you who don't know, is a style of cooking where the product is cooked using an immersion circulator, which is a piece of equipment that regulates liquid to a very specific temperature, so that the product is cooked thoroughly to the same consistent temperature. This means a piece of meat, for example, a strip steak, would be poached in this circulating water bath at an exact temperature, let's say 135 degrees f, or perfect medium rare, so the entire piece of meat is exactly medium rare. This may sound gross to a lot of people... why would I want a poached piece of meat? Well, the goal here is to have perfect medium rare all the way through instead of just a small sweet-spot in the middle which is what usually happens during conventional cooking methods. The outside of the meat would then be seared or grilled super hot to replicate how a normal piece of meat would look, and the finished product is just amazing. If you ever look to try your hand at sous-vide cooking and don't want to break the bank, go pre-order the Sansaire for $199 and I'll recommend a really easy recipe at the end of this post. 

The SousVide cooker from PolyScience is the professional version and runs a very steep price.

Brisket is a tough piece of meat with a lot of connective tissue. It's best cooked either brined and baked like corned beef, cooked low and slow on a smoker or BBQ rig for days, or braised for a couple of hours. The goal with a piece of meat like brisket is to let the collagen, elastin, and other connective tissues holding the protein together turn into gelatin so the meat stays juicy and tender. This can either be done above 180 degrees f  when collagen and elastin break down with heat, or by pounding the shit out of the meat. Beating your meat is always an option, but won't yield a traditional looking brisket, and heating the meat to 180 f is also an issue because the meat dries out. It's all about temperature and time to yield a juicy piece of meat with all of the connective tissue broken into gelatin... it's not so easy. I personally have failed at brisket every time I've ever cooked it, until now. Here's how I did it, and what I would do differently next time: