Briskett

There are two classic American barbecue dishes - pulled pork and beef brisket. There are plenty of guides on line for both - I favour this place which is a great mix of recipe, theory, history and philosophy - but sometimes it's hard to figure out which cuts of meat over here match the American cuts. It's funny, you'd think that cutting up animals would be a generic thing but different cultures divide the same animals up in different ways. Apparently it used to be a regional thing even within the same country, but with the development of the mass market the cuts that were sold became dictated by the larger merchant organisations. Nowadays there's a movement to discover old traditional cuts and even to invent new ones, to the point where some of the new cuts of meat are being patented by artisan butchers & restaurants. But for those of us trying to replicate recipes from what we can see on line, it can often be a case of looking at an American butchers cut guide and trying to correlate that to an Australian guide. So for example from what I can see Australian blade matches American brisket, whereas Australian brisket seems to match parts of American fore-shank & short plate.*

With that in mind I found a 'blade roast' selling for $6 / kg and thought that would be a good cut to experiment on. Here's the original joint

and with a rub applied (as per the Amazing Ribs link above)

Add to a kettle Weber set to smoke with indirect heat for a long time...

Six hours later the joint looks like this - you can see from the thermometer behind that it's been cooked at around 250F 

Leave it to rest for an hour or so in an Esky

take out onto a chopping board - it's apparently supposed to look like a meteorite

and then carve

There's good and bad with this. The rub is beautiful and the smoke 'bark ring' looks and tastes great, but the meat is a bit dry and granular 

The recipe suggested that I apply a 'Texas crutch' after a couple of hours, which entails wrapping the joint in a couple of layers of tinfoil with a few spoonfuls of beef broth next to the skin. That's apparently done to prevent the joint drying out during the end of the cooking process and I think that next time I'll give that a go. 

It seems like smoking meat is a bit like brewing beer. It takes time both in preparation and execution, it gives us large quantities of something I both enjoy very much and need to cut back on and when I've finished one, I immediately want to try another one with what I've learnt...  

*There's a family element to this too. My grandfather used to be a butcher before the war, but ended up flying in Catalina flying boats over the North Sea as a radar operator trying to pick up German U-boats. After the war was over he started working as an electrical engineer for Rolls-Royce Aero-Engines in Derby. It would probably surprise him to find out that almost 60 years on his grandson would be living on the other side of the world and trying to figure out what he knew about cuts of meat all those years ago. I need to ring him and ask him about it!