Source http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beef

Brisket is a tough meat to master for many competition and backyard cooks. You may or may not have noticed that brisket can have different grades from the USDA.  Below are the grades you may run into and a quick course in the differences.

Select Grade: This is the second lowest grade of brisket I have seen available. There are lower grades such as standard, cutter, etc.  These cuts contain the least amount of fat and will be firmer. Do not use these in competitions if you can avoid it. These are usually seen in grocery stores.

Choice Grade: This is the most common grade you will see and the most used grade in competition. Sam’s, Costco, and many butchers will carry these.  They will have more marbling than select and standard.  It is very important use the basic factors such as size, thickness, marbling and feel to find the correct choice brisket. They all may be labeled Choice, but some are clearly better.

Prime:  This is actually a choice brisket that has received the highest mark of the choice cuts. Typically they will have a little more marbling and will have a softer feel to them.  If you keep your eyes peeled, they are often mixed in with the Choice grades  at Sam’s and Costco. Look fat side of the packaging and you will see a USDA Prime stamp. You can talk to the butcher and the above resources and they can order prime for you.

Wagyu- Referred to as the American Kobe beef.  The USDA does not grade Wagyu.  It’s actually a different breed of cow originating from Japan and uses a different grading system. The Kobe breed of cattle used in these cuts produce a well-marbled brisket. The biggest deterrent is price. They can be up to 5x the price of the above briskets, and often you have to pay a hefty shipping cost as they need to ship refrigerated. We cooked a few of these and they produce a slightly different taste and seem to cook faster. If you can cook them correctly, they are just fine. However, reports of low scores using Wagyu are common, due to unfamiliarity of the judges and the difficulty to cook.

CAB Certified Briskets:  Beef branded as Certified Angus Beef® has a higher amount of marbling and an exceptionally tender, juicy flavor. Only some USDA Prime beef and top grades of USDA Choice beef are sold under this brand name.

Source http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beef

Product Review: IQ 110

Manufacturer: PitmasterIQ.com

Description:
Automatic Temperature for Charcoal Smokers (Weber Kettle, Weber Smokey Mountain models, Big Green Egg Smokers, Drum Smokers, etc.). 

Our team discovered the impact automatic temperature control can do for your turn ins when we added Rock’s Stoker BBQ controller to our main rig last year.  Additionally, it gave us a chance to actually get some rest instead of monitoring our rig temp, fuel level, etc. This led us to consider adding a second stoker fan and adaptor kit for our Weber bullets.  In our search we stumbled upon the IQ110.  We were intrigued by the design, and reached out to John Kennington, owner of PitmasterIQ.com, for more product information. A few weeks later, we were sent a demo model to conduct a review, so here we go. 

Installation:  
When the unit arrived, it consisted of 5 parts: the control unit, air adapter, hose, temperature probe, and an AC adaptor.  A couple of koozies also found their way into the fed ex box, which was much appreciated.  We found the instructions to be straight forward and easy to follow. Just looking at the pieces, it was pretty obvious how to use it and set it up, but we did due diligence and went through the steps in the instructions. For our review, we used the Weber 22” Smokey Mountain cooker. We were running some trial briskets, so we had two long cooks coming up, which would be a perfect time to put the IQ to the test. We installed the IQ110 in about 2 minutes, no problems.

Operation: 
Operating the IQ110 is simple, you turn the dial to the desired temperature and the IQ takes care of the rest. There’s a LED light that will be doing one of the following:

• Flashing green – your pit is10 degrees cooler that the set point
• Solid green- the pit is within 10 degrees of the set point (desired result).
• Solid red- pit is 10 degrees or more over the set point
• Flashing red- pit is 50 degrees or more over the set point, not good.
• Alternating red/green: This happened to us a few times, and was due to us taking the lid off to mop the brisket. This is the unit detecting the lip being open, and the LED returned to normal within a few minutes.  However, if it would have stayed alternating red/green, it could mean the probe has failed or the main unit has overheated.

As you can read above, it is easy to set up the unit and have a decent idea of where your temp is by observing the LED light. If you can’t figure out how to do that, you probably shouldn’t be around fire and need to stop reading now. For the rest, I digress to the results.

As side benefit:  Even though there isn’t a current temperature gauge on the IQ – you can turn the dial until it turn’s solid green and get a real good idea of where the temp sits currently.  Quickly turn it back to your desired temp though!  The IQ reacts very well! The fan will kick off within a couple seconds if you move it to a temp where it thinks it needs to stoke the fire! 

Cook:  
We filled the charcoal chamber up and used 1 charcoal starter full of lit coal to start the cook, in addition to hickory chunks. The LED flashed green and the fan kicked in.  In 35 minutes, it was at our set point of 240, and the LED was a steady green. Our brisket was added.  For the next 8 hours the unit rarely went away from the steady green, and if it did, it recovered quickly. In both cooks, we found the product to work near perfect during the first 8 hours. The only issue we had was when we began mopping our brisket, and we took the lid off every 40 minutes or so for 5 hours. We did have a couple of times of flashing red and red LED indicators, for about 15 minutes an episode. It is important to note that the Weber 22” is a great cooker, but has the flaw of extreme temperature rises when the lid is off. We had better luck in our second cook when we closed the bottom intake vent and top vent ½ way. The issue we faced was related to the smoker, not the IQ. For the 18” Smokey Mountain, we would not foresee this issue. Also, if we weren’t mopping so often, it wouldn’t have surfaced.  

Turning to accuracy, the IQ’s temperature dial is segmented in 25 degree intervals, with space to set in between (see pic below). So you if you want 240, you need to use your best judgment where that is. To test the accuracy, we used the built in thermometer on the Weber as well as a 3^rd thermometer placed in one of the top vent hole as our gauge. Both thermometers and the IQ ran at the same temp, which was great to find out. We were left with the impression that the IQ temperature probe is very accurate. 

Final Thoughts: 

The IQ110 did what it said it would do.  It does not have the features of some of the fancier controllers out there, such as digital readouts, food probes, etc. It also does not have the hefty price tag that comes along with those. It’s a no frills temp controller that is a great match for bullets, kettles, Big Green Eggs, Drum smokers, and similar types of smokers.  What we found with the IQ110 was an easy installation, easy to operate, and most importantly, a very accurate temperature control for long periods of time.  As a competition BBQ team, the last thing you want to do is battle rig temperatures all night long.  When we cook on our bullets, we find them to be accurate, but still get up every few hours to check the temperature during the night and usually make an adjustment to the vents during those times. With the IQ110, I would be comfortable sleeping through the night. Many backyard bbq folks and competition folks use aforementioned cookers. With the smaller price tag, the IQ110 isn’t going to break the bank and should provide some comfort before you close your eyes for some sleep during your cook.  Here is a pic of the brisket we turned out using the IQ110.

Ingredients list:

-          1 box of featherbones (usually sold in 10# boxes)
-          1 stick of salted butter
-          Rib rub/seasoning (your choice)
-          Your favorite BBQ sauce

Featherbones are also called riblets Rig: For this cook, I will use the Weber Kettle Grill. You’ll need to use the charcoal separator to covert the kettle into a smoker.

Step 1:   Trim off the excess fat on the feather bone.

Step 2: season the feather bones with your favorite rib rub.

Step 3: Place the featherbones on the smoker. It doesn’t matter which side is up or not. Make sure the featherbones are not directly above the heat source. Cook at 300 degrees for 1.5 hours.

Step 4: Remove the featherbones from the smoker and place on a large sheet of heavy duty foil. I you have a lot, you can stack them on top of each other. Melt 1 stick of butter and pour them over the featherbones. Also add some more seasoning on the ribs at this point. Wrap the bones in foil and place back on the smoker.

Step 5:  Cook in foil for 1.5 hours at 300 degrees.

Step 6: Remove the featherbones from smoker. Place the featherbones in a foil pan and add your bbq sauce to them. Cover the pan with foil and give it a good shake to distribute the bbq sauce.

Step 7: Place the covered foil pan back on the smoker. Cook in foil pan for ½ hour at 300 degrees.

Step 8: Remove from pan and enjoy your featherbones!

Pulled chicken is one of the most delicious smoked meats you’re going to get your taste buds on. It’s also one of the healthiest. It is far superior to grilling chicken. It requires more patience as it takes on average 3-4 hours to do, not counting prep time. The end product is the most juicy, succulent, and tasty chicken you will ever eat. It is well worth the wait. Today, I am going to demonstrate just how easy it is to make pulled chicken from a whole chicken (using techniques bestowed upon me by the Chicken King of the Midwest, pitmaster Matt Frampton, a fellow author on this site.

The first thing you need to do is butterfly the chicken. For this, go to Matt’s Post entitled “how to butterfly a chicken.” You will be doing yourself a disservice not to start here:

http://www.bbqrevolution.com/how-to-butterfly-a-chicken/

 Rig: The Weber Silver One Touch Kettle Grill.

Ingredients:

-1 whole chicken

-1 cup apple juice

-4 tbsp salted butter

-Spray bottle

-Your favorite chicken rub

First, you’ll need to set the kettle grill to operate in smoke mode. To do this, use charcoal separates to hold charcoal one a small portion of 1 side of the grill. Add a small bed of coals ant then add a few chunks of your favorite wood on top (apple and/or hickory are good choices). Use a charcoal starter to get a few coals lit and place them un top off the unlit coals. Now we’re smoking!

use a charcoal separater, add only a few chuncks of smoke wood

Note: chicken can be smoked at a wide range of temperatures (225 to 350). For this cook, I will cook around 250-275.

Step 1: Butterfly the chicken.

Step 2. Melt the 4 tbsp of butter and combine with the 1 cup of apple juice. This will be our injection. Pump the bird full if this injection. Just get the needle under the skin, you will see the bird swell up as the skin holds in the inject.

Step 3: Add your rub to the chicken. Season both sides of chicken. For this cook, I am using garlic salt and McCormick’s Smoke house pepper seasoning. Cover the skin in the rub.

Kettle is set up, birds are seasoned, let's BBQ!

Step 4: Add your bird to the smoker. Do not place any part of the bird directly over the coals. If you do, you are not going to smoke your chicken, you’re going to be grilling it.

Step 5. Every hour into the cook spray the bird with apple juice. This will help retain moisture as well as add some sweetener to flavor.

spray with apple juice every hour for moisture and for a natural sweetener

Step 6. Once the bird is cooked to 175 (in the breast area), remove the bird and let it rest for 15 minutes. You can also take the temp in the drum/leg area, where the meat is also thick.

step 7. Carefully remove the skin. Use can use a knife and cut out the skin.  Try to keep the skin in as few pieces as possibe. This chunks of skin will become your “dirty rags” in step 9.

Step 8. Grab the legs and pull off the body. Repeat on the wings. Pull the meat off the chicken bones  into bite size chucks. You can separate the dark meat (leg area) and white meat (breast area) if desired. The picture in step 9 shows the dark meat on the left and white on the right.

step 9.  Time to use the dirty rag technique. Remember the skin that you seasoned at the beginning of the cook and subsequently removed in step 7?  That’s your “dirty rag.” Our chicken expert Matt coined this soon to be buzz word on the BBQ circuit. Take the skin you removed, mix it and the chicken together repeatedly . You will see that the chicken meat now looks freckled with the seasoning from the skin. Continue this until you have ragged all the meat. Make sure to remove the rags(skin) from the pulled chicken.

Mix the pulled chicken with the rags and you will be left with seasoned pulled chicken!

Step 10: Enjoy the feast!!! 

Construction overview:

The first thing to do is buy 2 “food grade” drums. Be careful not to buy drums that were used for toxic materials or trash.  You need to burn these barrels for 6 hours minimum to sanitize them. I used all smoke wood when doing this. My neighbor had a ton of apple wood that worked quite well. You will also need to remove all the paint of the drum.

Next, we cut out the door and vents on the bottom. We hinged the door and used electrical box cover with locking washers for the vents.

Barrel is ready to paint.

The next step was paint. Use a high temp engine enamel, black is probably the way to go. However, being from husker country, I just had to have 1 of them be a husker smoker. Here, we apply the first coats of paint.

First coat of red paint is on. Looks like a Longhorn Burnt orange, but don't worry, it will dry to a more powerful Husker Red.

Still drying, but looking better.

After the paint dried, the fun began. I’ll spare you the step by step instructions, but in a nut shell, we added the casters, lined the inside of the barrel with fire brick (for insulation, efficiency) using bbq mortar, added the grates, the diffusion plate (a round piece of stainless steel with lots of holes. This sits right above the coals and prevents the flames from hitting the meat), added a stack, and finally a thermometer.

The last step would making the charcoal basket. My father in law Dan whipped up some awesome baskets.

Now that's a charcoal Basket!

 Here is a look at the smokers first action, cooking up some whole chickens.

The Husker N is added.

The bird is the word, in this case.

Barrel Smoker complete

 The pros of this smoker are the ease of use and most importantly, the efficiency. The fire bricks really make this thing very fuel friendly. It is a very similar to the big green egg in that regard.  It also responds very fast to adjustments to the vents, allowing for easy control of temperature. It cooks up some great chicken and ribs. We  brought it to a competition and turned in the ribs we made on it.  It can cook brisket and pork, but with only 1 shelf, that takes up all the space.

The cons are more abundant. The cost, when we finished, reach about $200 in materials. There were lots of little expenses like furnace gaskets, brackets, metal for the stack, diffusion plate, etc. The time was also a drawback. It just took too long to make a barrel smoker. These should be able to be constructed in a matter of a few hours, not a few days. It also requires welding, cutting, and fabrication, which can be frustrating. The other drawbacks are portability and space. It fits less than the Weber Smokey Mountain 18″ model. The fire brick and mortar make it close to 200 lbs when it is done. The casters help, but getting it to competitions or even through grassy areas is difficult.

Final thoughts: With a search you can find this plan on the internet. While the barrel does cook decent, I would gravitate toward a simpler, more portable design. After making this smoker, I can truly say I beleive I can build a more efficient, better cooking, more portable, and cheaper smoker from a drum.  In fact, I may do this in the fall and post the step by step instructions and results on here!

Ingredients:

- (1) 12 lb Brisket
- 1 12 oz can of Coca-Cola
- 1 cup of Apple Juice
- Your favorite  Brisket rub seasoning (lots available, to see the ones we win with go here http://www.bbqrevolution.com/ )

Get your Rig of Choice fired up: For this cook, I will utilize the Weber Smokey Mountain (bullet smoker).

The WSM is a fine choice. Grab some hickory chunks and let's get started!!

Step 1. Unwrap and trim brisket.

You can tap the fat areas and if it feels solid, it needs to be trimmed. you will notice 2 major areas of the brisket where you need to trim every time. The are located in the point. One is on top and the other is in the thickest side of the point. These are large fat “wedges” that need to be removed. Some folks trim off the fat cap, I am not a big fan of that. The cap will provide the brisket with moisture and taste as the fat renders and is absorbed into the meat. I also trim of meat on the sides that appears brown.

Inject sites are 1 inch apart. Note: Puddling can be seen in this pic

Step 3. Apply a thin coat of mustard over the brisket. This will act as a binding agent to hold the rub on the brisket throughout the cook.

Step 4. Apply a generous amount of rub on the brisket. It is of this Pitmasters opinion you cannot over-season a brisket. That said, don’t get in a contest to see how much seasoning you can get on your brisket. Use you common sense.

Logan’s note: Some of you pros will appreciate this one: It is not necessary to season the fat cap of the brisket yet… since you will cook the brisket Fat side up, you can season the fat cap after putting the brisket on your rig.

Step 5: Place the brisket on the smoker fat side up and season the fat cap if you have not yet. You will notice you can really get a good amount of seasoning on with this method. As the fat cap renders, this seasoning will absorb into the brisket with the rendered fat.

Pitmaster tip: Wait to season the fat cap until it's on smoker, if you can. You will hold more seasoning.

Step 6. Cook the brisket until internal temp reaches 160 degrees.

Step 7. Re-season and wrap the brisket in heavy duty foil. Many briskets, and pork butts for that matter, seem to hit a wall at this temperature and cook slowly, jeopardizing your turn in time. This will also seal all the juices inside the foil, making for a nice, juicy brisket nearly every time.

Re-season the Brisket

use heavy duty foil

Step 8. Cook brisket to 195 degrees.

Step 9. Keep in foil and let brisket sit for 1/2 hour to 3 hours. A brisket will stay tender for that long, maybe longer. Ideally, for a competition, try to keep this time as close to an hour as possible. The brisket absorbs a portion of the juices in foil. Take it out right away and you will have a dry brisket.

Step 10. Slice against the grain and enjoy!!!!!