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

The Jack Daniel’s World Championship in Lynchburg, TN – what an honor to be a part of it.  I think our entire team understood the prestige behind this event as much as we could before heading out, but I’m not sure we had any idea just how big and awesome this event actually is.  It was simply the coolest experience of our team’s history, hands down. 

We left Omaha on Wednesday, October 19^th – before the sun came up and we arrived in Lynchburg after the sun had gone down that evening.  The first two nights we stayed in a cabin on Tim’s Ford Lake, just outside of Lynchburg (thanks to Phat Jack’s for the recommendation) and it was an awesome place to stay.  The lake was huge, the cabin was clean and roomy.  Perfect for the team to rest up before the contest.

On Thursday, we toured the distillery.  Wow.  What an operation!  The history behind the place and how much that history is still leveraged in the current operation is simply astounding.  There are some new technological aspects to it, such as computer monitoring of the processes, but it is still quite manually intensive.  Very impressive and neat to see an entire town run off the success of one business.

The contest itself was incredible.  Everyone was so friendly.  91 total teams and we’re pretty sure we got to meet every single one of them and treat several of them to a flabongo.  The interaction between all the teams was like nothing we’ve seen before.  Everyone sharing stories about their season and travels into Lynchburg, sharing a beverage together and just general shooting the breeze was the theme.  The weather was great – in the high 60s during the days with no rain and chilly in the evenings.  Onsite Friday into Saturday, we stayed, like normal, at our campsite and slept in our lawn chairs with the canopy walls up and a small propane heater which was just enough to take the bite out.  In general, everything went as we planned, the cooker ran great and our food turned out like we intended, even though we wished for better results.  We finished 69^th out of the 91 teams, but it still didn’t take the wind out of us.  The experience was just too awesome.

We became friends with our next door neighbors, the Jack Daniel’s Champion:  Smokin Hoggz BBQ, from Massachusetts .  Pretty neat deal to be right next to them and we even sampled lots of their food.  Great stuff – as I’m sure every other team turned in.  What a great bunch of guys and a win well deserved.  We are proud that we were neighbors with them and have asked them to come to Omaha for a contest.  Turns out they have family in NE and IA – so we think it’ll happen.  Good article about the win and the event here: http://www.forbes.com/sites/larryolmsted/2011/10/24/does-massachusetts-really-have-the-nations-best-bbq-tennessee-says-yes/

The team Motley Q Crew was there and actually stayed next to us on the lake the first two nights.  They are some party animals and fit in well (and made themselves at home in our cabin into the wee hours!).  Guy Fieri from Diners, Drive Inns and Dives cooked with them and turned their cook spot into a zoo.  They actually had to buckle down the entire area and keep everyone out.

Nicole Davenport from T’aint the Sauce was there hanging out, who was right next to us on the BBQ Pitmaster’s show.  It was nice catching up with her and neat to see her and so many other teams just come to hang out, even if they weren’t cooking.

All in all, it was a wonderful experience and we hope to do it again next year.  While our finishing place could have been better – we feel that we represented the state and GOBS in high fashion and definitely did everything we could to spread the word about BBQ in our area. 

Here’s to a great 2011 season and best of luck to everyone in 2012!  We’d like to thank everyone at GOBS and all the other teams we’ve been lucky to spend time with and for all the support in our travels.  We couldn’t have done it without you.

Cheers!

Ryan, Matt, Logan and Chris

Hot Grill on Grill Action BBQ Team

Omaha, NE

www.bbqrevolution.com

GOBS Sep-Oct Drippings

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!

Overall Ranking: 12 out of 43

Chicken: 13th place

Ribs: 2nd place

Pork: 15th place

Brisket: 27th place

Congratulations to the Reserve and Grand Champions!

Grand Champion: Spitfire

Reserve Champion: Brew “N” Bar-B-Que

And another congratulations to Moe Cason with Ponderosa BBQ.  He came in 7th overall.  Despite our crap talk, Moe got us again.  We’ll getcha next time big guy!

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!

-Framps

Check it out everyone…..we’re doing everything we can to bring “BBQ Pitmasters-Season 2″ on TLC to Omaha this year. Join the group “Hot Grill on Grill Action BBQ team” on Facebook and check for updates and events surrounding this!!!

For now….enjoy our audition!!!