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

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!!! 

The best part is the leftovers can be used for anything from smoked chicken enchiladas to smoked chicken lasagna… you name it.

Long story short here, there are tons of recipes for smoked chicken and I will post some of them I have used. In the end, however, I feel that butterflying the chicken serves many purposes that benefit the cook. The bird cooks more quickly, it allows easier access for injecting and seasoning to all areas of the bird and it makes the cutting / pulling process after cook MUCH easier, since all the sections are nicely laid out as you’ll see below.

For this cook, I started with 2 whole birds from Bag n Save in Omaha. I placed them in foil pans because I hate messes and even more..I hate clean up.  This allows me to toss the pans when I’m done.  They are your basic Tyson whole chicken come just like this:

From here, you’ll need to open up the chickens from the package and wash them as much as you can at this point.  It might be slightly frozen still…which is OK.  Just run some cool water to wash and it will begin to soften up for handling.  You’ll want to place the chicken wings up with the legs pointed right at your belly.

Once you have it situated, you will remove the backbone.  Start by cutting with some kitchen shears as close to the backbone as possible so you don’t waste too much meat and cut all the way down to the neck.  You can see how I started this here:

Continue cutting down the backbone and then repeat on the other side.  Once you have both cuts complete, you can start to pull away the chicken halves and remove the backbone completely.  It’s nice to get this out as it’s a tough bone to work around when pulling / slicing and really only holds trivial, low quality meat anyway.

Now pull the backbone out and set it aside, like so:

Now is the time to clean out all the guts and other material that looks nasty out of here.  You can see….this doesn’t look very tasty:

At this point, we want to start getting the bird flattened out so it sits nicely on the smoker or grill.  Simply grab both sides of the bird and pull them apart gently until you feel the breast bone begin to break….just enough to get it opened up nice and wide.  After we wash it – we’ll flatten it out from the top side.  Once you have it opened up – run the entire bird under cold water using your hands and fingers to clean out all the guts and odd looking pieces as well as any “spur” type feeling material that’s in here.  This is the best time to get all this out of here and will make your finishing steps much easier so you don’t have to pick through it later.  Don’t hesitate to use a knife or scissors during this process.  Whatever you need.

Once it’s all washed up, check it out.  It should look like this:

Now you are set to make it sit flat and pretty up the way you want it to lay in the smoker.  I like to have mine skin side up…so I finagle it until I have the positioning I like in the smoker…just to make sure it’ll go that way once it’s seasoned up and ready to cook.  You want to keep the wings and legs tucked in as much as possible, while also allowing for as much of the skin and meat to get hit with smoke.  It’s a fine balance between keeping in moisture and giving it smoke.

Flattened out, it should look like this:

Now you’re all set!!  Season that bad boy up, inject it, whatever you want to do to it to make it delicious.

Like I said – I like mine skin side up while smoking so I put it in the smoker and leave it alone the entire cook..just as you see it directly above.  This allows for the most smoke to hit the meat and allows for the skin to get a nice color and all those seasonings you put on top to run into the meat…as well as the fat from the skin…which will break down during the cooking process.

Good luck – hope this helps!

If it isn’t in it’s proper place – we’ll begin looking around and if it can’t be found – we need to replace the item.

Though we’ve developed our own checklists, we did start with the one attached below and feel it is the best one that can be found on the web. We will always use these, just to make sure we won’t have the stress of not having something important…as the cook itself is stressful enough!

Here it is:  EventChecklist

Hope this tip helps you as you begin your qwest to become part of the BBQ Revolution!

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!!!!!

-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!!!

Getting there early provides many advantages, some examples:

1. If gives you flexibility to work around the weather if it isn’t cooperating
2. You can get your meat checked in earlier so you can begin your marinade, brine or whatever you’d like to do to the meat before you cook it
3. You are less rushed getting your camp/kitchen setup which creates a far more organized area
4. It gives you a larger window to run out and pickup anything that may have been forgotten.
5. You can begin to scope the competition as it comes in!
6. You can start drinking beer earlier!
7. Socializing

There are many other advantages - but these are the main ones.

There will typically be a meat inspector running around whenever you get there so you’ll want to get this out of the way as soon as you can.  You cannot unpackage any of the meat you are cooking until it has been “checked in” by one of these inspectors – so don’t bring anything open or in a marinade or already seasoned, etc.  It will disqualify you before you even begin.

Sometime in the evening, usually between 5PM and 7PM, there will be a cooks meeting.  You or someone representing your team will need to be there during this meeting.  At the end of the meeting you’ll get your clam shells (the styrofoam thingers you typically get from a restaurant for left overs) and whatever “goodie bags” the contest is giving each team.  You will get at least 4 clam shells (or more depending on the contest).  Take care of these and don’t mark on them!  You can be disqualified for trying to “mark” your box in an attempt to tell a judge who’s food this is.  A very serious rule in these contests is that turns ins are to remain annonymous, unbiased and fair.  I have seen more than one team given a diqualifying score.

Turn ins will usually be on Saturday for the big 4 (chicken, ribs, pork, brisket) and will usually start at noon and then be every 30 minutes.  For KCBS the order of turn in is chicken, ribs, pork, brisket…so it would end at 1:30.  Juding is then typically between 3 – 4 PM depending on the size and number of teams.