Post by FWS on Aug 21, 2014 8:53:02 GMT -6
Brisket Is Worth the Wait
By JULIA MOSKIN
New York Times
AUG. 19, 2014
As smoke from the oak-burning barbecue pits swirled around his head, Nestor Laracuente lit a Marlboro Red, inhaled hard and puffed out his own cumulus cloud. A pitmaster at Hometown Bar-B-Que in Red Hook, Brooklyn, Mr. Laracuente says nicotine and heavy metal help him through the marathon graveyard shifts he spends monitoring the combination of heat, meat and smoke that it takes to produce extraordinary barbecued brisket.
He prodded one plump, crusty hunk of beef with rubber-gloved fingers to feel where it was in its 11-to-14-hour cooking process. “You want it soft and balloon-like,” he said — not bouncy, like party balloons, but relaxed, like morning-after balloons.
During all the years when New York was a city of embarrassing or better-than-nothing barbecue, pork ribs and pulled pork were the most palatable options. Then along came the Texas Trinity — brisket, beef ribs and spicy beef sausage — turned out in authentic fashion at restaurants like Hill Country Barbecue Market and Fette Sau.
Now, suddenly, the spotlight — and the obsessive attention of cooks like Mr. Laracuente — has narrowed in on brisket alone. And New York is even starting to develop something new: a local style of serving it, in untraditional sandwiches or with more up-to-date side dishes.
“The brisket I’ve had in New York lately is better than a lot of places in Texas,” said Daniel Vaughn, the barbecue editor of Texas Monthly magazine.
At new operations like Randalls Barbecue and Lonestar Empire, they specialize in Texas brisket. Exemplary slow-smoked, Texas-style whole beef briskets have proliferated at recently established barbecue restaurants like Mighty Quinn’s Barbeque, BrisketTown and Hometown, and at weekly food markets like Smorgasburg and the Hester Street Fair.
The city’s thriving food-stall culture, which encourages artisans to pick a food (seasonal fruit pops, Korean fried chicken, Lebanese yogurt) and work endlessly to perfect it, is suited to barbecue, a field notorious for nourishing perfectionism, competition and even intimidation. The version by Daniel Delaney, the owner of BrisketTown, is close to brisket Nirvana: smoky meat topped with wobbly, savory fat, rimmed with a lip-numbing crust of coarse black pepper. “It’s a small number of things to get right,” he said, “and I am haunted by all of them.”
The gold standard for brisket has long been set by the pitmasters of Central Texas, at places like Kreuz Market and Louie Mueller Barbecue, which got their start in the last century as German-American smokehouses. A pilgrimage to Central Texas, where the meat is served plain on butcher paper, is obligatory for brisket newbies. But New York’s pitmasters agree that the current passion for local brisket is fueled by a young colleague in Austin, Tex., Aaron Franklin, whose Franklin Barbecue has parlayed expertise, an urban location and a canny use of social media into cult status just five years after it began in a trailer with a walk-up window.
Mr. Franklin and his peers have made some breaks with strict Central Texas tradition: cooking at a lower temperature, coaxing a lighter smoke flavor into the meat, using prime-grade beef. He has introduced outsiders to arcane trade secrets like the strategic use of butcher paper to wrap the cooked meat — and that, in turn, has liberated his northerly counterparts to develop their skills, then flex their wings and serve their barbecue with a dash or two of New York experimentalism: Pennsylvania Dutch potato rolls, Vietnamese rice paper, or biodynamic or natural wines.
Mr. Delaney’s BrisketTown, once a takeout joint, now has tables, a wine list and cloth napkins. He is even contemplating adding a barbecue sauce, anathema to Texas purists (although Mr. Vaughn of Texas Monthly said most barbecue places in the state do serve it on demand).
Like pitmasters in Central Texas, both Mr. Delaney and Hugh Mangum of Mighty Quinn’s smoke their briskets entirely over wood — oak, to be specific — though many other New York restaurants use a combination of wood and gas.
Mighty Quinn’s has gone from a Smorgasburg darling to an East Village restaurant to a growing chain of four restaurants in three years, and Mr. Mangum now smokes more than 900 whole briskets a week. His vision is to provide top-notch barbecue in a quick-serve setting, with sides that are less heavy than the traditional egg-laden potato salad, white bread and pinto beans.
“Why can’t we pair barbecue with lighter fare?” asked Mr. Mangum, who has Texas lineage but grew up in Los Angeles, graduated from the French Culinary Institute (now the International Culinary Center) and was a line cook at Nougatine, in New York. The sides at Mighty Quinn’s — like roasted corn and edamame salad; buttermilk broccoli salad; and house-pickled celery, onions, cucumbers and chiles — are solid proof that we can.
Photo
Lonestar’s “Hewston” brisket summer roll. Credit Tony Cenicola/The New York Times
Dennis Ngo, the Vietnamese-American chef from Houston who is a founder of Lonestar Empire, which sells at fairs and does catering, takes an untraditional tack with the ends of the smoked meat, wrapping them with crunchy herbs and spicy mayonnaise to make summer rolls.
“I would hesitate even to say that I make barbecue,” said Mr. Ngo, who also sells wonderfully squishy and juicy brisket sandwiches on potato buns, with traditional toppings of pickle slices and raw onion, at weekend markets. Mr. Ngo’s kitchen doesn’t allow for outdoor smoking, so purists may be inclined to dismiss his work, along with that of many other New York purveyors. “I make smoked brisket sandwiches like the ones I grew up eating, and I make summer rolls that I’m proud of,” he said, “but I don’t want the barbecue police coming after me.”
Brisket is a particularly difficult cut to cook, a thick clump of fat, muscle, connective tissue and collagen that, under perfect conditions, combine into supple, beefy perfection. For professionals, the greatest challenge is consistency, making sure that each brisket comes out identically.
Continue reading the main story
For home cooks, the challenges are smaller, but twofold. First is finding a brisket to barbecue. A whole brisket consists of two distinct muscles, usually separated into what butchers call the flat and the point. The flat, or first cut, is too lean to barbecue on its own; braised, it makes a nice pot roast. The point, or second cut, must be attached for barbecue, along with the sheath of fat that covers the whole cut.
Until recently, a whole brisket was as hard for a home cook to secure as a whole lobe of foie gras. But as barbecuing has become a serious weekend activity, whole briskets have been popping up at stores like Costco, Walmart and Restaurant Depot. These are usually select grade: the choice grade is preferable, if you can find it. And with a few days’ notice, any butcher can order a whole brisket.
The second challenge is discarding everything you know about cooking meat. Keeping a charcoal grill as low as 225 to 250 degrees can be worrisome for those of us used to cranking it up for steak. Just one scant chimney starter of charcoal and a handful of wood chips can get the grill up to temperature. (Purists may prefer to use a backyard smoker, but a kettle grill will work just fine.)
Also, determining doneness is different with brisket than with roasts or steak. “The meat thermometer is the worst thing that ever happened to a person making brisket at home,” Mr. Delaney said.
Unlike most cuts, brisket is not done when it hits a certain temperature. Yes, the meat will be cooked through at 180 degrees. It will also be fibrous, and webbed with chewy, sticky collagen. A brisket needs to spend a certain amount of time — just how long depends on the individual cut — at that temperature, as the fat renders into drippiness and the collagen turns to gelatin. Meat that feels tough after 10 hours may be perfect at 12. Be patient.
At Hometown Bar-B-Que, that brisket becomes an irresistible New York-Texas mash-up as a sandwich with Brooklyn Brine pickles, Kansas City “sticky sauce” and raw onion, on an onion roll from the legendary Caputo’s Bake Shop in nearby Carroll Gardens.
Mr. Laracuente, the Hometown pitmaster, says that cooking meat in the dark of night, stoking the fires and communing with the briskets are surprisingly satisfying compared with other kitchen jobs he’s held. “Cooking is science, but barbecue is magic,” he said.
“Also, I’m from the South originally,” he said, explaining his love of the craft. “South Queens.”
By JULIA MOSKIN
New York Times
AUG. 19, 2014
As smoke from the oak-burning barbecue pits swirled around his head, Nestor Laracuente lit a Marlboro Red, inhaled hard and puffed out his own cumulus cloud. A pitmaster at Hometown Bar-B-Que in Red Hook, Brooklyn, Mr. Laracuente says nicotine and heavy metal help him through the marathon graveyard shifts he spends monitoring the combination of heat, meat and smoke that it takes to produce extraordinary barbecued brisket.
He prodded one plump, crusty hunk of beef with rubber-gloved fingers to feel where it was in its 11-to-14-hour cooking process. “You want it soft and balloon-like,” he said — not bouncy, like party balloons, but relaxed, like morning-after balloons.
During all the years when New York was a city of embarrassing or better-than-nothing barbecue, pork ribs and pulled pork were the most palatable options. Then along came the Texas Trinity — brisket, beef ribs and spicy beef sausage — turned out in authentic fashion at restaurants like Hill Country Barbecue Market and Fette Sau.
Now, suddenly, the spotlight — and the obsessive attention of cooks like Mr. Laracuente — has narrowed in on brisket alone. And New York is even starting to develop something new: a local style of serving it, in untraditional sandwiches or with more up-to-date side dishes.
“The brisket I’ve had in New York lately is better than a lot of places in Texas,” said Daniel Vaughn, the barbecue editor of Texas Monthly magazine.
At new operations like Randalls Barbecue and Lonestar Empire, they specialize in Texas brisket. Exemplary slow-smoked, Texas-style whole beef briskets have proliferated at recently established barbecue restaurants like Mighty Quinn’s Barbeque, BrisketTown and Hometown, and at weekly food markets like Smorgasburg and the Hester Street Fair.
The city’s thriving food-stall culture, which encourages artisans to pick a food (seasonal fruit pops, Korean fried chicken, Lebanese yogurt) and work endlessly to perfect it, is suited to barbecue, a field notorious for nourishing perfectionism, competition and even intimidation. The version by Daniel Delaney, the owner of BrisketTown, is close to brisket Nirvana: smoky meat topped with wobbly, savory fat, rimmed with a lip-numbing crust of coarse black pepper. “It’s a small number of things to get right,” he said, “and I am haunted by all of them.”
The gold standard for brisket has long been set by the pitmasters of Central Texas, at places like Kreuz Market and Louie Mueller Barbecue, which got their start in the last century as German-American smokehouses. A pilgrimage to Central Texas, where the meat is served plain on butcher paper, is obligatory for brisket newbies. But New York’s pitmasters agree that the current passion for local brisket is fueled by a young colleague in Austin, Tex., Aaron Franklin, whose Franklin Barbecue has parlayed expertise, an urban location and a canny use of social media into cult status just five years after it began in a trailer with a walk-up window.
Mr. Franklin and his peers have made some breaks with strict Central Texas tradition: cooking at a lower temperature, coaxing a lighter smoke flavor into the meat, using prime-grade beef. He has introduced outsiders to arcane trade secrets like the strategic use of butcher paper to wrap the cooked meat — and that, in turn, has liberated his northerly counterparts to develop their skills, then flex their wings and serve their barbecue with a dash or two of New York experimentalism: Pennsylvania Dutch potato rolls, Vietnamese rice paper, or biodynamic or natural wines.
Mr. Delaney’s BrisketTown, once a takeout joint, now has tables, a wine list and cloth napkins. He is even contemplating adding a barbecue sauce, anathema to Texas purists (although Mr. Vaughn of Texas Monthly said most barbecue places in the state do serve it on demand).
Like pitmasters in Central Texas, both Mr. Delaney and Hugh Mangum of Mighty Quinn’s smoke their briskets entirely over wood — oak, to be specific — though many other New York restaurants use a combination of wood and gas.
Mighty Quinn’s has gone from a Smorgasburg darling to an East Village restaurant to a growing chain of four restaurants in three years, and Mr. Mangum now smokes more than 900 whole briskets a week. His vision is to provide top-notch barbecue in a quick-serve setting, with sides that are less heavy than the traditional egg-laden potato salad, white bread and pinto beans.
“Why can’t we pair barbecue with lighter fare?” asked Mr. Mangum, who has Texas lineage but grew up in Los Angeles, graduated from the French Culinary Institute (now the International Culinary Center) and was a line cook at Nougatine, in New York. The sides at Mighty Quinn’s — like roasted corn and edamame salad; buttermilk broccoli salad; and house-pickled celery, onions, cucumbers and chiles — are solid proof that we can.
Photo
Lonestar’s “Hewston” brisket summer roll. Credit Tony Cenicola/The New York Times
Dennis Ngo, the Vietnamese-American chef from Houston who is a founder of Lonestar Empire, which sells at fairs and does catering, takes an untraditional tack with the ends of the smoked meat, wrapping them with crunchy herbs and spicy mayonnaise to make summer rolls.
“I would hesitate even to say that I make barbecue,” said Mr. Ngo, who also sells wonderfully squishy and juicy brisket sandwiches on potato buns, with traditional toppings of pickle slices and raw onion, at weekend markets. Mr. Ngo’s kitchen doesn’t allow for outdoor smoking, so purists may be inclined to dismiss his work, along with that of many other New York purveyors. “I make smoked brisket sandwiches like the ones I grew up eating, and I make summer rolls that I’m proud of,” he said, “but I don’t want the barbecue police coming after me.”
Brisket is a particularly difficult cut to cook, a thick clump of fat, muscle, connective tissue and collagen that, under perfect conditions, combine into supple, beefy perfection. For professionals, the greatest challenge is consistency, making sure that each brisket comes out identically.
Continue reading the main story
For home cooks, the challenges are smaller, but twofold. First is finding a brisket to barbecue. A whole brisket consists of two distinct muscles, usually separated into what butchers call the flat and the point. The flat, or first cut, is too lean to barbecue on its own; braised, it makes a nice pot roast. The point, or second cut, must be attached for barbecue, along with the sheath of fat that covers the whole cut.
Until recently, a whole brisket was as hard for a home cook to secure as a whole lobe of foie gras. But as barbecuing has become a serious weekend activity, whole briskets have been popping up at stores like Costco, Walmart and Restaurant Depot. These are usually select grade: the choice grade is preferable, if you can find it. And with a few days’ notice, any butcher can order a whole brisket.
The second challenge is discarding everything you know about cooking meat. Keeping a charcoal grill as low as 225 to 250 degrees can be worrisome for those of us used to cranking it up for steak. Just one scant chimney starter of charcoal and a handful of wood chips can get the grill up to temperature. (Purists may prefer to use a backyard smoker, but a kettle grill will work just fine.)
Also, determining doneness is different with brisket than with roasts or steak. “The meat thermometer is the worst thing that ever happened to a person making brisket at home,” Mr. Delaney said.
Unlike most cuts, brisket is not done when it hits a certain temperature. Yes, the meat will be cooked through at 180 degrees. It will also be fibrous, and webbed with chewy, sticky collagen. A brisket needs to spend a certain amount of time — just how long depends on the individual cut — at that temperature, as the fat renders into drippiness and the collagen turns to gelatin. Meat that feels tough after 10 hours may be perfect at 12. Be patient.
At Hometown Bar-B-Que, that brisket becomes an irresistible New York-Texas mash-up as a sandwich with Brooklyn Brine pickles, Kansas City “sticky sauce” and raw onion, on an onion roll from the legendary Caputo’s Bake Shop in nearby Carroll Gardens.
Mr. Laracuente, the Hometown pitmaster, says that cooking meat in the dark of night, stoking the fires and communing with the briskets are surprisingly satisfying compared with other kitchen jobs he’s held. “Cooking is science, but barbecue is magic,” he said.
“Also, I’m from the South originally,” he said, explaining his love of the craft. “South Queens.”
. gates has been doing BBQ since 1946 and still going strong. Jack stack since 1957 and won many awards for their BBQ and wabash makes some great brisket as well, but I like their smoked turkey the best the most moist and perfect smoke no place I have eaten at. Compares on smoked turkey. Too many get too strong of smoke on turkey and that is all you taste. Wabash turkey breast is fork tender and moist turkey I feel one of the hardest meats to BBQ right each and every time there is.
