Well I took on the challenge of cooking 85 lbs of of brisket and 40 lbs of sausage for our track banquet tonight to save our booster club some money on catering. I've been scouring the green screen for the last month and reading every thread I could find on the best way to cook brisket. As we all know, asking that question on this forum will get you about 100 different answers. So, I decided to combine a little advice from here and there and put out an adequate product tonight.
I used a borrowed trailer pit that I had only used one other time for cooking burgers, so I wasn't real confident going in. The fire box had a giant, rusted hole in the bottom of it and the side door to the fire box wouldn't completely close. Needless to say, I battled keeping the correct temp the entire time. The briskets closest to the box almost burned up in the first 3.5 hours of the cook but I was able to salvage them. Two of the points ended up falling apart when was cutting them, but I just turned them into chopped beef and it was fine. A couple of the briskets ended up a little dry in the flat area, but were actually pretty tender. I poured some of the collected juices from the resting ice chest on them and that seemed to help when serving. We fed about 150 people tonight and all I had left was about 2 lbs of chopped beef left, so I guess it was eatable.
There's probably a few things I'll do differently next time, such as not wrapping in foil for the last part of the cook (I tried to find non-waxed butcher paper, but our local stores didn't carry it). By the way, if you do wrap it in foil, do you pour the juices out before you put in the cooler to rest? I had 8 briskets in the cooler and the ones on the bottom ended up submerged in drippings. Made for great flavor, but kind of ruined the bark
Anyway, all this to say, thanks y'all for all your arguing and bickering over the best way to cook brisket. Had it not been for y'alls successes and failures, and y'all sharing all of them, tonight could have been a major catastrophe for me.
I used a borrowed trailer pit that I had only used one other time for cooking burgers, so I wasn't real confident going in. The fire box had a giant, rusted hole in the bottom of it and the side door to the fire box wouldn't completely close. Needless to say, I battled keeping the correct temp the entire time. The briskets closest to the box almost burned up in the first 3.5 hours of the cook but I was able to salvage them. Two of the points ended up falling apart when was cutting them, but I just turned them into chopped beef and it was fine. A couple of the briskets ended up a little dry in the flat area, but were actually pretty tender. I poured some of the collected juices from the resting ice chest on them and that seemed to help when serving. We fed about 150 people tonight and all I had left was about 2 lbs of chopped beef left, so I guess it was eatable.
There's probably a few things I'll do differently next time, such as not wrapping in foil for the last part of the cook (I tried to find non-waxed butcher paper, but our local stores didn't carry it). By the way, if you do wrap it in foil, do you pour the juices out before you put in the cooler to rest? I had 8 briskets in the cooler and the ones on the bottom ended up submerged in drippings. Made for great flavor, but kind of ruined the bark
Anyway, all this to say, thanks y'all for all your arguing and bickering over the best way to cook brisket. Had it not been for y'alls successes and failures, and y'all sharing all of them, tonight could have been a major catastrophe for me.
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