Cookout-Worth Beef Brisket

Hey I'm Josh Ozersky. I'm Rachael Ray's buddy and I'm here for eHow and I'm making tailgate brisket. Now to me brisket is the ultimate but it's also the ultimate challenge. It's a very hard thing to make, even under optimal circumstances like a barbecue contest, let alone when you're on the parking lot of a football stadium somewhere. So what I like to do a lot of times, I will make a brisket in my oven and I will do the traditional old time Southern staple, Dr. Pepper braised brisket, I'll add some heat, usually in the form of some very hot pepperocinis, pepper flakes, hot sauce, what have you and then I'll let it get cold and I will finish it on site in the Weber. Now in this Weber you'll see I'm finishing my brisket here, I have some nice caramelized onions that I've done, I've been moving them around. I took the Dr. Pepper and the hot sauce and everything else and I worked it down to a nice thick glaze and what I've been doing is laying on the glaze. You can see the little pepperocinis and all the hot pepper flakes, they're actually the same thing and what I keep doing is I keep laying on the glaze, then putting the lid back on and then that way I get the glaze, I get the glaze to absorb smoke, then I get the glaze again, then I get the glaze to absorb smoke. So it's probably been about six or seven levels now of glazing and absorbing smoke. The brisket is not a true barbecued brisket. I'm not going to tell you that you can make a brisket in your oven and then finish it on a Weber grill and have a true barbecued brisket. People who tell you that or tell themselves that are lying. Alright so I think this is probably about ready to take off. Now, I'm going to take it out and I'm going to put it on the board, I'm going to cut some slices. It's not completely falling apart done but that's okay because I'm going to grill the slices. Alright so I'm going to use my spatula here and the tongs, try to get this monster onto my cutting board, oh yeah, come to Papa, there. I have now given birth to a beautiful 12 pound baby brisket and what you'll notice about this brisket is that it is the real deal, full packer cut brisket. That is to say it has both the muscles, the flat and the deckle, I'm going to make all the good sandwiches from the deckle here. You'll see that it doesn't have a huge layer of fat because I trimmed the whole thing before I cooked it. So it's not going to be one of those briskets where you cut it and there's like this much fat on top. On the deckle, the deckle has got a lot of different muscle groups running at different angles but this is the biggest one here. What do I do when I have muscles running this way? Cut them this way and that's what I'm going to do. Oh, look at that, now is that, you know what, that is a nice piece of brisket. Now when it gets grilled and glazed, another level, that's going to be even better. For the purposes of instruction, I'm just going to cut those three slices. Rest assured the rest of it's going to get eaten. Now I'm going to trim up the slices a little bit, you see there's a layer of fat, there's a fat seam here. So it's easy to handle, you just cut right around it, it comes right out. Now I have three nice slices. I'm going to individually glaze them up like so and I'm going to put them down on the coals over direct heat and then I'll put some of this on the other side too. See what's happening now is that bottom part is searing and sizzling, it's going to be crunchy. If it was an open fire, the fat would drop down and get big flareups but because it's sort of starved for oxygen, that's not happening, it's just browning and sizzling but I'm re-glazing the top layer and all that smoke is coming around back down onto that glaze so you're getting it from two different angles. Now dig this, this is a Zaydee's bun. It is essentially a sweet onion egg roll made by one of our Jewish bakeries here in New York. You can use what they call a Miami style onion roll, a potato roll, something heavy, something rich, something dense, something that's going to stand up to the load of meat that I'm about to lay upon it. Wow, look at that. How often are you going to get that? Sometimes the stuff I cook is so good that I'm acutely embarrassed for myself but I shouldn't be seen with such a crudely sybaritic moment of pleasure and yet, what am I going to do? This piece, it didn't get a ton of smoke for most of its cooking life but because it got such an intense sear at the very end right over the hot coals with a lot of smoke going throughout, we ended up getting like a little punch of smoke more than we really deserved. It's like we stole it, like we cheated the barbecue process, but of course, the sandwich wouldn't be complete without these delicious braised onions which also have had the Dr. Pepper cooked into them. And there we have it, the brisket sandwich of the Gods. I'm Josh Ozersky, Rachael Ray's buddy and this is eHow Food.