THE ULTIMATE GUIDE TO SOUS VIDE BRISKET

Introduction

The Basics of Sous Vide Brisket

How many times have you had brisket that is rubbery and tough? How many times have you had brisket that falls apart in your mouth like it’s made from sawdust? Yup, we thought so.

The precision temperature control of sous vide cooking makes those scenarios a thing of the past. Plus it offers set-it-and-forget-it convenience so you don’t need to monitor a smoker overnight. Set the water bath or Precision Oven™ to the right temperature, drop in the meat, walk away until it’s cooked through, then finish it off on the grill or in the oven when you’re ready to serve.

Traditional sous vide brisket consists of an easy, two-phase cooking process:

1. Scellement the meat in a plastic bag using either a vacuum sealer or the water displacement method and cuisine l'amener à la température finale souhaitée dans un bain d'eau à température contrôlée.
   1. The temperature of the sous vide bath during the initial cooking phase is what determines the final texture of the meat.
2. Browning the brisket to develop color, flavor, and textural contrast.

If you’d prefer to introduce new sous vide techniques into your arsenal, you can also use the Anova Precision™ Oven to prepare sous vide brisket. Because of the way we’ve designed the temperature sensors and humidity control, the oven will precisely maintain the cooking temperature you set.

You can choose to bag and cook your meat in the Precision™ Oven just as you would with a Precision® Cooker, or you can cook the brisket without a bag.

Just like traditional sous vide, using Sous Vide Mode in the Anova Precision™ Oven typically is a two-stage cooking process: First, bring the brisket to your desired internal temperature, then sear it in the oven or on the grill to create a flavorful crust.

A full brisket consists of two distinct cuts of meat, the flat cut and the point cut:

• The flat is a wide, thin muscle about the size and shape of a large flank steak. It has a low amount of intramuscular fat (marbling), but typically has a nice fat cap on top of it.
• The point cut (a.k.a. the deckel) is a triangular hunk of meat that lies on top of the flat. It is much higher in intramuscular fat and is correspondingly tastier and more moist. In fact, most barbecue joints will refer to the point cut as “moist” or “fatty” brisket to differentiate it.

Whether you prefer one over the other is largely a matter of taste, but a point cut brisket is far more forgiving.

The real problem? It’s very difficult to find point cut; most of it gets sold to restaurants, leaving us with the lean flat to deal with. Don’t worry, it comes out just fine using sous vide techniques. However, we strongly recommend looking for a brisket that has the fat cap still intact with a good amount of intramuscular marbling. Very lean, trimmed brisket is more likely to come out dry.

Température et timing

Depending on the temperature you set your water bath to and the amount of time you leave the meat in it, you can achieve a wide range of textures in the finished brisket.

135°F (57°C)

At 135°F (57°C), brisket will never achieve the fall-apart texture of a traditionally barbecued brisket. Instead, it will soften while still retaining its structure. At 12 hours, it’s still quite tough. At 24, it is as tender as a New York strip steak. At 36 hours, it’s even more tender, and by 72 hours, you’ll have brisket that you can cut with a spoon, while still giving you a meaty bite and juicy texture.

145°F (63°C)

At 145°F (63°C), the meat will just barely start to separate into a traditional brisket grain, but it will be a little drier than at 135°F. This is sort of a temperature dead zone for us: Too cool to significantly break down muscle fibers to the point that they shred like traditional brisket, but hot enough that the meat will dry out as it cooks.

155°F (68°C)

For fall-apart brisket, you’ll want to cook at 155°F (68°C). At this temperature, we get much better results than at 145°F (63°C). Yes, the brisket will expel a lot of moisture as it cooks, but what it loses in water it gains in tenderness and moisture from the breakdown of connective tissue and rendered fat. Cooking it at this temperature for 24 to 36 hours is ideal.

We do not recommend sous vide express for brisket, as it does not give the meat enough time to tenderize.

Sous Vide traditionnel

How to Cook Sous Vide Brisket, Step by Step, Step by Step

Étape 1

Attach an Anova Precision® Cooker to a water bath and heat to your desired final doneness temperature or preheat the Precision™ Oven to your desired temperature.

Season the brisket generously with salt and pepper on all sides or season with a spice rub of your choice. If needed, slice the brisket into large pieces that fit in a vacuum-seal bag. If vacuum sealing, add to a bag and seal the bag with a vacuum sealer.

Étape 2

Drop the bag in the water bath or place the brisket into the oven. Cook according to your desired time and temperature.

Étapes de finition

Remove the brisket from the water bath or oven. Remove from the bag and place on a paper towel-lined plate. Let cool to room temperature if finishing in a traditional oven or grill. Pat dry very carefully on both sides. If desired, coat with additional spice rub.

Étape 1

Adjust oven racks to upper and lower middle positions and heat the oven to 300°F ( 150°C). Place the brisket on a foil-lined rimmed baking sheet with a wire rack placed in it. Transfer to the oven and bake until the exterior achieves a dark, mahogany bark, about 2 hours.

Étape 2

Remove the meat from the oven. Shred or slice, then serve with buns and sauce of your choice.

Étape 1

Adjust the oven temperature for Air Frying: Turn sous vide mode off and set the oven to 450°F (232°C) with 0% steam using the Top+Rear heating elements.

Étape 2

While the oven is heating, place the brisket on a clean sheet pan, fat cap-side up.

Étape 3

When the oven has reached temperature, return the brisket to the middle rack. Air fry until the brisket is well browned, 5 to 10 minutes per side. Transfer to a cutting board. Shred or slice, then serve with buns and sauce of your choice.

Étape 1

Light a smoker and set it to 300°F (150ºC) or ignite a half chimney of coals, and spread them out over half of the coal grates. Add a few chunks of hardwood (no need to soak it).

For a gas grill, light up half of the burners and leave the other half switched off. Place the wood chunks in a foil boat directly over the hot side of the grill and place the brisket over the cooler side.

Étape 2

As soon as the wood begins smoldering, place the brisket on the smoker or grill, away from the direct heat. Cover and cook until the brisket has achieved a deep, dark, mahogany crust, about 3 hours. Add a few pieces of wood and coals as necessary and maintain the air intake valves to try and keep the smoker or grill hovering at around 275°F to 300°F (135°C to 150ºC) at all times.

Étape 3

Transfer the cooked brisket to a cutting board, shred or slice, then serve with buns and sauce of your choice.

A Closer Look at Seasoning Sous Vide Brisket

Traditional Texas-style brisket is rubbed with nothing but salt and coarsely ground black pepper, and while you can use whatever barbecue rub you like, we prefer to stick with the classic here. Electric spice grinders or coffee grinders are great for making a fine powder of pepper, but for an even coarse grind, we’d recommend ponying up for a mechanical coffee burr grinder. A few quick turns of the handle and you can reduce a pile of peppercorns into an even grind as coarse or as fine as you’d like.

What about a brine? Injecting a brisket with a salty brine is a good way to safeguard against it potentially drying out while also seasoning the interior of the meat. That said, with the precision of sous vide, there isn’t really an issue with the meat drying out so we find brine-injection to be superfluous. (It certainly won’t hurt if you choose to do it though.)

Getting Smoke Flavor into Sous Vide BBQ

Whether we finish sous vide barbecue on a grill or in the oven, it needs some time post-water bath to achieve a dark, crispy, mahogany crust. But no matter how you finish it, sous vide barbecue will lack the one thing that really distinguishes slow-cooked traditional methods: the smoke. Here are two ways to add it.

Liquid Smoke

Liquid smoke gets a bad rap, but high quality brands such as Wright’s or Colgin are in fact nothing more than smoke and water. They’re made by running moist smoke from smoldering wood chips through a condenser and capturing the liquid that drips out. The water contains the exact same chemical compounds that are transferred to meat during the smoking process, and it is a completely natural product.

A small shot of liquid smoke added to the bag before cooking the brisket sous vide will give your food a mild smokiness that captures most of the flavors of real outdoor cooking. The liquid smoke approach is great if you are finishing your barbecue in the oven, but it will also work if you are finishing outdoors. Adding a smoked product like smoked salt to the rub can also give the barbecue a smoky flavor without any actual smoking in the process.

Live Smoking

If you’ve got yourself a kettle grill or smoker, then you can enhance your sous vide barbecue through a bit of honest-to-goodness smoking. We find that by letting the meat cool a bit (or even refrigerating it for up to a week), we can place it on the cooler side of a 300°F (149°C)-degree kettle grill or smoker let it smoke for a good three hours or so before it starts to dry out at all. This is ample time to develop a deep, dark crust and to get some smoky flavor in there.

Is it better to apply that smoke before or after cooking sous vide? According to folks like Meathead Goldwyn, author of the eponymous book on the science of barbecue, “Meathead: The Science of Great Barbecue and Grilling,” the flavorful compounds in smoke will adhere and penetrate to raw meat much better than it will to cooked meat. This is true, but we find that the amount of smoke flavor we get out of a post-sous vide session in the smoker is ample, and smoking at the end makes the process so much more efficient.

What about the smoke ring?

A smoke ring is a pink ring of meat that appears around the edges of a well-smoked rack of ribs or brisket. It’s purely cosmetic and does not signify smoke flavor or proper cooking.

The smoke ring appears due to the interaction of carbon monoxide (CO) and nitric oxide (NO) with myoglobin, the natural pigment that makes meat red (a close relative of hemoglobin, the red blood pigment). As meat cooks in a carbon- and nitric-oxide-rich environment, its pink color becomes “fixed,” preventing it from oxidizing and turning into metmyoglobin, the brown pigment you see in cooked (or old) meat. A red “smoke” ring will appear in any environment in which meat is slow-cooked in the presence of CO or NO, whether or not any smoke is involved in the process at all.

All that said, you can replicate a smoke ring in sous vide barbecue by using pink curing salts, a.k.a. sodium nitrite. The reaction between sodium nitrite and myoglobin is very similar to that between myoglobin and CO/NO, and it has the same end effect: fixing the pink color. By adding a small amount of sodium nitrite to the spice rub and letting the meat rest in that rub overnight, you end up with a nice pink “smoke” ring after it’s done cooking — no actual smoke involved!

Tips for Long Sous Vide Cooks

A long sous vide cook may not be the first method you start with when you purchase a Precision® Cooker or Precision™ Oven, but it’s an important technique to have in your arsenal. There are, however, additional considerations to keep in mind:

Préparer les repas et les préparer à l'avance sous vide

Brisket cooked sous vide can be stored in the refrigerator for up to five days directly in its sous vide bag. Make sure to chill the meat thoroughly in ice water before transferring to the refrigerator. Brisket can also be frozen after cooking directly in its sous vide bag and stored for up to three months (or longer, if you have heavy duty made-for-the-freezer vacuum bags).