Barbecued Beef Brisket For a Charcoal Grill

From America's Test Kitchen Season 7: Barbecued Brisket and Corn Fritters

The main reason it’s so hard to cook brisket is that it starts out as a very tough cut of meat. It’s also big, sometimes weighing upward of 13 pounds, which is why most butchers separate it into two cuts: the “point” (the fattier of the two pieces) and the “flat” (which is leaner and also a little tougher). Slow-cooking for as many as six to 12 hours at a low temperature tends to be the norm for cooking brisket, but we wanted to jump-start the cooking on the grill, to give us tender, smoky meat. We didn’t get the total cooking time below six hours, but we did make the job easier using the grill. First, we cooked the meat over the grill for two hours to let in those all-important smoky flavors; barbecuing the brisket fat side up allowed the fat to melt slowly over the meat. Then we moved it to the oven to cook for a few more hours unattended. For flavor, we turned to a dry rub; typical barbecuing methods like basting the meat or setting a pan of liquid on the cooking grate to create a moist environment just didn’t work. Our grill-to-oven approach, although unconventional, gave us fork-tender meat with real barbecue flavor in about half the time it would take to cook the meat entirely on the grill.