sudsandswine
Quintessential Chatty Farker
- Joined
- Jun 23, 2012
- Location
- Kansas City
A good friend of mine asked if I'd help them out by cooking the meat for their wedding reception occurring in a few weeks. I crunched the numbers and figured eight ~8lb pork butts and six ~15lb briskets would do the trick. I decided to do the cook across 2 days, pork on the first day and brisket on the next. I trimmed up all the briskets Friday night, vacuum sealed them, and tossed them in the cooler for Sunday. We also injected the butts with white grape juice + Oakridge BBQ Game Changer injection so they could be cooked on Saturday. It was a late night.
The 'ol Foodsaver I've had for years and years and processed hundreds if not thousands of pounds of meat with was finally giving up, so I ordered this 16" sealer, mainly because I thought it'd be big enough to vacuum seal briskets. It is indeed.
The pork was seasoned with Oakridge BBQ Secret Weapon.
We got about 35lbs of cooked pork out of it.
I did not get a lot of pictures of the brisket cooking, but they all turned out great. Seasoned with 2:2:1:1 by weight kosher salt, coarse black pepper, granulated garlic, and granulated onion. It'd been a while since I cooked that many briskets and never had on this smoker, so I was a little nervous because the stakes were high. All 6 turned out perfectly though.
Since we had free heat I threw on a slab of ribs and a few sausages I made for dinner.
I didn't feel like messing with butcher paper and I wasn't sure I even had enough to wrap all 6, so I foiled them instead. It was very very windy here yesterday and the cooker didn't want to run much over 250-260*, so things were taking a bit longer than they normally do for me, and the foil wrap helped speed things along a bit. I did rotate the briskets around the cook chamber based on size and progress and they all finished within about 90 minutes of one another.
I was impressed with the bark and color/penetration of the smoke ring.
Everything rendered perfectly, tender points and flats and nothing over or under done.
I tried to slice the brisket in such a way that it would discourage overserving at a buffet line. Halved the flats down the middle and then sliced across the grain and that sort of thing.
I used the chamber vac sealer to package everything up....my theory is it would pull less moisture out of the meat compared to the external style vacuum sealer that pulls vacuum out of one end of a bag.
We wound up with about 40lbs of cooked brisket. When you're dealing with this volume of meat, a residential refrigerator can have a hard time safely bringing down temperature of that much thermal mass, so I usually just fill a cooler full of ice and water then throw the vacuum bags of meat in there. Within 5-10 minutes they're fully chilled and ready for the freezer.
It was a lot of work, every time I do this I have to give kudos to those who do this sort of thing day in and day out. :clap2:
The 'ol Foodsaver I've had for years and years and processed hundreds if not thousands of pounds of meat with was finally giving up, so I ordered this 16" sealer, mainly because I thought it'd be big enough to vacuum seal briskets. It is indeed.
The pork was seasoned with Oakridge BBQ Secret Weapon.
We got about 35lbs of cooked pork out of it.
I did not get a lot of pictures of the brisket cooking, but they all turned out great. Seasoned with 2:2:1:1 by weight kosher salt, coarse black pepper, granulated garlic, and granulated onion. It'd been a while since I cooked that many briskets and never had on this smoker, so I was a little nervous because the stakes were high. All 6 turned out perfectly though.
Since we had free heat I threw on a slab of ribs and a few sausages I made for dinner.
I didn't feel like messing with butcher paper and I wasn't sure I even had enough to wrap all 6, so I foiled them instead. It was very very windy here yesterday and the cooker didn't want to run much over 250-260*, so things were taking a bit longer than they normally do for me, and the foil wrap helped speed things along a bit. I did rotate the briskets around the cook chamber based on size and progress and they all finished within about 90 minutes of one another.
I was impressed with the bark and color/penetration of the smoke ring.
Everything rendered perfectly, tender points and flats and nothing over or under done.
I tried to slice the brisket in such a way that it would discourage overserving at a buffet line. Halved the flats down the middle and then sliced across the grain and that sort of thing.
I used the chamber vac sealer to package everything up....my theory is it would pull less moisture out of the meat compared to the external style vacuum sealer that pulls vacuum out of one end of a bag.
We wound up with about 40lbs of cooked brisket. When you're dealing with this volume of meat, a residential refrigerator can have a hard time safely bringing down temperature of that much thermal mass, so I usually just fill a cooler full of ice and water then throw the vacuum bags of meat in there. Within 5-10 minutes they're fully chilled and ready for the freezer.
It was a lot of work, every time I do this I have to give kudos to those who do this sort of thing day in and day out. :clap2:
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