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When you see a great, big eight-pound brisket at the butcher or in your fridge, it’s hard to get past the spectacle of that giant slab of red meat just lying there. You want to punch it like Rocky Balboa smacking beef around in the cooler while gabbing with Pauly, or at the least, to just gawk at its terrible, barbaric, hugeness. A brisket is like the Battle of Gettysburg in miniature – it’s bloody, it’s a lot to take in, and when finished, it probably calls for a speech.
Stephanie Pierson doesn’t get hung up with these concerns, though. She’s a sensualist, and brisket is her high-protein ambrosia. Her new book, The Brisket Book, is, she claims, the first complete cookbook devoted entirely to the art and science of the brisket.
It is a cookbook. There are recipes here – 30 of them, in fact -- many of which are curious innovations to the tried-and-true barbecued brisket, Jewish roast beef, or corned beef. But mostly, it is not a cookbook. It is, however, a collection of everything you can possibly brainstorm related to all things brisket.
There is brisket humor (Pierson mentions a kosher BBQ contest featuring a team called “LeBron Flames and the Miami Meat Team”). There are interviews with acclaimed butchers. There is even a brief bit on the innovations that celebrated, autistic animal expert Temple Grandin has brought to the industry of cattle chutes. And, there is a dissection of the author’s own obsession with the morphine-like effect that fall-apart brisket and braised onions has, when placed in her mouth.
A solid year of "brisketeering," as she puts it, produced an exhaustive look at her favorite cut of beef, and for anyone who’s been to a Jewish holiday meal hosted by a lady who knows her way around a brisket, it’s easy to see why the brisket is indeed the attention-grabbing diva of the party.
But, the meat of any cookbook (pun intended) is the recipes therein, and Pierson has gone straight to the experts for her tidy collection of the same. The all-star list of beef wranglers who offer traditional and newfangled brisket recipes includes restaurateur John Besh (smoky New Orleans brisket), NYC’s Kitchen Arts & Letters bookshop owner Nach Waxman (Jewish brisket), Bill Niman of Niman Ranch (“branding brisket”), Chris Kimball of Cooks Illustrated (onion-braised brisket), and Jewish cooking maven Joan Nathan (brisket with ginger, orange peel, and tomato). Other recipes describe outré dishes like brisket in tahini, Cuban Creole stew, brisket noodle soup with Korean chile, and a “brisket burger.”
There are good tips galore here, too. Besh adds cooked brisket-fat to baked beans. Waxman advises slicing the brisket and returning it to the pot for the final two-thirds of the process. There are even sections on recommended side and leftover dishes, as well as wine pairings. (And everything from the juiciest slice of meat falling off the roast to a simple side dish of baked potato with Cheddar cheese, sour cream, and chives is beautifully photographed.)
It is not the recipes, exactly, but the author’s in-depth excavation of nerdy “controversies” in the brisket realm that really titillated me. People will argue about brisket, just as they argue about barbecue and ribs and barbecue sauce and all such things where various American regions stand against one another in eternal pique and heel-dug immobility.
Namely, Pierson gets into how thick to slice it, sweet vs. savory, Liquid Smoke as a necessity or a sacrilege, what kind of grill to use, what kind of meat to buy, and much, much more. No expert quoted is definitively correct, and none is completely wrong. It’s an amusing look at how all us aficionados are each, in our own special way, full of bull (again, pun intended). There are plenty of different briskets that are each superlative in their own way, yet we fight like rhinos in spring rut when someone dares suggest a deviation from the holy recipe of our region and/or family.
In the words of one brisket-making superstar, my mother, Arleen Kerman, “if you’ve never made a brisket or only made a few, this is a good book, but if you have, you think yours is the best, and you already know a lot of this, anyway.”
Hey -- I’m not gonna argue with Ma.
One thing that all cooks seem to agree on, however, is that whether you’re braising or barbecuing your brisket (or both), you have to be very patient to wind up with that coveted melt-in-your-mouth meat, as is apparently the case at House Park, in Austin (see left).
According to the web site for The Brisket Book, “’Low and slow’… is the mantra. Expect to wait at least three hours for your brisket to be cooked. The meat will not go from tough to tender without patience and an oven temperature around 350.”
A lot of people agree on something else, too – brisket almost always tastes better reheated the second day, after a night of chillin’ in the fridge.
