Sous Vide Smoked Brisket

An easy combination-cooking method for juicy smoked brisket. Sous vide takes the guesswork out for beginning cooks.

Originally Posted: Jan. 21, 2022

Total Time: 24 hours Sous Vide, 3 hours Smoker

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Intro

Traditional Smoked Brisket

In the world of barbecue and smoked meats, brisket is considered to be a moderately advanced recipe. A large brisket can take up to 8 or 9 hours to cook all the way through. Depending on your smoker, you may end up tending your firebox for hours, or constantly checking on your temperature and wood chip levels, or topping off your wood pellet hopper.

Brisket can come out dry if done improperly, which is a horrible thing to happen after spending so much time on one. There are many ways to prevent this; many cooks use a combination of spritzing with a spray bottle of vinegar and wrapping the meat in foil or pink butcher paper. The amount of active cook time and effort definitely makes brisket a weekend project compared to a lot of other recipes.

Enter Sous Vide

However, with the advent of sous vide circulators built for the home chef, we now have an incredibly precise method of combination-cooking. Pre-cooking a brisket in a sous vide bath and finishing it on the smoker gives you the best of both worlds: the sous vide method ensures that there’s no way for the meat to dry out, and finishing on the smoker gives it that beautiful smoky flavor. If you’ve never smoked a brisket the traditional way before, there’s a lot less risk in buying around $100 worth of meat and then being disappointed in the result.

With enough planning ahead, this becomes a potential weeknight dinner. Just take the time of day you want to serve it, subtract 3 hours for smoking and 24 hours for sous vide, and you have a good idea of when your start time should be.

Times and Temperatures

One of my favorite food authors to read when trying out a new sous vide recipe is J. Kenji Lopez-Alt. His sous vide articles for Serious Eats and is book The Food Lab are great resources, comparing many variables such as time and temperature and showing how the resulting cook turned out. His article on sous vide brisket will give you a starting point depending on how you want your brisket to turn out. He also gives multiple options for finish-cooking the brisket besides just in a smoker.

Another author whose more straightforward recipes are great for beginner cooks/smokers is Greg Mrvich, who has a book called Sous Vide BBQ. I’ve found that the times and temperatures in his book give my favorite texture for brisket, and they also correspond to Kenji’s favorite method: 155°F (68°C) for 24 hours.

Brief Overview of Brisket

Brisket is an incredibly tough cut of meat. It’s one of the toughest cuts on a cow. The brisket roughly corresponds to the human pectoral muscle; cows—being four-legged—support most of their weight on these muscles while standing. Being such a tough cut of meat, we need to cook it for a long time over a low temperature to make it tasty. As a bonus, this also breaks down the intramuscular fat and connective tissue that are present in brisket, giving us a tender and juicy slice of meat in the end.

Briskets can come whole (a “packer brisket”) or cut into pieces. When cut into pieces, they’re commonly separated into the “flat” (often called “lean brisket”) and the “point” (often called “fatty brisket”). You can have a butcher separate these for you, you can do it yourself either before or after the sous vide step, or you can just keep the whole brisket together and cook it that way.

Ingredients

• Brisket, fat cap still intact
• Rub of your choice
• Olive Oil
• 8 Cloves of Garlic, minced, per whole brisket

Equipment

• Sous Vide Circulator
• Sous Vide container (see note about size down in the “Prep” section)
• Vacuum Sealer like the FoodSaver, and vacuum seal bags
• Smoker (one of my favorite pieces of cooking equipment is my Recteq-700 pellet smoker. It gets a lot of use when the weather is nice around here.)

Written Instructions

Total Time: 24 hours Sous Vide, 3 hours Smoker

Prep

Trim the fat cap to about ¼in. thick (or about .63cm). I like to do this at the beginning of the process, but keep in mind you can trim a little more after the sous vide step if you feel the need to; in fact, it’s much easier to trim once the fat has gelatinized a bit.

If you want to at this stage, separate the “flat” from the “point” by slicing through the layer of fat that connects the two. This can be a little hard to find on some packer briskets, but separating the brisket into these two parts (or even just chopping the whole thing in half) will make it easier to fit into vacuum bags. Once again, you can also separate the cuts after the sous vide step for ease if you want to. This will also result in more overall surface area exposed to smoke, and therefore more “bark”.

Note: If you want to keep the brisket in one piece, you need a large sous vide setup. I made a DIY one using this post on Anova’s blog as a guide. To do this, you’ll need:

• 24-can Coleman Cooler (link)
• Hole Saw Kit (link)

Sous Vide

Place the whole (or chopped) brisket into one (or two) vacuum bags. Add olive oil down both sides of the meat to coat a bit. Add 8 minced cloves of garlic; divide this between the two bags if you went that route. Seal the bag(s). Your brisket is now ready to cook, or you can refrigerate or freeze it for later at this stage—just remember to let it thaw completely before you start cooking.

When you’re ready to start cooking, preheat your sous vide setup to 155°F (68°C). Allow refrigerated or thawed brisket to sit in room temperature for a while so it won’t cool off the sous vide water too much. Place sealed brisket into water once sous vide setup comes to temp, then cook for 24 hours.

Smoker Prep

At the end of 24 hours, take brisket out of the water bath. Cut vacuum bag open, drain liquid, and set brisket aside. Dab completely dry with paper towels; this will help the rub stick and will help form a nice bark from the smoke.

Apply your choice of rub. Sous Vide BBQ includes a homemade general-purpose beef rub, but if you’re strapped for time you can use a store-bought rub. My favorite store-bought blend so far is a mix of Kinder’s “The Blend” (link), and this local one I picked up in a butcher shop in Issaquah called Dances with Smoke Beef Brisket Rub. I’ve even used my North African Spice Blend as an experiment one time and that turned out delicious (we also put it on some smoked shrimp appetizers).

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Depending on what kind of smoker you’ll be using, you’ll want to start it 45min to 1 hour before taking the brisket out of the sous vide bath so you can get it up to temp (see next section).

Smoking

As far as smoking goes, I’ve finished this brisket with a few different types. Your basic smoker types can be divided by fuel source—charcoal, electric, gas, pellet—and also by how they’re built—offset, reverse-flow, vertical, kamado. There are even ways to add the smoke aspect to a variety of grills.

My parents have a decades-old electric smoker that’s more or less just a heating element in a metal can. To simple smokers like this, just add a disposable pan and soaked wood chips to create a slow smoke. I can’t even remember if the thermometer on that old thing works, we mostly just eyeball stuff until it looks finished.

When I decided to get some beginner’s practice in smoking last year, I bought myself a little present: a RecTeq-700 pellet grill. The pellet grill style of smoker gives you an amazing amount of control and automation when you’re smoking with it, but for these reasons many old-school pit masters don’t consider them real smokers. Then again, I bought it because I wanted some practice getting recipes under my belt before I started getting experience with fire-based smokers.

No matter which smoker you have access to, the brisket is going to be delicious. If you have a smoker with temperature control, or if you’re good at reaching and maintaining temp on a more traditional smoker, you’re going to want to smoke the brisket for 3 hours at 250°F (121°C).

Finishing Steps

Pull the brisket off the smoker and set on a cutting board. Give it 30 minutes to rest; this allows the meat to reabsorb some juices and keep from becoming dry or tough. Slice and serve with your favorite BBQ sides.

Side Dish & Appetizer Ideas

• Mashed potatoes
• Baked Beans
• Smoked Shrimp
• Salad
• Balsamic-Glazed Brussels Sprouts

Sauces

BBQ Sauce Blend

Making your own BBQ sauce from scratch isn’t too hard, and there are a lot of recipes out there to use as starting points. Basically, you want a balanced blend of sweetness, acidity, and smokiness. Most recipes include ketchup, brown sugar, and vinegar, and smokiness can be added either with liquid smoke or by simmering the sauce in the smoker for a bit while the meat is cooking.

I’d like to do that myself someday, but generally I don’t. My favorite BBQ sauces to have on hand during Brisket Night are: a 1-to-1 blend of Sweet Baby Ray’s Original and Stubb’s Smokey Mesquite, and some Sweet Baby Ray’s Honey-Chipotle on its own. I started using those two a few years ago when I did a sous vide rib night for my birthday and cooked for 20 people or something, so I know they’re great brushed on ribs as they grill, too.

Toum

Whenever I make this at my parents’ house, I like to take over a container of homemade toum (the recipe I use is elaborated in this post). Toum is a Lebanese style of garlic sauce belonging to the branch of aioli variants that don’t use any egg yolk. It’s easy to make if you have a food processor, and I use it in place of mayo whenever I can because that’s how much I love garlic.

I spread it on buns and then toast them over a large cast iron griddle. The buns come out toasty, garlicky, and a little greasy on top from melted oil getting everywhere. Like garlic bread buns. Delicious.

Leftover Ideas

The Brisket Melt

One of the first things I did with some of my leftover brisket was to try and recreate my favorite sandwich from this tap house in Redmond, WA. Their “Brisket Melt” has toasted bread, pesto, melted cheddar cheese, brisket, and sliced tomato.

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Ramen

The last time I made this brisket in September, I ended up with more leftovers than usual. I vacuum-sealed the extra slices and stuck them in the garage freezer.

Now I haven’t technically gotten around to doing this at the time of writing this article, but the plan is to reheat the slices gently in beef broth and then use them to top bowls of ramen with.

Eggs Benedict

The other recipe I want to try using some of the leftovers with is eggs benedict. There’s a place in Redmond, WA that does a great benny with smoked pork belly, so why not brisket?

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