Trim That Fat!

Now, we have told you in previous classes that you should use a low fat cut of meat like eye of the round to make your jerky and when you think of Brisket you probably aren’t thinking about a lean cut. Well, a brisket really has 2 parts, the point and the flat and these are separated by a thick vein of fat, if you are going to use brisket to make jerky we recommend you use the flat as it has very little intramuscular fat. Now, you do have to spend some time trimming the flat to remove as much of the fat around the outside as possible but the shape of the flat lends itself to being trimmed fairly well.

Slice it Up

So, we’ve trimmed all the fat off of these and as you can see one advantage of using a brisket flat is that it has a very pronounced grain and we are going to cut against that grain. This will allow the pieces to break down easier in your mouth and make it feel more tender. We are slicing this in 1/4 thick pieces, you can try to cut this by hand or with something like the precise slice knife from Victorinox but if you have a slicer I would recommend you go with that.

Picking a Seasoning

Now, the brisket really has a strong beef flavor, obviously, so we want to choose something that will go with that without covering it up. We are going to be using the Colorado Spicy jerky seasoning that comes with a 1 oz bag of sure cure. The bag and the sure cure is enough for 25 lb of jerky but we are just going to be doing about 10 lb so we need .36 of a lb of the seasoning and 0.4 oz of the cure. We are going to mix these together and then drag our slices through the meat making sure to coat both sides evenly.

Once everything has been fully coated we are going to put them in a plastic bag and add just enough water so everything is submerged. This will further make sure that all areas of the meat are seasoned and cured. With some seasonings that have very large particle size I might not add water as I don’t want those large flakes of seasoning to be washed off but with something like colorado spicy which is all very small pieces of seasoning we’ll go ahead and add the water.

Now, we will set it in the fridge and let it sit overnight in the marinade to all the cure time to work. If we wanted, we could vacuum tumble this for 30-45 minutes and go ahead and smoke it today, so if you have a tumbler at home, like the marinade express pro, feel free to do that.

Rack Tip & Smoke Schedule

You can cook this in your oven, smoker or even use your dehydrator to do this, just make sure that if you are doing this in your dehydrator that it gets above 160° first. Lay your jerky out flat on racks making sure to leave a way for air to flow through the racks, the easiest way to do this is to leave a 3" x 3" open space in the center of each rack. To get your probe thermometer to read correctly go ahead and fold over one piece of jerky and insert the probe in between the folds.

We are doing it in our smoker so we are starting it out at 120° with the vents wide open at both the top and the bottom. This is going to dry the surface of the jerky evenly and allow smoke to adhere and cook evenly and we will run this drying phase for an hour. Now, we are going to move the temperature up to 145 for 2 hours and close the dampers two thirds of the way. Finally we will raise the temp to 175 and cook until the internal temp reaches 160°.

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