Smoked Brisket

I have a smoker.  Well technically it is a Weber grill with a smokenator in it.

I also joined a beef CSA, so I decided to try a brisket, and see how it compares against the oven.  (hint: smoker wins)

Step 1:
I started with a 2.5lb grass fed beefalo brisket (Not sure what part of the brisket it came from, but it was super lean 'cause that's how grass fed beefalo rolls.  rolls?  roams?

I let it thaw, and coated it super liberally with a mix of 2pts salt, 1pt black pepper, 0.5pt ancho chilli and 0.5pt dry mustard.  I rubbed this all over, and let it sit overnight.  As it turns out, this was too much salt for a small piece of meat with a high surface to volume ratio.

Here it is in all its glory

Then I fired up my weber to 225-250F (I am still learning to keep it steady so there was a lot of variance through the day), added some hickory wood, and my brisket.  It turns out that like salt, hickory wood is best used in moderation, and instead of thin blue smoke (which I am told is best) I had great billows of grey-white smoke.  The amount of smoke actually inhibited the fire for a bit, and kept the temp too low.  Because of this I felt I could taste an acridity in the bark, but my other taste tester could not.

At 150F internal meat temp I opened the grill up and wrapped the brisket in foil .  Then I let it all be until 203F, at which point I transferred it to my toaster oven set on warm (140F) to "rest"for an hour.

OK, here's the final product:

From 2.5lb start, I was left with a little over 1.5lbs cooked meat.

Flavor wise I was disapointed by the saltiness and smokiness, but these are easily fixed in future runs (for now I just picked some of the bark off my slices before eating).

Texture wise this was some of the best brisket I have had.  it was very very juicy compared to the oven method.  I was especially surprised because Beefalo is a low-fat meat.

It went well with corned bread and braised cabbage.  (I used this recipe for cabbage and I think I ate half of it: http://www.chow.com/recipes/10712-braised-red-cabbage-with-bacon)

Fun fact to end the post:
I reek of hickory smoke.