I don’t know about you, but cooking a beef brisket sounds intimidating to me, best left to the experts I say and certainly not for the average home cook like me.
But is that really the case?
I have news for you, you don’t have to be an expert to cook up this cut of meat — You Can Do This!
I love this cut of beef and so does my family…especially the burnt ends. I can feed them for days from this flavorful recipe.
This beef brisket recipe for the oven is going to come as close as you can get to a Texas-style smoked brisket without actually using a smoker. You’ll feel like a pro especially after babying this brisket. :-)
The brisket is lathered in a dry rub and baked in the oven until tender + you don’t even have to leave your kitchen to run out and check the smoker.
Beef brisket is known for its meaty flavor and amazing texture when cooked correctly (you don’t want it to dry out).
The brisket comes from the lower chest area of the butchered steer. It’s a very tough cut of meat because it comes from the part where there is a lot of muscle and tendons.
A good brisket will have fat marbled throughout the meat, which helps keep the beef tender and juicy and ohhh is it sooo good!
There are two basic parts of the whole beef brisket. The bottom part of the brisket is called a “flat” and it doesn’t usually contain much fat at all. The top part of the brisket is called a “point” and it is mostly fat with very little meat on it.
If you have a whole brisket and don’t want to use it all for this recipe, you can cut it in half and use the other half for a corned beef recipe like I did HERE.
This recipe is amazing and provides lots of leftovers.
Although it sounds like a lot of time, it actually just takes a little bit of prep work, albeit approximately 5 minutes for the dry rub, and putting the brisket in the fridge until the next day or a few hours on the day of, depending on your needs.
Note:If you want to be really prepared, start the brisket a day before cooking it and add some crisscrosses in it with a knife to give soak up the flavors from the dry rub overnight.
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Take your whole brisket or brisket flat out of the package, lay it on a cutting board, and pat it dry with a paper towel (this prevents steaming).
Spread a generous amount of brown sugar and then dry rub on top (see below for dry rub recipe) — it takes approximately 1 cup of brown sugar and 1/3 to 1/2 cup of dry rub to cover the brisket, more so if it’s over 5 lbs. Next, flip the brisket over and spread a generous amount of brown sugar and dry rub over that.
Wrap rubbed brisket in a couple of layers of foil, covering it tight, and place it in a pan or dish so it doesn’t leak all over the refrigerator.
Refrigerate overnight for up to 24 hours. Take the brisket out of the refrigeratoran hour before cooking it, unwrap it, and wait until the brisket is room temperature.
If you’re just stumbling on this recipe today and didn’t know you needed to refrigerate overnight, which adds a whole other level, but if you don’t have time for that, skip it and just plan for a few hours instead when you make it. :-)
Dry Rub Recipe:
5 tablespoons paprika
3tablespoons salt
2tablespoonsgarlic powder
2tablespoonsonion powder
1tablespoonblack pepper
1tablespoondried parsley
2teaspoonscayenne pepper
2teaspoonsground cumin
1teaspoongroundcoriander
1/4teaspoonchili powder
1teaspoondried oregano
1 cupbrown sugar
1Strandquist Family Farm brisket (4-8 lbs.)
Preheat oven to 300° and use a rack inside the large roasting pan. Use a couple of sheets of foil to cover the brisket loosely and put the brisket, fat cap up, which means the fattier side up, on the rack. (You can layer the bottom of the roasting pan with aluminum foil to catch drippings that will leak through if you’d like.)
Place in the oven and bake for about an hour and 15 minutes per pound, until the brisket reaches 170-180° (Initially, I used one of our 4 1/2 lb. flat briskets that took about 4 hrs., 15 min).
Update: after cooking one of our 7 lb. whole briskets, it will take over 5 hrs. to get to 180 degrees). Use a meat thermometer to measure the thickest part of the brisket.
Next, open the foil and bake the brisket for another 30 to 45 minutes until it’s fork tender and juicy… approximately 190-195 degrees (you don’t want it to dry).
Take the brisket out onto the cutting board, tent it with a sheet of foil, and let itrest for 30 minutes and it will come to an almost perfect 200 degrees.
Make sure to cut the brisketagainst the grain!
