Let's talk brisket, not blown calls

I thought I had the heart to smoke a brisket for 20 hours. I did not. I also thought I liked cracked pepper. Wrong again.

I set my Weber up for the snake method, which allowed me to light one end of the coals to slowly smoke an eight pound brisket I had purchased the other day. That worked.

Being that the brisket is the chest muscle, brisket can get tough if you’re not careful with the amount of heat you use to cook it, so I was really careful while cooking it.

One thing I was not careful about was the amount of cracked pepper I put on the brisket. Typically when I make a rub with pepper, I use less than what is needed because cracking pepper can be an excruciating process with a simple pepper mill.

This time I used a cheap coffee grinder that I had brought for grinding spices, so when I needed pepper I measured in peppercorns and not in ground pepper. I found that to be a mistake that I shall not make again.

So, most pit masters like to smoke brisket for over 18 hours; a true low and slow process. In doing so, many of those pit masters keep their smokers anywhere from 225-250 degrees. The finished internal temperature of a brisket is around 195-203. You can eat brisket after it reaches the medium rare temperature of beef but something crazy happens internally with the fat within the meat when you tough it out.

When you cook at such low temperatures, something called evaporative cooling happens, that causes the internal temperature of the meat to stall. So, if you use a thermometer, you will find that brisket stalls for hours at a time, elongating the cooking process.

I started out so patient, but the meat stayed at 167 for three hours and dinner time was only two hours away. Fearing that the brisket would get done at five in the morning, I did a tried and true method of beating out the stall. I wrapped the meat in foil and cranked the heat up to 300 degrees.

Two hours later, the brisket was done. While it was executed well, I had found that I overdid the peppercorns in my rub. Thanks to a fork, I was able to scrape the offensive seasoning off and man did I find it tasty.

I wrote all of that to avoid what I really wanted to talk about, which is fair officiating in basketball games. I don’t care where you are from or which town you love or hate. Kids’ safety should always come first. That is all I will say.