How was your Christmas? In our house it is tradition (and obligation, lol) to spend the first day of Christmas with my in-laws and the second day with my family. It gets harder every year to come up with something original to eat and, in our case, the group is also getting bigger. Especially in my family, my sons now both have a girlfriend (which is very nice by the way), my oldest brother has 3 children, one of whom has a girlfriend, the oldest already has two children so that also makes 10 people. And then my youngest brother, he has two daughters, so that quickly makes us 20 people. You can't do that at home anymore.
This year I offered to cook for my in-laws, the second day we went out for dinner (due to the size of the group).
I always like barbequing so I thought I'd prepare a nice piece of meat on the BBQ. I chose a brisket, I had never made one before. I ordered the meat from our local butcher, the butcher is known far and wide for his quality meat, and that was also noticeable. People were queuing... so was I :) .. In addition to the brisket I also got diamond tenderloin for steak tartare. I always wanted to make that myself sometime.
In the preparations I processed the brisket a day in advance and put it in the rub with herbs. What I was a bit disappointed with was the amount of fat. Now I know that a brisket contains fat, but these were large thick pieces through the meat. So I trimmed the meat reasonably.
In principle you can use the fat for many other applications, but I didn't have any other purpose for it :)
For the Steak tartare I found a nice recipe consisting of:
- Gherkin
- Capers
- Shallot onions
- Dijon mustard
- Tabasco
- Worcestershire sauce
- Salt and pepper
I don't really like big pieces so I cut it all very finely.
For the steak tartare I had diamond fillet, a super tender piece of meat. In various recipes I came across putting the meat through the mincer, but I thought that was a waste. You still need to have some structure left.
For those who didn't like steak tartare I made a salad of smoked chicken. It had avocado, mango, onions, chicken (of course) and herbs.
A brisket is the piece of meat from the cow's breast. In the United States it is very popular among BBQ specialists :) In the Netherlands it is popular but less available because Dutch butchers often use the meat for other purposes.
It is a nice piece of meat for Low and Slow, so the BBQ was lit early. (10 in the morning).
Due to the busyness and amount of work I hardly took any pictures :) But of course I did take pictures of the end result of the brisket. After six and a half hours on the BBQ with a core temperature of 85 degrees I wrapped the brisket in butcher paper, then another 1.5 hours until a core temperature of 95 degrees. Then removed from the BBQ and let it rest for another hour with this as the result:
The meat had a nice bark and was deliciously tender and juicy. According to my youngest son it was one of the tastiest meats he had ever eaten....You can't get a better compliment, right?
So the Christmas dinner was a success :)
So, what did you eat?
Have a great weekend,
Peter
Oddly enough, we also had brisket. It was my first time as well. It didn't turn out as nicely as I had hoped, but I learned some things and I plan on applying them in the future. I'm actually going to cross post this in my new grilling and smoking community!
Haha that's cool, the same meat. I will join your community, cool. I was a bit affraid doing a brisket seeing the video's of the pro's preparing them. The most problems I had was getting a straight and stable temperature. I do have a digital thermometer on bluetooth (handy) but I still had to play with the sliders on the barbecue quite a lot. But it is a great hobby :)
I had to play with my vents as well. It took a bit for it to get at a stable temp and I think I was going a little too hot, but again with it being so cold out, it was almost a fools errand.