At 3:04 on Saturday morning, Ryan's phone started buzzing its way across the nightstand. He was out of bed before I was awake enough to ask why, and by the time I found my glasses he was on the patio in a headlamp, tearing off a sheet of pink butcher paper next to a brisket that had been on the pellet grill since eight o'clock Friday night.
That was the first brisket of 2025. Ryan has smoked one every spring since we bought the pellet grill in March 2021, and he has gotten a lot better since that first April, when most of the brisket ended up in Waylon's bowl. This one stayed with the people.
We bought a whole packer brisket, point and flat in one piece, at the Costco in Cool Springs: 14.2 pounds at $4.29 a pound, $60.92. Ryan trimmed it Friday after his shift, rubbed it while the grill warmed up and had it on by eight.
Ingredients
- 1 whole packer brisket, about 14 pounds
- 1/2 cup kosher salt
- 1/2 cup coarse ground black pepper
- 2 tablespoons garlic powder
- About 4 feet of pink butcher paper
- Oak or hickory pellets, roughly 26 pounds for a 13-hour cook
- Barbecue sauce on the side, for Jack
How Ryan smokes it
- Trim the hard fat on top down to about a quarter inch and round off the thin edges of the flat so they don't burn. Mix the salt, pepper and garlic powder and coat every side.
- Heat the pellet grill to 225°F. Lay the brisket fat side up with the thick point toward the hottest part of your grill (on ours, the back).
- Put one probe in the thickest part of the flat and a second one in the point. Set the alarm on the flat probe for 165°F.
- Somewhere around 150 to 160°F, the temperature will stop climbing for hours. Leave it alone.
- At 165°F, wrap the brisket tightly in butcher paper, seam side down, and put it back on.
- Pull it between 200 and 205°F, when a probe slides into the flat with almost no push.
- Rest it, still wrapped, in a dry cooler packed with old towels for 2 hours. It should stay above 140°F the whole time.
- Slice the flat against the grain about as thick as a pencil. Chop or cube the point.
The stall, the alarm and what we ate
The brisket climbed fast for five hours. At 11:30 p.m. I checked the app on Ryan's phone and it read 157°F, and I went to bed thinking we'd be eating brisket for breakfast. At 1:00 a.m. it read 160. At 2:00 it read 161.
That's the stall. As the meat heats, moisture moves to the surface and evaporates, and evaporation cools the brisket the same way sweat cools you in July. For a few hours the heating and the cooling cancel each other out, and wrapping slows the evaporation down. Ryan looked at the number at one in the morning, said, "It's not stuck, it's sweating," and went back to sleep. I did not.
After the wrap it started moving again. It hit 203°F at 9:00 a.m., thirteen hours after it went on, and rested in the cooler until 11. When Ryan unwrapped it, it still read 158°F inside. A big brisket will hold safely for hours in a cooler as long as nobody keeps opening the lid to look, which in our house is the hard part.
Mom and Dad drove up from Lewisburg for lunch, and Mom brought deviled eggs, because it was a day that ended in y. Jack drowned his slices in sauce and gave the brisket a nine out of ten. He took a point off for "the crumbly end."
He was right, and that was our one real mistake. This time Ryan had trusted the probe in the point, which is fattier and more forgiving, and by the time it read 203 the thin last few inches of the flat had dried out enough to crumble. That's why the method above puts the main probe in the flat now. The point will wait. The flat won't.
After trimming and cooking, the 14.2-pound brisket gave us 7.4 pounds of meat on the cutting board, which works out to about $8.25 for every pound we actually ate, or closer to $11.75 a pound once you count the pellets. We had chopped brisket sandwiches Sunday, and two pounds went into the chest freezer in the garage for a night when I can't face the stove.
