STORY BY PAM BURKE
Parker’s BBQ Pit Brisket Rub and Recipe With only two ingredients, the spice rub is as simple as it gets — but added to tender beef brisket, which gains much flavor from the cut’s natural marbling, then paired with a light smokey flavor and attention to cooking details, Steve Parker’s recipe gives you a brisket that takes center stage. “My primary objective with keeping the rub as simple as possible is to let the quality of the beef speak for itself,” said Parker, owner of Parker’s BBQ Pit with his wife, Jennifer. Brisket is a hands-on meat, Parker said. You need to maintain water in a pan in the smoker or grill to help keep the meat from drying out. You also have to spritz the meat at regular intervals to add moisture and flavoring to the meat. And the process requires attention to temperatures of both the meat and the cooker during a 10- to 14-hour cook time. But you also have to be brave enough to keep the lid shut until it’s time to check the temps and spritz the meat — because if you’re lookin’, it isn’t cooking, he added. “It’s definitely a labor of love,” Parker said. “Y’know brisket is the king of all smoked meats you got to be able to put the time in to put out a good product.” Parker, who is the pit master for the family-run food truck business, said he makes his brisket in a central Texas style, which is cooked without a barbecue sauce and has a smoke flavor created with post oak, a tree native to the central Texas. “It’s a little more subtle,” he said. Not only is the smoke from post oak subtle, but he also only adds enough wood to create the smoke, not make
the wood part of the heat source. Post oak isn’t normally carried in stores in Montana, he said, so you’ll have to special order some. He said he’s found some private sources online, but he’s also purchased off of Amazon. Local stores do have hickory, he added, and that can be substituted in a pinch. It will change the flavor, he said, but the key is to put very little of the hickory on your coals to at least keep with the subtle flavoring. “Smoke is flavor, not a cooking element,” he added. Like a spice, the smoking is meant to enhance the flavor of the meat, not overwhelm it. To help the rub and the smoke penetrate the meat and create that quarter- to half-inch of outer darker or redder layer in the smoked meat called “bark,” Parker said, you have to remove the hard tallow layer of fat from the outside of the brisket. This is easiest done while the meat is still cold from the refrigerator, or even still partly frozen. But don’t remove all the fat, he said. Leave about a quarter-inch layer of the softer fat layer that’s under the tallow and leave any fat that is marbled in the meat, or connecting the flat and point portions of the brisket. This “fatcap” and marbled fat will render down and bring flavor and moisture to the meat. At the points in the smoking process when you spritz moisture on the
10 | LIVING Havre and the Hi-Line MAGAZINE | October 2020
brisket and check temperatures, Parker recommended checking internal temperature in a few areas of the brisket. And if you need to turn the meat to help even out temperatures, don’t flip it — you want to keep that fatcap on top. Parker uses different styles of smokers for various cooking methods and different meats, but he also said he uses a regular “dad-style” propane grill, too. He demonstrated how he uses a simple charcoal kettle grill as a smoker by arranging the briquettes or charcoal and the post oak in a semi-circle against the edge of one half. The pan of water is placed within the semicircle of coals. and the meat is laid, fat side up, in the center of the other half of the grill. Smoking a brisket with a small grill this way is more difficult, but smoking any meats is a challenge that might not turn out perfect the first time, he said, but you’ll learn from the experience. In fact, he warned that even the weather — wind, humidity, temperature — can influence the smoking process, from one time to the next. Becoming a pit master relies on and develops patience, adaptability and creativity, as well as experience, he said, but it’s worth working to perfect the technique.
