Dateline: September 5, 2020 DERBY DAY Brisket and Juleps

Bill owns a race horse that is running in the Derby.  Authentic is its name and it is trained by Bob Baffert.  Now, before your head blows completely off your shoulders, he owns just a small piece of this said horse, in fact, 100,000th of it.  If you are horse curious, then visit www.myracehorse.com and see how you too can be a stake holder.

Nothing screams out on this Labor Day Weekend like a brisket.  I got one from D'Artagnan along with some boar, which will become sausages.  I got up at 3 am and prepped the meat.  Salt and pepper only a la Franklin BBQ in Austin.  My brain does not work very well at that hour, and I prepped the meat before lighting the smoker.  

I start the smoker, and it goes through its start up cycle and says it's at 69°F.  Ok, that seemed reasonable.  Again, let me remind you, it's 3:30 in the morning.  I go back into the house, clean up, finish packing up the brisket trimmings for sausages in the future and grab the meat and head back out to the deck.  WTF the smoker is still at 69°.  

The smoker wouldn't light.  It's 3:40 in the am, and pitch dark and I have to troubleshoot the f-ing smoker.  I know that you are on the edge of your seats trying to figure out was I successful at this.  The answer is yes.  I had to pull out the grates, the grease trays, the baffle and get down to the fire pot.  After rooting around in there for a while, I reset the smoker to go back to its start up cycle, and suddenly there was a ton of smoke pouring out.  Now I had to put it back together with smoke billowing out into my eyes!  I got it done, smelling of smoke I went back to bed around 4:15.

I got up again at 7:30 and took this picture:

The internal temp was about 149° with target temp in the mid 190's.  I will probably have to wrap this in butcher's paper to help it get through the stall.  I am spraying it down with white wine mixed with water.  Brisket temp at this moment 10:20 am is in the mid 150's.  

Mint has been cut, washed, and bagged for Juleps later on.

So, it was a very exciting day yesterday!  The brisket came out lovely, albeit, a bit too salty on the top, which can be scraped off, but it was tender and luscious.  It came off the smoker around 4 PM, which made the cook about 12 hours.  I wrapped it, and put it into a cooler until 7:30, when a friend came over for a socially distant dinner on the deck.

The more exciting news was that Bill's horse in the Derby won the race!!!!!  That means he is going to be in the stud fee pool and will make back his investment and a little bit more, God willing, over the course of the horse's, ahem, ability to perform.

Dinner also included a farro and vegetable salad and a crunchy salad.  I definitely decided that I am not a fan of diet juleps.  The after taste of the diet soda is just terrible.  I made a mint simple syrup, and then forgot to put it into my julep.  Sort of describes how yesterday afternoon into the evening went.