The Brisket Debacle

I cooked my first brisket on Friday - well, I started it Friday, I guess it was technically Saturday when I finished.

Needing dinner for 8-10 people on Saturday night, it seemed like an opportune time to cook my first brisket on the pellet grill. The recipe I used call for seasoning the big cut of beef overnight in the fridge, smoking it for 4-5 hours and then wrapping it in aluminum foil and cooking for another 4-5. 

Now it was pretty chilly at 7:30 Friday morning when I threw the brisket on the grill, and being from Costco it was a healthy size (17 lbs), so I figured we would be looking at the long side of that timeline for sure. 

But when it didn't reach the foil-wrapping temperature of 160 degrees until 4:30, a whopping nine hours in, I knew I was stepping into the twilight zone.

After swadding the brisket in heavy duty foil, I had to dash back to Costco to buy more wood pellets, for fear of running out if it took another nine hours to finish cooking - but it turns out that was not going to be the biggest issue of the night. 

I watched the temperature slowly creep up toward the goal of 203° as Audrey and I watched an episode of Shogun, after which she went to bed. Sometime later I looked up from my loong-running game of REd Dead Redmption 2 to peer at my wireless thermometer and noticed two disturbing things: 1) the brisket was only at 186°, but even more disturbingly, 2) it had been 188° when I had checked previously...

I dashed outside and sure enough, an error code flashed on the grill's panel. Due to either underheating or overheating, it had shut off, and the lid was cool to the touch. I rushed inside for a cookie sheet and threw my foil-wrapped, beefy treasure into the oven, then covered the grill to protect it from the snow shower that was starting.

At 10:30 I turned the oven up to  315 from 275 and at 11:30, the thermometer finally beeped to let me know the target temperature had at last been reached.

But now it had to rest for an hour before slicing and storing it...

So at half past midnight, I started slicing the brisket into manageable chunks and stashing it in a couple of our largest Tupperware containers. Most of the flavour in a brisket comes from the thick line of fat in the middle of it, and the grease from that meant that some serious kitchen cleaning was needed before I eventually crawled into bed at close to two a.m.

The grease got me to thinking though; the Traeger is highly resistant to flare-ups since it uses indirect heat and has a very efficient grease management system...but with so large a cut, is it possible a small grease fire had shut the grill down on me?

Thankfully, depsite being largely a salvage job, the brisket itself was very tasty and still fairly tender (I mean, why not, it took 16 hours to cook!) and everyone enjoyed the sandwiches we had for supper Saturday night.

But today I went to clean out the grill, and sure enough, in addition to a gooey Grease Management System and lipid stalagmites that had blossomed on my foil-wrapped drip tray, there was a deposit of fat in the very bottom of the grill next to where the auger delivers fuel to the firebox.

That is more than enough fat to fuel a fire of sufficient size to trigger a shutdown (turning off the fan to deprive the fire of oxygen), but not big enough to cause any damage as far as I can tell.

It took a screwdriver, a shop vac, a bunch of concentrated Dawn, an eighth of a roll of shop towels and about an hour to get everything cleaned up and reset, but with the mystery resolved, the Traeger is ready to be put back into action.

And the amazing thing is, I can't wait for my next opportunity to test myself against the brisket again!