We moved again. The first truck delivered the furniture and big appliances exactly a week ago and here I am seven days later telling myself that there’s nothing about our old neighborhood that I miss. But that’s not a hundred per cent true.
I miss one household where husband and wife started their smoked meat business. We were regular customers and we found the beef brisket BBQ particularly good. On days when they did the cooking, the combined smell of meat, wood and smoke came in through our rarely open windows, and… It was so tantalizing that there were times when my husband and I talked about getting our own smoker — not for business but to learn the craft just for our enjoyment.
We never got a smoker though. It would just have been another expensive toy — thrilling until it wasn’t. I had this mental image of a smoker so often in use as we experimented with various meats, cuts and seasonings. Then, as the reality of cleaning the smoker and maintaining it in good condition sank in, smoking meat would become less and less frequent. And the smoker would just end up with the pile of forgotten appliances that lived in the gazebo. Perhaps, on top of the satellite dish that hadn’t seen action in over 15 years.
So, no smoker. But that was okay. Even before the husband-and-wife meat-smoking team moved to our neighborhood, I already had a cheat sheet for cooking beef brisket BBQ without a smoker. I tenderize the meat in the slow cooker then give it the texture of charred meat in the oven. The smoky flavor comes out of a bottle.
I call it, quite simply, slow cooker beef brisket BBQ. We pair the sliced tender meat with melt-in-the-mouth fat with rice, bread or mashed potatoes.
But I have also discovered that although there are few things more pleasurable than chewing fatty meat, combining beef brisket BBQ with other ingredients results in dishes that are just as satisfying.
In the photos:
