I've been wanting to try that for about year now but every time I'm in the mood to smoke a brisket I completely forget about it. Do you use one of those prepackaged corned beef briskets or do you use your own thing?
From scratch, natch. I'll try and find the brine recipe I used. Think I put it in the brine on Monday and smoked it the next Saturday, so plan on having a bit tub o' meat in your fridge for a week. eta: this is what I did. Made the corned beef (recipe from same site), skipped the steaming step. I used a whole brisket, very well trimmed, some people use only the flat, some only the point. https://amazingribs.com/tested-reci...s/home-made-pastrami-thats-close-katzs-recipe
i believe there is a drive-thru for BBQ. i went in and ordered and then they have an outdoor seating area. give it a try. i was more than pleasantly surprised.
Pit Room and Pinkerton’s is open for dinner and been to both for dinner without them running out of stuff for the most part. That being said, BBQ has always seemed more like a lunch meal than dinner. A BBQ joint not opened for lunch is missing out on prime time hours.
I tried the HEB in Huntsville a while back. Got a sandwich and brisket beans and was pretty happy with it. It was pretty surprising.
No. You're thinking in terms of the "average restaurant". Ever notice that, for the most part, the best-rated bbq restaurants are mom & pop shops with one location that is open from "when Buford wakes up" until "Buford feels like closing" and the worst are chains that are open "normal" hours? lol. My answer(s) : Places like Snow's get up early because their cooking method requires the brisket cook for around 10 hours or so. They're only open 1 day a week and for a few hours that day (somewhat due to tradition/history). The other reason is expenses : Like I said above, brisket isn't something you take an order for and it's cooked in 10 minutes. If you make too much brisket because demand changed or the weather changed, that's a huge loss at the end of the day/dinner for a small-time operation; especially since it can happen several times. If you say you're open for dinner daily and run short on brisket, there goes your rep. And if you serve leftover brisket from the previous day you'll probably get ripped apart by "Smokin' Joe's Meat King blog" and news will spread. Not good for a mom & pop shop. If you make just enough to sell-out at whatever time during the day, you're safe in that regard -- so you'll see "open from 10am until the meat runs out!" on the sign. It's also not easier to just cook more brisket because the grills/pits usually take up a lot of space and there's only so much space you have to cook "x" number of briskets at a time. The other reason again ... is expenses : small mom & pop places have to open up early and possibly pay someone to help. They may have people helping during the lunch hour. Then they have a generally dead period between lunch and dinner where they either tell people to go home and come back to help out during dinner (yeah, right) or pay them for possibly not really doing a lot during the off-hours. If you start cooking brisket for the dinner hours during these dead hours, well, it won't be ready until bedtime at the earliest. lol. Last reason... most of these legendary places have one person that really knows how to cook bbq (the John Muellers, Tootsie Tomanetzes, Aaron Franklins, etc. of the world). They can't be cooking 24 hours a day. There's an art to cooking, cutting, serving, etc. bbq. It's hard to spread that expertise out over 24 hours. Places like Rudy's cook their brisket around 12 hours from what I understand, so they do exactly as you say. But then they're a big chain, their quality is damn near random when I go, and I've had the worst bbq babyback ribs I've ever had in my life from a Rudy's. I usually don't throw away food, even if I don't like it, but I've never had ribs that tasted like liver. I honestly thought I was eating something poisonous and trashed it. The same location has decent brisket and sometimes terrible brisket. I can never tell what I'm going to get when I go there. It's not the difference between an 7 and a 10, it's more like the difference between a 2 and a 7 when I go there. Corollary : if you are trying a BBQ restaurant to see how good they are, go for lunch right when they open because you know when they open, that brisket is fresh (or at least you hope so). If you go during any other time, you may or may not be getting fresh food. Dinner food at a bbq joint may be a lottery - you may get fresh brisket or you may get
No need to be embarrassed. Years ago, at 5:27, I had almost reached Snow's in Lexington after driving from Dallas to get ready to wait in line. I got there at 6am, but my GPS couldn't find the location. I kid you not, I rolled down the window and tried smelling the air. I could smell bbq smoke. I spotted the location by driving around and accidentally running into it. I felt bad about myself that morning, but felt much better after eating the brisket. Not long after, I got to Franklin to be first in line just to make sure I'd get bbq. I think I left DFW around 4am. When I got there, I was the first person there (around 7 or 8am, I think). I didn't want to look like an idiot and have a news crew show up and try to interview me, so I drove around and, when I returned, was still 3rd or 4th in line. This was a few years ago. Nowadays, I hear getting there at 8am may make you 100th in line if you're lucky. LOL.
most legit BBQ joints started as meat markets, not restaurants. thats probably another reason they dont stay open too late.
Normally I would be too. Pinkerton’s changed that for me and is arguably the best BBQ spot in Houston.
My embarrassment was more seated in that I didn't actually realize what pastrami was until perusing this thread. And now I am craving one of those pastrami/sauerkraut sandwiches like a crack fiend. No shame at all in craving good BBQ at any time of day, period. I would eat it breakfast, lunch, and dinner if I wouldn't develop colon cancer in 3 weeks.
Maybe my question came off as kind of rookie-ish but I'm relatively well versed in BBQ. I've been to all of the places you mentioned except Snow's. I'm usually at one of Corkscrew or Tejas a couple times a month and usually getting there around 10:45 am. I know how long a brisket takes and the top places are becoming less of a what you described and more professional. There just aren't many Snow's around (still on my bucket list to get to before she dies). To me, you just adjust. Instead of coming in at 2 am to be ready for 11 am opening...you come in at 6 am to be ready for a 4 pm opening. No reason quality would suffer from that. Just different times of the day. I wasn't saying being open all day. Skip lunch and just do dinner service...but be open early enough for people to be able to come and pick up to take home. It's just an idea I had but not necessarily something I plan to act on any time in the future. FYI...my favorite mom and pop is the Castel General Store. Also only opened on Saturday's and just fantastic food. Rudy's is definitely the only chain that I'd even consider going into. I've never been a fan of their ribs but the brisket is usually decent enough. And if it isn't that day, at least their sauce is good. Not a bad breakfast taco place either.
Yeah, I misunderstood. I thought you were saying to open "normal hours" like 9-9 or something. Yeah, I'd rather guess on the number of briskets I'd need for a day and stay open until I sell out than guess on the number of briskets I need and pray I didn't make too many and traffic dies down by 8-9pm and have to do something with the 6 or 8 extra briskets I have left. At least in the morning people will keep on coming in until you sell out so you potentiall have more hours to sell. You have a hard limit of around 8-9pm if you're open during the night. I also don't know what dinner traffic for bbq would be like or how many people want to stand in line for hours after they just got off work. If you open during the morning hours, if it rains or there's a major wreck or whatever, you just stay open and keep selling since your closing time is determined by how much you have left to sell. You potentially have 10 hours of open time whereas if you're open at night, you have about 4-5 hours. The other reason is there's another 2-3 hours of clean up afterwards, probably. I'd rather get all that done during the day than worry about it at 10-11pm. But that's just a guess. Then you have guys like Aaron Franklin who said his average work day is something like 15-20 hours, so I don't know if it matters. I remember reading an interview with Aaron Franklin once where he said that he would never open another Franklin because he has a hard enough time sourcing brisket as it is. Most of these guys source there brisket from a couple of ranches and they try to stick with those ranches for consistency. So at least in his case, I'm not sure he even has the ability to sell more. A lot of these top places also have tons of online and shipping orders, too. I don't know if they're taxed to the point where they just say they're getting enough business as it is and going to a night shift would throw something of (like shipping/online orders, for example). That, and I'd rather have the rest of my day for myself. If I'm at work morning and night, I don't have any time for myself. lol. I'd rather get in early, sell out by noon and still have the rest of the day to clean up and do something either with family or for myself.
I live over in Mueller and when they opened the HEB in our 'hood, it was the test run for their 'True TX BBQ' concept. They've since converted their restaurant into the True TX BBQ (along w/ other food concepts) and yes, their BBQ is above average. Not Snow's/ Louis Mueller/ Franklin good, but with it being around the corner at a grocery store, it's very good.
Thanks for the tip, @Turbo. Now I will have to try it. I'm intrigued! Not only edible BBQ at an Austin HEB, but actually decent BBQ? My curiosity is aroused. Not as aroused as I get after a Rockets win, of course. You should ask my significant other! Well, perhaps it's better that you don't. ;-)
Makes me pretty salty that they debuted this concept about a year after they totally rebuilt the HEB here. I'm in a damn BBQ wasteland, which is pretty shocking for Central Texas. Someone could make good money opening a spot anywhere around Marble Falls.
I remember the time back in college when friends and I went camping at Enchanted Rock State Park. We stopped on the way to pick up our meats to grill on the campfire. We saw a raw corned beef brisket in a bag and decided to go with that. That was the most awful thing to eat. After reading through the links provided by Buck Turgidson, I now realize this wasn't meant to go from the bag straight to the grill. It was way too disgustingly salty and pretty much unconsumable. Basically, wasted a whole cut of meat. It needed to be soaked in water to get the salt out of it. Also, cooking it straight on a campfire grill is not the way to cook it obviously. For years after, I wondered how people could eat that sh_t and swore off corned beef altogether. But, I also never associated corned beef with pastrami...which I also rarely ate except once or twice at a local deli. Whenever I thought of corned beef, my thoughts instantly turned to corned beef hash...which makes my water mouth just thinking about it. Then, there is also roast beef hash. I'm made my own bastardized versions of roast beef hash with leftover roast and potatoes with whatever spices. It was never up to par of a pro hash but was decent. Then, obviously you have the disgusting canned versions of both which are loaded with sodium and fat but is a quick way to inferior hash. Come to think of it, I've never really had a really good corned or roast beef hash. But, diving into the details of the link provided by Buck, I now understand the errors of my ways when it comes to corned beef. I am definitely going to make me a corned beef hash and do the pastrami on rye thing at some point using recipes on those links. Maybe then I will be able to get that awful taste out of my mouth from so many years ago back when we were camping and ate that awful grilled corned beef? I also remember how sick I was that trip as I had pneumonia the whole time. I could barely breathe. I just remember my lungs seemed to be full of liquid and I was breathing very shallow breaths. And, I was completely clogged up nasally. It was also very cold (below freezing). I've never been that sick before or since. I recovered on my own. I don't think it's a good idea to go camping with pneumonia in below freezing temperatures.
