Barbecued Brisket and Sweet and Smoky Baked Beans

For the meal last night I had bought a very large beef brisket at the butcher said that was the closest they had to tri tip. After cutting off the 1 ½#, I had 3 ½# left. I thought what to do with a brisket. Went on line and found that smoking seemed to be the answer. I bought Jim a long time ago a cookbook called, “How to Grill” by Steven Raichlen. In there was Lean and Mean Texas Barbecued Brisket. I did not follow all the directions. Today I went to Kroger and bought hickory chips, their recommendation. Instead of making the rub in the cookbook, I used Wegmans Barbecue seasoning. It is recommended that you rub “the rub” on about an hour before cooking, which I did. I did make the Vinegar-Beef Mop Sauce and the suggested Sweet and Smoky Baked Beans. It has been a trial as Jim has never used the smoker insert before. We learned a lot.
1. Soak twice as many chips as you think you will need.
2. Keep water nearby to wet the chips occasionally or they just turn to charcoal.
3. It takes all day. Our recipe said 90 minutes per pound to reach 190 degrees, that is 3.5 hours for the size brisket we had left. We are still cooking and it has been 4+ hours, lost count. It is taking longer, as it was hard to keep the heat up with only using indirect heat. I am sure we will get better at this.
Ingredients: for Vinegar-Beer Mop Sauce:
1C distilled white vinegar
1 C beer
1 T garlic salt
1 T brown sugar
1 t hot red pepper flakes
1 t black pepper
Directions:
1. Combine all the ingredients in a nonreactive bowl and stir until the salt and brown sugar are dissolved.
2. Mop the brisket every hour.
Sweet and Smoky Baked Beans. Serves 10-12
Ingredients:
6 oz. bacon, cut crosswise into ¼” dice
1 large onion, finely chopped
3 cans (15.5 oz each) cooked navy or great northern beans
3T brown sugar
1T molasses
3T maple syrup
3 T Barbeque sauce (We are using Wegman’s Memphis Sauce. We will also put this on the meat when it finally finishes. They say to take it to 190 degrees. It is now at 173 and we are removing it as it is 9:00 PM. It is to sit for 10 minutes and then thinly cut and sauced. )
1 ½ T dry mustard
1 ½ T Worcestershire sauce
1 ½ T cider vinegar
1/2t liquid smoke
Coarse salt and black pepper
2-3 jalapeno peppers, thinly sliced (I used jarred as the fresh ones outside of CA are lame)
Directions:
1. Place the bacon and onion in a large skillet over medium heat and cook until the bacon fat renders and onion is golden brown, about 5 minutes. It says to pour out excess grease, but we did not have any as we had very lean bacon.
2. Now I did something different. I put all the remaining ingredients in a aluminum foil pan and added the bacon and onions when they were done. This went on the grill with the beef brisket. The beans as they describe cooking would be very runny. If you like them that way fine, I like mine rather dry. We kept them on the grille until they were well done. I then placed them in a 200 degree until we could wait no longer for the brisket.
We both agreed that we need to try smoking more. It was a rough day of cooking. The brisket was fine at 175 degrees, which is well done for beef. We have a large piece left over. I am going to slice it very thin on my meat slicer and serve it on buns sometime this week. stay tuned.  Jim served an excellant South Australia Shiraz called Groom from the Barossa Valley.  He got it at the Opera House Gourmet in Manassas.  I told Jim it was a shame we had to drop it when we moved as they introduced us to wines we never thought about and it was mostly very good.