Food - Drink
Why You Should Never Trim Warm Brisket
By JOE DILLARD
Beef brisket refers to a cow's breast or lower chest meat, and this cut has a high fat content that makes it the perfect candidate for slow-cooking and smoking or barbecuing. However, if you don't treat that fat correctly, your brisket can turn out lackluster without a good "bark," a term for the crispy outer crust made of fat and seasoning.
Trimming some of the fat off a brisket is a necessary step, but you should leave ¼ of an inch of fat to keep the meat moist and protect it from the smoker's heat. Just make sure you keep an eye on the temperature when you trim the fat; warm fat is sticky and hard to handle, so trimming your brisket while it's cold is your best bet.
To make trimming easier and cleaner, keep your brisket in the fridge until you’re ready to cut the fat off, or you can even freeze the meat 20 minutes before trimming. Also, while you can smoke your brisket before trimming it, this method is likely to cause a mess as well as flare-ups on the grill; when it's time to trim, the colder, the better.