Why hello there, and welcome back to Kitchen Catastrophes, where, for once in our life, we’re talking about something almost criminally simple. So of course it was also uncomfortable, inconvenient, and disappointing. And yet, despite that litany of woes, the results were perfectly acceptable. You can skip the story and get to the gory…details (Damn Jon, learn to stop on the rhyme) with this link. Everyone else, let’s get UNCOMFORTABLE.  

I’m Burning, I’m Burning, I’m Burning for You

Oh, great, we’re tired enough that Title Jon has dropped out of Pun mode into Song Lyrics Sleepy. That’s fine. We’re going to crash pretty soon, and much earlier than usual, so he doesn’t have to hold out for long. Today is a bit of a “cure or kill” situation, brought about by dramatic need. But we’ll get into that later. FIRST, the super back-story! You saw the title, we’re making Burnt Ends. What are they? Where do the come from? Why are they here now? These answers and more I will stumble through.

Normally I need arcane tinctures of strange alcohol to get this wobbly.

Burnt Ends are really easy to explain: they’re chunks of beef brisket. Specifically, they’re typically chunks of the Point portion of a beef brisket, which…let me see if Past Jon can bail me out here…dammit, he cannot. Well, he can a little. So we’ve discussed what the brisket is, and how to cook it, and why that way works, in KC 55, so if you need that update, follow that link. For everyone else, the addition:

The thing about the brisket is that, as I said, it’s like a cow’s pecs. And, like human pecs, which have 5 distinct muscles in them, the cow’s pecs have areas of different structures. The big thing is that the whole brisket consists of two parts, the “point” and the “flat”, connected by thick vein of fat.

Weirdly, there aren’t many great open-source pics of whole briskets. Though I suppose the fact that I personally refused to open a whole brisket to take my own pic speaks to the distaste for it.

And that’s important because it turns out that the point has a lot more connective tissue than the flat, which means it needs more time of low and slow cooking to be edible. It also has more prominent fat veins, and it was generally see as the harder cut to work with. But the thing is, that if you GIVE it those extra hours, it can become an amazing product. This is where burnt ends come in.

The story goes that Kansas City pitmasters, being as they were in the heart of beef country, actually had a bit of an issue: the heart isn’t where shit gets done. The beef was being raised in Texas and Oklahoma, and slaughtered in Chicago. And a fun fact about that is, if you take the most northeast point of Texas, where it forms the Oklahoma panhandle, and draw a straight line to Chicago, you’ll draw a line straight through Kansas City. So they had plenty of access to great beef, but they weren’t the producers of it, or the harvesters. So they had to be frugal, since they were paying full price for their meat. And thus, they started a tradition.

As you slice beef brisket, you tend to get little nubs and chunks that get trimmed off for whatever reason, like making the slice look more even, to shear off a bit of bark that got too thick,  or the customer only wants to pay for so much meat, etc. So at the end of a day of prepping and selling brisket, you’d have a bunch of spare odds and ends. And the story goes that the pitmasters would take these odds and ends, toss them in sauce, and re-cook them to shellac them with sweet and smoky glaze. The sugars would blacken in the heat (and from absorbing the smoke), and you’d get darkened, sweet and spicy, smoky chunks of beef. The “Burnt Ends” of the meat.

And they realized they could combine this with the point cut above: if they need the smoker still up and running to finish these burnt ends, they can keep the point in the fire for the extra couple hours, and dice it up for the burnt end bash too!

Looking at it, Burnt Ends are pretty clearly like, the Pulled Pork of beef brisket.

Thus, Kansas City Barbecue is known predominantly for THIS specific dish. Which answers what it is and where it comes from, so…why are we making it? The answer is: because fuck Oysters. 

Sudden Shocking Profanity Against Simply San-Franity

Oh god, he tried to show he could still do puns, and just showed how bad he’s gotten. We REALLY need to sleep soon. (Don’t worry, it’s fine, as I will SOON explain.) What was I saying?

Oh, yeah, Football!

He says, having at no juncture mentioned football before this moment.

I WAS ABOUT TO, Caption Jon! As you’re probably aware, this Sunday is a relatively important American Football game whose name is still copywritten and therefore we must all be very careful about how and when we use it. And the teams playing come from San Francisco, and, oh, look, Kansas City.

This was a real painful year for football for me. Not because I care much about any given team (though the Seahawks getting as close as they did before dropping out was somewhat sad), but because, well, in all honesty, I was MUCH more on-board with the other two teams that almost made it: Green Bay is in the HEART of Pasty Country, or I could have fried Cheese curds, or made BOOYAH STEW, a real food they eat in the region! And apparently they also like Profiteroles and Paczki, meaning they would have tied into the other posts of the month to a frankly frightening degree. Tennessee was…well, it probably would have been Hot Chicken and Sweet Potato Fries, but I was LOOKING INTO IT. I found a recipe for Hot Chicken Potstickers! That sounds cool!

Instead, I ended up with San Francisco and Kansas City. You know what Kansas City is known for? Barbecue. Which, sure, I love barbecue, but it takes for-EVER to cook. I found a Burnt Ends recipe that was Twenty THREE hours long. And San Francisco…they’re famous for two things: American Chinese food, and seafood. I even MADE the most famous seafood dish of the region for KC 100: Ciopinno. So unless I wanted Hangtown Fry (a kind of oyster and bacon omelette), I was stuck in Kansas City. So I sighed, went to Costco, and bought something like 13 pounds of brisket. Of which I cooked 2. THIS IS THE STORY OF THAT JOURNEY. 

A Slow Boi-l

This is where we get to the point I’ve been bitching about the most through this post: I’m so tired. And that’s a simple matter of shitty math: If I want to eat this meal with my family before they go to sleep around 9 PM, and the recipe I have says it can take up to 13 hours, then, logically, I need to start this recipe at 8 AM, 7 AM if you want to have any kind of wiggle room. Which is why I found myself standing on a wet deck before the sun had really risen, my pajama pants collecting rainwater, getting a smoker ready.

The legal sunrise was literally like, 15 minutes after I put in the brisket.

And while that would be a moderately uncomfortable morning activity for say, my mother, who gets up at 4 AM, or Nathan, who wakes up around 6, for someone with an internal clock set to sleep from 2 AM to 10 AM, it was much, MUCH more uncomfortable. Especially since I’ve been having insomnia issues for the last week or so, and been sleeping instead from 3 or 4 AM to fucking noon. So I got up at 6:45 after making myself go to sleep at 3:30. So I’m currently at about 3 hours sleep in a 35 hour window. (If I push through to midnight, it’ll be 36!)

Which will hopefully help me go to sleep early, and wake up at my normal time. And honestly, the timeline is probably half of the difficulty of the recipe. Like, the prep of the meat is NOTHING: trim the fat cap if you think it’s too large (I didn’t, so I didn’t, though I think in retrospect maybe cutting like, HALF of it off would have had a better result.) and then hit it with a stupidly simple rub. If you listen to Aaron Franklin, a premiere Texas Pitmaster, all a brisket needs is fresh ground black pepper and salt. I personally added ever so little of an extra touch: My rub consisted of a tablespoon of black pepper (like, 80 damn cranks of the grinder), a tablespoon of salt, and like, a half teaspoon of garlic salt.

You can’t see the garlic salt here, because I realized that pictures of seasoned meat are more interesting than pictures of spice mix bowls.

Rub that on the meat, get a probe thermometer in it, and toss it in the smoker (or a low, indirect heat barbecue with smoking tray prepped, if you can.) for quite a few hours. And this is one of those things where Barbecue has a weird scale. See, a standard recipe of like, 5-7 pounds of brisket might take 12 hours to cook. A 13 pound brisket might take…14-15. My TWO pound brisket ended up taking NINE, and I think I rushed it.

Because of this, I had consoled myself that, once the meat was on the grill, I could go back to sleep for a couple hours, knowing that no emergency would go undetected, and that there was little point to be invested in the first couple hours. This is because of “the stall”: basically, for the first couple hours you’re heating brisket, it’s going to look like it’s heating up WAY too fast: you might be at 120 degrees within 2 hours, having climbed 80 degrees, with only 80 more to go. But then, around 150-170, the rate of acceleration is going to drop off immensely. This is because it’s when the collagen starts gelatinizing, and that eats a lot of heat for some reason. (I straight up do not know the scientific reason. I assume it’s to do with the energy needed to dissolve certain bonds.)  As such, my first alarm was set for 170, and despite hitting 120 before 10, we were over noon when it went off. At which point, you’re supposed to wrap the brisket. Peach Butcher paper is the high-end “I know what I’m doing” move, but…come on, this is Kitchen Catastrophes we’re talking about. I decided to make this meal Friday night. I didn’t have time to find butcher paper. So I used Tinfoil (which is also acceptable) and then I entered the irritating part of the process.

I think it’s on me: because I used such a small piece of meat, I think the smoker just overcame the thermal sink of the collagen quicker than it should. Because we KEPT hitting numbers, and the meat was NOT as soft as it should have been. What I ended up doing was dropping the heat of the smoker to 180, and just letting it go for a couple hours: it was never going to get hot enough to finish the job, but it was the perfect range to soften the tissues.

Eventually, I decided enough was enough, and took out the brisket to cut it.

Behold my tragic results.

And don’t get me wrong, that is a handsome looking brisket. Good smoke ring, great bark…but as someone who KNOWS good barbecue, I had WAY too much connective tissue. You could see it, between the threads of muscle in the meat, a pale lining that I KNEW should have been dissolved into nothing. But I resolved myself to wrap up the meal at a reasonable time, and went to the next step, which is cubing the brisket, moving it to a foil tray, and tossing it in a mixture of brown sugar, the drippings in the foil/paper, and barbecue sauce. A process for which I certainly did NOT forget the brown sugar, shut your face.

A saucy little dish .

Toss the meat cubes in hot fat, sauce, and sugar (or no sugar. Maybe you’re deciding to be a little healthy) and pop the tray into the smoker with the heat turned up to 275 to cook for 45 minutes, getting a darker crust on the cubes, “burning” them.

We actually did this process twice, for a total of like, an hour, because we took them out, and then nate had to go grocery shopping so we had to reheat the ends. But they came out looking great.

Now THIS is a better color.

You can eat them just straight, or you can do stuff like Burnt Ends Nachos, or do what we did, and make Burnt Ends sandwiches, with a little coleslaw on top.

And despite my distaste for the excessive connective tissue, in the sauce-confit stage, a lot of it ended up getting pretty close to the texture I had been aiming for. I do think another hour or two would have made it better, but everyone thought it was a solid result. Nate had second, my mother said it was good, I had seconds, and thought that honestly, for a first attempt at smoking brisket, it wasn’t a catastrophe at all. Other than the sleep schedule thing. Speaking of which, It’s now 11:40, so if I wrap up right now and let tomorrow Jon handle the recipe, pictures, and other stuff, maybe I can fall asleep at midnight, and do something about this sleeping issue. I’ll see you tomorrow.

(Editor’s Note: In a cruel twist of fate, Jon’s body decided he had resisted tired long enough that, 10 minutes after he finished the post, it hit a second wind, and refused to go to sleep. He had to take Melatonin to get to bed at a normal time, and ended up oversleeping again. On the plus side, he partially woke up when he was supposed to, so he thinks he may have succeeded in re-calibrating. We will see. )

As ever, we couldn’t do what we do without the support of our Patrons on Patreon, or our social media fans on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

THURSDAY: WE MIGHT TALK ABOUT MISSOURI, OR SMOKERS. I DON’T KNOW.

MONDAY: I LITERALLY FORGOT THE NAME OF THE DISH I MADE WHILE TRYING TO SAVE THIS FILE. ASK THURSDAY JON.  

Recipe

Burnt Ends

Makes 5 servings

Ingredients

1 trimmed beef brisket “point” cut (aka Deckle cut), 2-3 pounds

1 tablespoon fresh ground black pepper

1 tablespoon kosher salt

1 teaspoon garlic salt

½ cup Kansas City Style Barbecue Sauce (this is a “normal” barbecue sauce for many Americans: a sauce containing molasses, tomato paste, spices, and vinegar. Check our Five Finger-licking Barbecues post for info)

¼ cup brown sugar (optional)

Vinegar, Beef Broth, or other flavoring agent, if desired

Tool: Probe thermometer, butcher paper or aluminum foil 

Preparation

1. Preheat a smoker or prepared barbecue to 225 degrees. Mix together the salt, pepper, and garlic salt, and rub over the exterior of the beef brisket. Place in the heated smoking unit. Smoke until internal temperature reaches 170 degrees. If desired, you can spray the brisket hourly with vinegar, beef broth, or other flavoring agent.

2. Then, remove brisket from smoking unit, and wrap in butcher paper or aluminum foil, then return to the smoking unit until the brisket reaches 190 degrees. Hopefully, it will be very tender at this time. If not, you can lower the smoking unit heat and hold the brisket at that temp until sufficiently rendered, or push ahead.

3. Once ready, take the brisket from the smoking unit, and slice into ¾” to 1” thick strips, and then slice those strips into cubes. Place the cubes in a foil tray, and toss with drippings from wrapping material, barbecue sauce, and brown sugar if using. Raise the heat on the smoking unit to 275 degrees, place the foil tray back in the unit, and cook an additional 45 minutes to 1 hour, until sufficiently darkened.

4. Serve warm.