Cook 19 - BBG and Honey Rubbed Corned Beef
12th April, 2015 05:16 PM by BBQ Phil
Today, I'm going to try something different with this Corned Beef that my wife loves to buy. I'd had this thought of instead of rubbing it with olive oil to make the dry rub stick, I decided to rub it with honey. I then seasoned it with the Big Bog Gibson's Dry Rub that has that nice sweat flavour to it. I also wanted to smoke this meat for at least 6 hours, so at about 11am the pit was setup with the mean going on at 11:30am with an internal temperature of 11°C. Meanwhile, the range hood temperature had gone through the roof and was sitting at about 500°F !!!

I brought my MacBook Air outside to the deck and was doing a bit of iOS coding when at 12:10pm, I heard a crash. I looked over to see that the lid of my Smokey Joe had been knocked off by the swelling of the meat. This did help some of the heat to escape, which was a blessing in disguise, because when I put the lid back on (and half a brick on top), I'd gotten the range hood temp down to a reasonable 300°F.

At 1:30pm, then internal temperature was 81°C, so I foiled up the meat and spritzed it with some apple cider vinegar and basted it with some of the juices/water that had collected in the drip pan. I spritzed it again at hour intervals, so at 2:30pm, 3:30pm and at 4:30pm, I noticed the foil had ripped (despite me double wrapping), so some of the spritz just went straight into the drip pan.

It was also at this point, I had noticed the coals had gone out, but was still giving about 220°F. I wrapped the meat with another layer of foil, spritzed and put it back til 4:45pm, which is when I took the meat off to rest.

So, how was it ? Still the best style of corned beef I like. I had it when it's boiled, however, when it is, it loses a lot of the saltiness to it. Corned Beef is a salty meat and when smoked, it retained all that salty flavour, which I didn't mind, but my wife said it was a bit much. The crust was nice, but the honey didn't overly add much sweetness to it as I was hoping for.

Cook19-20150412