On BBQing & Fishing

In case you haven’t seen the ad, the Fayette County Record will hold it’s 101st Anniversary Party on Friday, Nov. 4, and you’re all invited. I’m supposed to smoke a brisket for the occasion. So I put in a little practice last weekend. I’ve had the fortune (although I’m not sure whether it’s good or bad) to temporarily inherit a Traeger pellet grill from a fellow who doesn’t have space for it right now. I’ve been putting it to good use. It feels kind of weird plugging a barbecue pit into an extension cord, especially when there are at least a dozen dead post oaks on our place. It also feels weird dumping a $14 sack of pelleted sawdust into a hopper, and then listening to an electric motor hum for a few hours while your meat smokes. I’m not sure that I would actually buy one of these contraptions. But whatever, it’s easy, and it’s on my porch. It’s pretty easy to cook delicious brisket on a pellet grill. It won’t have the deep, deep smoky flavor you can get from a traditional offset smoker. But it’s pretty dang good. The pellet grill takes heat and smoke management completely out of the equation. It does that for you. You can concentrate on the other elements of a good brisket - seasoning, internal temperature and trim. If you have a Traeger or some other pellet grill, don’t be scared to smoke a brisket. You can do it. Just give it plenty of seasoning and smoke it at 275 degrees until it gets to an internal temperature of 203 degrees or thereabouts. How long will it take? That depends on how big of a brisket you’re smoking. It could be eight hours. It could be 12 or 14 hours. I’m not really here to talk about brisket, though. I wanted to talk to y’all about beef tallow. I like to call it meat butter. Mmmmmmmm. Meat butter.

If you like to smoke briskets, you better not throw away those fatty trimmings. If you do, you’re missing out.

I used to buy briskets that were pre-trimmed. I don’t any more. They were never trimmed the way I wanted. I can’t really explain how to trim a brisket in writing. You’re better off watching a YouTube video. Basically, I remove the deckle fat and trim the fat cap down to about a ¼ inch. Then I round the edges and try to make it look aerodynamic. It’s hard to explain, but the point is, you end up with a bunch of trimmings.

Some of the trimmings are mostly meat. I grind these up into hamburger meat or chili. Most of the trimmings are hard fat. I rendered one quart of beef tallow from the trimmings off the 12 lb. brisket I smoked last weekend.

To make tallow, simply chop the fatty trimmings into one-inch pieces and put all the pieces into a pot that will hold them. Add a few pinches of salt. Then add about a cup of water to the pot. The water will help to keep the fat from burning on the bottom of the pan at the beginning of the process. Bring the water to a boil and then set the heat as low as the stove will go. My last batch took about three or four hours to render. You will be left with a pot of gold-colored clear oil with pieces of meat and crispy beef cracklings.

Yeah, you’re not going to want to throw those cracklings away. Sprinkle some salt on them. You know you want to. Save a few without salt and feed them to your dog. Your pup will love you forever.

Allow the liquid to cool and strain the liquid through a finemesh strainer or cheesecloth. Then pour the liquid into a jar that can be sealed with a lid. The liquid will turn into a solid at room temperature. It will keep in the refrigerator with a lid for a long time.You can spoon it out and use it just like butter.

Pan fry a steak in it. Fry eggs with it. Smear it on a cobb of roasted corn. Whatever you do with butter, do that with beef tallow.

If you have enough of it, I hear you can use it to fry some of the best chicken known to man.

Earlier this week, I smeared some tallow on a couple of redfish half-shells and smoked them in the Traeger. Now that’s what I call surf-n-turf. It was yummy. How did I get those redfish, you might ask? My dad treated me and my two sons to a guided fishing trip in Port O’Connor a couple of weeks ago. The guide was Capt. James Shuler. He was excellent. So was his boat. When we weren’t catching fish, we were doubled-over laughing at his jokes and antics. Whenever someone reeled in a line and the bait was missing, Shuler would say, “You’re fishing on credit!”

At one point, I needed to go to the front of the boat to get a bottle of water. I asked my son Sam to hold my rod. Shuler said, “No, give it to ol’ Rodney,” as he pointed to a rod holder. That’s when I learned he called his rod holders “Rodney.” I grabbed a bottle of water out of the ice chest. About the time I turned around, a fish was on my line, and the tip of my rod was arcing to the water.

“Look at old Rodney set that hook!” Shuler yelled. “Every time!”

I took the point – he’d been telling us all morning to keep our rod tips up.

He told us a story about a group of duck hunters who invaded someone else’s duck blind. The hunters who built the blind showed up later that morning and found it occupied, and the invaders refused to leave. The guys who built the blind decided to set it on fire with the other hunters inside.

Let’s not forget, everyone was carrying shotguns.

Shuler didn’t say whether any of them shot ducks that day. At least they didn’t shoot each other, I guess.

Shuler got us a limit of redfish that day. To be honest, it would have still been a great time without the fish.