My chocolate Lab, Svatchime, watched me warily all day long. In the pre-dawn hours, I carefully built my fire. The Big Green Egg came to easily to temperature. My brisket had sat overnight, salted and peppered, on a rack in the beer fridge. It was dry and looking good when I put it on the Egg. Four hours passed, and I foiled the brisket. I placed my temperature probe into the thickest portion of the brisket. Back into the Egg the brisket went. The wait began. Svatchime and I keep a close eye on the temperature in the Egg as well as the temperature of the brisket. Both are key metrics in the production of a brisket. The Egg temp hovered around 225, and the internal temp of the brisket rose until it stalled at 178. This isn’t unexpected. It happens every time.
“Why’s it taking so long?”, asked Svatchime as if on que.
Yes. My dog talks, but she doesn’t have a good memory for details.
Just like every time before, I explained that when a brisket hits the ‘stall’ its actually doing magic that transforms it from a leathery hunk of tough, grainy near rawhide meat into an amazing chunk of mouth watering beef. We’ll keep the brisket on the Egg and not let the internal temp of the brisket exceed 203. We’ll hold it at 203 for about four hours, for about an eight or ten hour total cook time.
“I can’t wait to taste it”, Svatchime said as she sat drooling in the shade.
“No brisket for you”, I replied. “Remember, brisket and you do not get along”, I added. A chill ran up my spine, and for just a minute I could not see out of one eye.
Some five years ago, I barbequed 5 huge briskets for a local fire company celebration. I cooked them at home, and planned to deliver them the next day. Brisket cooking is a long and tiresome task, and once it is done you are exhausted. On this occasion, I pulled the briskets at about 10:00PM. I wrapped them in foil, and placed them on the counter in the kitchen to cool for a few hours before I put them on ice. I lay down and rested.
I woke up at 5:00AM, and went down to the kitchen to stow the briskets. Where I had left five briskets the night before, there now were only four. Where Svatchime the night before had been full of energy and a pain in the ass, now she lay on the floor with an amazingly distended belly, surrounded by the remnants of foil. She had consumed an entire 17lb brisket. She was too full to move. She moved only her eyes as she watched me explode.
So I kicked Svatchime out of the house and cleaned up the kitchen floor. I was furious. I delivered the remaining brisket to the firehouse and spent the rest of the day cleaning the kitchen floor again because briskets give up a lot of grease.
That evening, we had guests. One was a dear friend from just a block over, and the other was a friend from our church. Her father was the retired priest of the church. Both are dignified young ladies who are a lot of fun to be around. Both are somewhat prim and proper, but hey…they were coming over to play poker. They are fun people.
They arrived on time. Landi, our guests and I sat down around a small gaming table. Everyone greeted Svatchime and Chaunti. Svatchime lay down behind our guests. Chaunti was in Landi’s lap. We began to play poker and chat. We had been playing for about thirty minutes when something went awry, badly awry.
The preacher’s daughter suddenly sat up very straight, almost as if she had been shocked. Her eyes sprung wide open and bulged out. Her eye brows leaped onto the top of her head, and steam appeared to emerge from her ears. She began to fan her face very fast and frantically. The neighbor from around the block just stared at her, as did Landi and I. Then she went pale, and pulled her shirt up over her mouth and nose. Her eyes were tearing up, and she went flush. The creases fell from her pressed pants and the colors in her blouse went gray. She began to hyperventilate. She looked about frantically for an escape route.
Landi and I only wondered what was going on for a matter of seconds. Our friends had been the first victims of Svatchime’s brisket fart. We were doomed just like them, but we didn’t know that as we watched our friends descend into a hypoxic state and enter a near death realm.
Svatchime’s fart made it to us. To say it was a smell is to say that Noah and the Ark survived a heavy dew. The air shimmered as the fart approached us. I saw it. Landi saw it. We didn’t know what it was. Chaunti knew what gas going on. She leaped from Landi’s lap and fled the room. We should have run. We just didn’t know that the olfactory insult that was approaching us would render mute, us blister our eyes, and cauterize our noses. The air was perceptibly warmer and more dense inside the fart cloud. The room began to spin as our oxygen deprived brains began their shutdown sequences. Landi, in one last heroic effort, lit a candle.
We survived. We all survived. I kicked Svatchime’s ass outside for a week.
After five years, the damn dog remembered how much she like brisket. She was begging for brisket. Just a bite…one bite. One little bite. With her ears on the back of her head, and her eyes locked on mine she said, “One bite…..please…one tiny bite….”
I folded. I gave her a bite.
Two hours later, my generosity was rewarded with a fart that has necessitated repainting the house.
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