Eats: Easy Slow Cooker BBQ Beef Brisket Recipe

Hello! I'm sure that many people celebrated the recent Labor Day holiday with a cookout, but not me. I found an easy way to get a close-to-cookout taste with very little fuss and effort: a recipe for slow cooker barbecue beef brisket. 

Beef has gotten rather pricey, so I rarely buy it. But when I see a cut with a reduced-price label on the package I'll give it a look. Last week I came across a beef brisket that was now as cheap per pound as the turkey breast lunch meat I usually get. I'm sure the turkey is better for me, but a little variety is good now and then, and I like a good deal.

I've had a couple of barbecue beef brisket sandwiches at restaurants and decided to try that preparation at home. But feeling rather lazy, I wanted something with a quick prep time. 

And thanks to Amy Wisniewski's recipe over at Chow.com, I found just the recipe. Granted, as it's a slow cooker recipe, there's an all-day cooking period, but the actual hands-on time is very minimal. All one has to do to mix up the barbecue sauce ingredients (this can be done directly in the slow cooker). Next, a spice rub is prepared and, of course, rubbed onto the brisket. The brisket is then placed into the barbecue-sauced slow cooker and cooked on low for 10 hours. 

And here's the end result:

Above, an awesome sandwich indeed! I added all sort of fixings (I like "the works" on my sandwiches) but I think you can still see the barbecue beef brisket in there. 
 
But if you go here  you'll see a better picture of how the brisket turns out. You'll get the recipe too. 

A few recipe notes:

The barbecue sauce recipe calls chipotle peppers in adobo sauce. Well, I have ground chipotle powder, so I used that instead. 

I noted that many of the recipe commenters mentioned the barbecue sauce was too thin when the cooking time was up, so they thickened it with cornstarch. I did the same, but first cooked the sauce down a bit on the stove (to concentrate the flavors of that thinned-out liquid), then added about a teaspoon of cornstarch. This worked well and added maybe about 15 more minutes to the recipe. 

I got distracted toward the end of the cooking time and so my brisket cooked for about an hour more than the specified time. Consequently, I ended up with shredded instead of sliced brisket. But this was fine with me. 

I liked the flavor of the barbecue sauce, but like the sauce recipe I usually use even better. So, if I come across another sale-priced beef brisket again, I'll follow the same cooking method but with a different barbecue sauce. 

Feel free to use the barbecue sauce and spice rub of your choosing if you want to try this recipe yourself.

Of course, with Labor Day's departure, summer is supposedly over. But thanks to this recipe, I have plenty of barbecue beef brisket in my freezer. Now I can pretend it's summer no matter what the weather!