Beef brisket is one of our ultimate favorite cuts, especially for smoking. But to achieve the results you want with brisket, it takes a decent amount of preparation. One of the most important steps: trimming your brisket. This guide explains why it’s important and provides a step-by-step guide for trimming brisket the right way.
Why Do You Have to Trim a Brisket?
Would you leave chunks of fat hanging off your ribeye or even a piece of chicken breast? Probably not. Thick fat isn’t very pleasant to eat, so it’s best to remove it from your meat before you cook, as large fat pieces are unlikely to cook down, even with long cooking processes like smoking.
But brisket is a unique cut that often requires even more preparation than, say, a New York strip steak. Brisket is much larger, for starters, and it will likely have a good amount of fat along its surface and edges. You want to get rid of big areas of fat for the reasons we just mentioned, but also to help flavors penetrate the meat. If you have a layer of fat covering your brisket, the fat might soak up flavor, but the actual meat won’t be as lucky. This is especially important when smoking brisket, as the smoky flavors will have a hard time cutting through the fat to flavor the brisket meat.
Plus, brisket often has thinner and thicker areas. Trimming off the thinner areas keeps the shape and size of the brisket as uniform as possible to promote even cooking.
What’s the Best Temperature for Trimming Brisket?
Brisket is easiest to trim when it’s cold, so you can do it as soon as you take it out of the refrigerator. When the fat on a brisket is cold, it’s thicker and more stable, making it easier to work with than if it were to become warm, which makes it more squishy, flexible, and difficult to trim. You might even notice that the fat warms up while you’re trimming if you take a while to complete the process. If needed, you can always place the brisket back in the refrigerator for 30-60 minutes to cool it off so you can continue.
Tools Needed for Trimming Brisket
There are only three things you need to trim brisket: gloves, a knife, and a cutting board.
Choose nitrile gloves, if possible. They’re much stronger than typical latex and other types of disposable gloves, so they’ll keep your hands protected well when working with raw meat. However, if you can’t get nitrile gloves, any type of disposable gloves will do.
As for your knife, you’ll want a boning knife, which is specifically used for filleting meat similar to what you’ll be doing when you remove fat from the brisket. Make sure it’s sharpened before using it.
Your cutting board should be large enough to hold the entire surface of the brisket, which is why a wooden butcher’s block often does the trick. Be sure to use a cutting board that you only use for meat, keeping a separate cutting board for fresh produce.
Steps to Trimming a Brisket
Below, we break down how to trim a brisket, step-by-step. This is the technique generally used by experts who smoke and cook brisket regularly.
Step 1: Remove the Hard Fat
First, you want to look for the hard pieces of fat along the brisket. These are the big white chunks and strips of pure fat that you’ll typically see near the edges and along the flat sides of the brisket. Hard fat won’t render down properly when cooking like the small, thin strips of fat will, so it’s important to get rid of them before you start cooking.
Use a sharp knife and glide the blade carefully along the underside of the hard fat, using your other hand to pull it away from the brisket as you go.
Step 2: Shape the Brisket and Trim Off Thin Corners
Next, look for any thin, narrow edges and corners of the brisket. Notice how the main part of the brisket is much thicker, probably by a few inches. Thinner parts of brisket will cook much quicker than the thicker parts, so it’s best to trim them off before you start cooking, leaving you with a more uniform brisket.
This isn’t a perfect science, especially because all briskets are shaped a bit differently. Some people like to square up the brisket, leaving only thick meat in place, but that’s not necessary. Just use your best judgment here. As long as you have the really thin sections out of the way, you’ll be good to go.
Step 3: Trim the Fat Side
Now, flip the brisket over so that the underside—also known as the fat side or fat cap because it’s covered in a layer of fat—faces up. You’ll want to trim the fat down until it’s about a ½-inch thick or less. Remember that thick fat won’t render down enough, so the idea here is simply to get the fat to a workable amount that’ll render down as the brisket cooks. There’s no need to remove it all.
Step 4: Remove Fat Between the Flat and Point
There are two main parts to a brisket: the flat and the point. The point is the muscle that juts up from the brisket and connects to the flat, usually with a bunch of fat in between. Use your knife to remove some of this fat and connective tissue, as it typically contains too much fat to render down.
Should You Leave Any Fat on the Brisket?
Absolutely. Fat is an important part of a brisket’s final results, adding flavor and moisture to the meat. When you trim brisket, don’t go overboard, removing every piece of fat you see. Instead, focus on large chunks of fat that are thicker than ½-inch.
You’ll end up removing some meat in the process of trimming fat, and that’s okay. But over-trimming brisket can also lead to removing more meat than you bargained for, so be careful about how much you remove and consider whether it’s actually fat or meat.
How To Use Brisket Trimmings
When trimming brisket, it’s nearly impossible not to remove some meat along the way. After all, the brisket’s fat attaches to its meat.
Don’t let all those good trimmings go to waste, though. You can use brisket trimmings in a few different ways:
- Simmer the trimmings with a small amount of water over several hours to create a beef broth.
- Make beef tallow using fat drippings by boiling the brisket trimmings with salt and using a filter to separate the drippings from any leftover brisket remnants.
- Grind up brisket trimmings to make into sausage or ground beef for burgers.
Learn More About Brisket
If you want to learn everything you can about cooking brisket, you’ve come to the right place. We have multiple brisket cooking guides on Steak University to help you understand more about this cut of beef and the best ways to cook it. Bookmark these links to reference when you’re ready to work with brisket again: