I’ve written here repeatedly about barbecue and my love for it. The thing I always try to emphasize is that it’s actually quite easy to make better barbecue than you’re going to get in any restaurant around here — and quite possibly elsewhere. The keys are patience and preparation, and I thought I’d walk you through my overnight Q session with a brisket to see how I do it.

There are many, many variations on smoking a brisket and most of them are good. The Web is full of advice on the topic, but here are what I find to be keys:

–Selecting a good cut

–Giving the seasoning the chance to break down the brisket a bit

–Keeping a constant, steady temperature in your smoker

–Not fooling around with it very much once it’s in the smoker!

So, with that in mind, here’s how I smoked this brisket.

1. Selecting a cut — I buy my briskets at the Foodway store on Telegraph Road in Alexandria. It’s a Hispanic supermarket that sells great cuts of meat used in Mexican/Hispanic dishes at a low price. It’s only one of the few places in the area that sells whole packer-cut briskets, and since those briskets cost about the same as the half-the-weight brisket flats sold at Shopper’s Food Warehouse and elsewhere, this has become my go-to brisket store.

This is what you want in a brisket: Relatively even thickness (although the ‘point’ end of a whole brisket is always going to be thicker), good marbeling through the meat and a ‘fat cap’ that covers all, or almost all, of one side of the cut. Reject odd-looking briskets or ones with little marbeling.

2. Trimming the meat — Some people don’t trim briskets at all. I always trim whole briskets. They are often caked with fat and you don’t need that much to keep the meat moist during cooking. Also, thick fat won’t render through the meat and helps prevent smoke from penetrating into the brisket. Trimming speeds up cooking time, too — you don’t have to cook an extra pound of fat.

Trim the fat on brisket to about a quarter-inch thickness on top (no need to be terribly precise). Trim it off of the sides and — especially — trim the hard, dense fat you’ll often find on the point end. This fat will do nothing for your brisket other than slow down the cooking time.

3. Season the trimmed brisket — There are all sorts of seasonings, and I change mine depending on my mood. A lot of Texans just salt and pepper their briskets and let the smoke do the talking. Another easy rub is to mix a steak seasoning 50-50 with turbinado sugar (“Sugar in the Raw”). The sugar crusts on the outside and the molasses in it adds a great rich note to the beef. If you keep your temps in the cooker stable, the sugar will not burn and turn bitter.

I seasoned the brisket a *day* before the cook. I find that seasoning the meat early helps give the salt and sugar time to break it down a bit. Brisket, which is a relatively thin cut of meat, seems to be particularly helped out by this.

I coat my briskets with a very thin layer of vegetable oil to help keep the rub in place, and then I apply the rub evenly. I typically sprinkle it in a line down the center of the brisket, spread it around with my hands, flip over the brisket and repeat the process. This is messy — it helps to have a big cutting board to work on.

Once the brisket was seasoned, I dropped it into a kitchen-size trash bag, put a large bowl underneath it to prevent any sneaky drippings from staining my refrigerator, and dropped it in the fridge for a day.

4. Prep the smoker — I came home from seeing a friend’s band play on Saturday night and fired up my Weber Smoky Mountain cooker. I had soaked four chunks of blackjack oak in water in advance, and used that with all-natural charcoal briquets and the Minion Method to run the smoker.

It took about an hour to get the smoker temperature stabilized and I went to bed, getting up once overnight to check the smoker’s temperature (which was perfect at 250 degrees). I highly recommend the Weber as a backyard smoker — it’s durable, fine for most family-size barbecues (and even for bigger ones if you set it up right), it can hold a temperature with little assistance for hours and hours and if you have spouses who might be sensitive about the appearance of a smoker, this one should meet with approval.

5. Cook — Keep your smoker in the 225-250 range (hopefully this won’t take too much work on your part) and cook for about 1.25 to 1.5 hours per pound. Don’t use too much smoke wood and be prepared for the finishing time to vary literally by hours.

Also, don’t forget to baste. Using a spray bottle (this prevents you from knocking off the rub) I basted the brisket twice with a mixture of apple juice, Worcestershire sauce, a splash of bourbon and a little bit of veggie oil to help the baste stick. It helps keep the brisket moist — moisture and tenderness are always the challenges when cooking a brisket. With 10 pounds of brisket here, I basted after about eight hours and again at the 11-hour mark. As it turned out, it only took about 12 hours to cook this brisket — some three hours quicker than I anticipated (hey, it’s one of the vagaries of barbecue).

I used a digital meat thermometer to track the temperature of my brisket, putting a probe in the thickest part of the meat and pulling it when the internal temp hit 185 (brisket, like most BBQ meats, is a tough cut and it must be cooked past doneness to make the collagen dissolve into juicy loveliness). I wrapped the briskie for an hour in foil, and then carved it.

6. Carving — Brisket must ALWAYS be carved against the grain. I start at the flat end (it’s the squared-off side of the brisket) and, using an electric knife, carved thin slices until I reached the point (you can tell because a vein of fat will run through the center of the cut of meat once you hit the point). I then used a utility knife to separate the point from the flat and carved up the rest of the flat, putting much of it in Ziploc freezer bags for later meals.

7. What do to with the point? The point is the fattier, tougher cut of the brisket. This time, I used the point to make “burnt ends,” which are delicious. Here’s a typical recipe, although I did not use barbecue sauce and then shredded the cubes by hand when things were done. I now have slices of brisket for typical meals and some shredded brisket that can go in chili, soups, gumbo, enchiladas or sandwiches.

And there you go — another brisket BBQ session in the books, and meat for at least half a dozen meals ready to go.