Brisket, the slow-cooked, sometimes temperamental cut of beef, has become the darling of restaurants as public appreciation of barbecue expands. Consumers are flocking to a food they’re not likely to cook at home.
“Brisket is very hot. It has been for a year or more and you’re seeing it on menus more and more,” said Joel Bulger, chief marketing officer and head of product innovation at Johnny Rockets.
The casual-dining burger chain based in Lake Forest, Calif., introduced brisket limited-time offers for the first time last summer. The BBQ Brisket Burger was a beef patty topped with cheddar cheese, smoked brisket and barbecue sauce on a brioche bun, and the BBQ Brisket Loaded Street Tots were potato tots topped with cheddar cheese, smoked beef brisket strips, barbecue sauce, scallions and chopped brisket.
“That particular LTO was in our top 10 of all time from a sales standpoint,” Bulger said.
He said their product development team, including chef Calvin Harris, had noticed a proliferation of brisket in trend-forward food cities such as New York, Los Angeles, Atlanta and Chicago, especially as an add-on to other items — served over polenta, for example.
Harris worked with a manufacturer in Texas to produce a brisket with the right level of smoke, test it with customers and roll it out.
The tots actually ended up performing slightly better than the burgers, Bulger said, particularly as a shareable item for customers under the age of 35.
Photo: First Watch
Brisket buying booms
Brisket comes from the breast of cattle, between the neck and the belly, and has two parts: the lean “flat,” closer to the skin, and the fattier “point,” or deckle, inside.
Restaurants bought a lot more of it in 2016 than they did a year earlier. The National Cattlemen’s Beef Association reports that foodservice purchases of the cut totaled 73 million pounds last year, an increase of 12 million pounds over 2015. Eight million pounds of that increase was in limited-service restaurants, the association reported.
Qdoba Mexican Eats contributed to that increase with its Outlaw Taco, a limited-time offer introduced in October made of brisket, ancho chile barbecue sauce, habanero salsa, corn salsa, cilantro and cotija cheese in a corn tortilla. The chain made brisket available in other offerings for that month, and rolled the meat out as a permanent addition in January.
First Watch did its part, too, with the summertime rollout of a smoked brisket hash. The 199-unit chain serving breakfast, brunch and lunch offered smoked brisket with seasoned potatoes, kale and roasted onions topped with two eggs, maple barbecue sauce and herbs.
Shane Schaibly, vice president of culinary development at the Bradenton, Fla.,-based First Watch said the dish outperformed the other two summertime specials — chocolate hazelnut French toast and smoked salmon and cucumber toast — and accounted for 2.6 percent of all entrées sold, significantly outpacing their target of 2 percent.
First Watch also considered pulled pork and barbecued chicken in the hash, but he said the brisket held up better than the pork, which tended to fall apart.
First Watch’s supplier pre-sliced the brisket, which Schaibly said helped them maintain consistency, and then it was cut into one-inch chunks.
He said he thought part of the appeal of brisket is that it’s not a food his customers are likely to prepare at home.
“It’s not like a steak,” Schaibly said. “[Brisket] takes a lot of time and it takes a certain amount of restraint and knowledge to do it. Not a lot of home cooks are getting that deep: Their braising or smoking game might take a little bit longer to master.”
Brisket has been spreading at restaurant chains for a while. Arby’s introduced its Smokehouse Brisket in October of 2013 and was the most successful product launch in the brand’s more than 50-year history, according to senior vice president of communications Christopher Fuller.
Since that launch, brisket has been used in a variety of limited-time offers, including a Spicy Jalapeño Brisket Sandwich, which paired the meat with melted cheddar cheese, diced jalapeños, fried onions and chipotle barbecue sauce, and a flatbread for which the brisket was joined by melted cheddar, pepper bacon, smoky barbecue sauce, lettuce tomato and mayonnaise. Those were both offered in fall of 2015, and in the fall of 2016 the 3,200-unit chain introduced the Smoke Mountain, which included the brisket, smoked turkey and a sous vide pork belly that was also introduced last year. It was available through the month of October.
Schlotzsky’s took a similar tack to Johnny Rockets when it introduced brisket last year. The 362-unit fast-casual chain is based in Austin, Texas, arguably the nation’s brisket capital.
“Brisket is one of the things that people actually seek out when they come to Austin, so why not bring that to Schlotzsky’s everywhere?” president Kelly Roddy said.
Similar to Johnny Rockets’ tots, Schlotzsky’s tested brisket by adding it to something rich and starchy: The chain’s new line of mac & cheese. Those were introduced last summer, followed in the new year by a Spicy Brisket Flatbread with pesto, jalapeño chips, Swiss cheese, hot sauce, blue cheese dressing and basil.
The cut of beef will be featured in a new line of sandwiches at Schlotzsky’s starting in late February.
Photo: Bruegger's Bagels
New York brisket
Much of the brisket on menus these days draws some reference to Texas barbecue, but Bruegger’s Bagels used a different American cultural reference: The New York deli.
That’s the inspiration for much of the Burlington, Vt.-based chain’s menu, “so brisket fit perfectly into a lot of the menu work we had done,” said Judy Kadylak, vice president of marketing and menu innovation at the 274-unit chain.
She had brought in pastrami before, which is often made from brisket, and in early 2016 introduced a breakfast brisket sandwich for which the meat was served with an egg, Muenster cheese, pickled onions and horseradish sauce on an everything bagel. Kadylak said the inspiration for that was a New York City brunch of brisket and eggs.
At the same time the chain offered Twisted Brisket, which was brisket with bacon, Muenster and Dijonnais on toasted jalapeño cornbread.
“We agave that a little bit of a kick,” she said.
“The great thing about brisket is it obviously hits a sweet spot in New York, but it [also] plays out across the country,” Kadylak added. “Different regions might have a different attachment to brisket in how they prepare it, but it seems to have [become] a lot more of a popular trend over the last couple of years.”
Like many chains, Bruegger’s gets its brisket pre-smoked, sliced and ready to heat and serve. That makes it easy operationally, and Kadylak said the limited-time offers performed well.
“We had a great response, and in fact I’m looking for ways to maybe bring it in as a permanent selection on our menu, because it really did very well and people really wanted it back,” she said, adding that they’ll get their wish in the fall with another LTO, but declined to go into further detail.
Photo: Sonny's BBQ
DIY brisket
Of course some chains smoke their own brisket, including Sonny’s BBQ, a 114-unit chain based in Winter Park, Fla., whose pit master, Bryan Mroczka, switched from using beef eye round to brisket in 2009, and currently sells about three million pounds of it each year.
“Brisket was starting to become really popular, and it really fits in well with our restaurant,” said Mroczka.
In order to keep up with the competition, he’s in the process of upgrading his beef, from USDA Choice to Certified Angus Beef.
“It has higher marbling, and the sizing is more consistent,” he said.
He rubs brisket of between 14 pounds and 16 pounds in a proprietary spice blend and cooks it over oak wood at 210 degrees Fahrenheit for about 13 hours — putting it in the smoker at 6 p.m. and then returning to the restaurant at around 7 a.m. Then he wraps the brisket in aluminum foil to heat it up slightly and bring the internal temperature to where he wants it. Then he removes it from the smoker at around 8:30 or 9 a.m. and lets it rest.
Although Texas hickory and mesquite are the woods of choice for Mroczka, he said Florida has more oak, which gives the meat a local flavor.
Photo: Snap Kitchen
Potential health halo
Brisket, especially the fatty deckle, is often thought of as an indulgent food, but it can actually be quite lean, said Ethan Holmes, chef of the health-focused Snap Kitchen, a 44-unit chain based in Austin, Texas.
“It depends on what you do with it,” he said, noting that brisket is often served with coleslaw, potato salad and sugary sauces, making for a starchy, high-calorie meal.
Snap Kitchen introduced paleo diet-friendly brisket tacos and brisket hash as permanent additions last summer.
The tacos feature the brisket with roasted poblano peppers and zucchini in a dairy- and gluten-free “tortilla” made of cassava and coconut. It’s topped with a choice of chipotle salsa or a diary-free “sour cream” that Holmes makes by soaking cashews in water and slowly cooking them until soft. He blends them with a little lemon juice and salt, “and it tastes like sour cream,” he said.
The tacos also have a paleo-friendly barbecue sauce made with slowly caramelized onions, chile powder and other seasonings, along with red wine vinegar, cider vinegar, tomato and honey.
The hash blends the meat with peppers, onions, red cabbage and sweet potatoes.
“People have responded really well to them,” he said, noting that they’ve exceeded sales expectations.
Holmes and his team use the whole brisket subprimal cut and rub it with light chile powder, smoked paprika and other spices and slowly cooks it in a 200° Fahrenheit oven, letting much of the fat render out. The process takes 13 hours: They start cooking it at 3 p.m. and cook it until 4 a.m. Then they blast chill it to get it as quickly as possible below 40° Fahrenheit, for food safety reasons, and chop it up.
The key to making sure the brisket meets the chain’s nutritional standards is to balance the amount of deckle that goes into each portion, Holmes said.
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