If you smoke brisket from time to time, you have probably purchased cuts that required trimming because they were fattier than usual. Of course, some people do not mind plenty of fat on their brisket because it adds taste but many people do mind and hence trim it off before throwing their brisket cuts in the smoker.
If you're wondering how to trim a brisket the right way, check out our step by step guide.
If you do mind fat on your brisket, perhaps you’ve just trimmed it off and are wondering what to do with it. You are in the right place! In this article, we will reveal to you all the things you can do with your brisket fat trimmings.
Let’s begin.
What to Do With Brisket Trimmings – All the Uses
Below are all the amazing uses of brisket fat trimmings.
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Beef Tallow
Perhaps the best use of brisket fat trimmings is to make beef tallow. Beef tallow, or tallow, is oil that can be used for cooking. Basically anything you can do with cooking oil you can do with tallow.
Tallow is simple to make. You can make it by cutting fat trimmings into tiny bits, boiling them with salt for a couple of hours, and then filtering out the impurities from the resulting oil. This is a simplified version of the process – check out our comprehensive post on how to make beef tallow from brisket fat for more information.
Once you make beef tallow, you can use it to for a couple of things. It can be used to cook any type of meal including meat, eggs, rice, vegetables, french fries, chicken, and so on. It can also be used to make other products including soap, body butter, and lubricant.
Tallow-based soap is often thicker and more lathery compared to regular soap, while tallow-based body butter is usually a much better moisturizer than regular body butter. Since tallow is an oil, it can directly be used as a lubricant around the house.
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Hamburger Meat
Brisket fat trimmings can be used to make delectable and juicy burgers. You will need to mix the fat trimmings with lean beef at the ratio of 1:4 and then grind the mixture with a meat grinder or a food processor. The fat trimmings in the mix will make your ground beef moist and tasty. Note that ground beef often comes from the round cut of a cow.
The best grind consistency for burger meat is a coarse grind. Therefore, make sure you grind your meat in 2-second bursts rather than continuously to achieve this consistency. After grinding your meat, mix it with seasoning salt, onion powder, and garlic powder, and then use it to form meat patties.
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Homemade Sausages from Brisket Trimmings
You can use brisket fat trimmings to make homemade sausages. Of course, brisket fat trimmings alone are not going to help you to do this. You need to mix them with pork and grind them together to get great tasting pork sausages.
Mix them in the ratio of 1:4 to get the perfect taste. Excess fat trimmings in your sausage could make it taste unfamiliar. Be sure to mix just the right ratio of fat trimmings with your pork, and you should add spices like black pepper, brown sugar, and cayenne pepper for taste.
Homemade sausages featuring ground fat trimmings are almost always very tasty. When you make your own sausages at home, make sure you don’t eat or taste them until they reach an internal temperature of 160 degrees F. This will help protect you from getting sick.
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Brisket Trimmings as Moisturizer
You can use fat trimmings as “moisturizer” for your brisket in the smoker. All you need to do to use brisket fat trimmings as meat “moisturizer” is to place the trimmings on a rack directly above your brisket in your smoker.
Once you do this, as the temperatures rise in the smoker, the fat will start melting and dripping on your brisket. This will ensure your brisket doesn’t dry too quickly, which is a good thing. Dry brisket tastes like leather, which is something you don’t want to eat!
On the other hand, properly cooked and “moisturized” brisket is a delight to eat. It tastes amazing and juicy.
To ensure the melting fat from your trimmings gets to your brisket even when you have covered it with aluminum foil, you should poke holes into the top part of the foil.
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Yorkshire Pudding
You can use brisket fat trimmings to make Yorkshire pudding. Beef fat is one of the top ingredients of Yorkshire pudding. It is one of the things that gives this meal its iconic taste. Google any Yorkshire pudding recipe and you will notice that it has beef fat in it.
In addition to beef fat, you will need eggs, milk, flour, and water. The best way to make Yorkshire pudding is using an oven. Make sure you wait until it is golden brown and puffy to remove it from your oven.
Final words
Brisket fat trimmings have multiple uses. You can use them to make beef tallow, hamburger meat, homemade sausages, and Yorkshire pudding. You can also use them as meat moisturizer when smoking brisket.
So if you have been throwing away brisket fat trimmings, you now know not to do that. The trimmings are far too precious to be chucked into the bin.
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