Recipe Source (Marinade): Cheryl and Bill Jamison. Smoke & Spice. The Harvard Common Press, Boston 2003 p. 115
For our Labor Day weekend barbeque, I wanted to do a bourbon-flavored beef. I rummaged through all my barbeque cookbooks, but I couldn’t find anything that both looked good and would feed the 20 people who would be attending, so I decided to make something up. I picked up a couple of beef roasts from Costco, totaling about 13 pounds. To flavor the beef, I decided to use the marinade from the Drunk and Dirty Tenderloin recipe in Bill Jamison’s Smoke & Spice, which I doubled, since I was cooking a larger piece of beef. I smoked the meat, pulled it off rare, sliced it thin, and served it on rolls along with a bourbon BBQ sauce. This went over really well, and although we had 6 or 7 other dishes, we ate nearly all of it.
Bourbon Pit Beef (Serves 20; Approx. Cost Per Serving Not Available)
Beef Roast (about ½ pound per person)
Kosher salt
Black pepper
Deli-style or hamburger rolls
Hickory wood chips or chunks for smoking
For the marinade:
2 cups soy sauce
1 cup bourbon
½ cup Worcestershire Sauce
4 tablespoons brown sugar
1 teaspoon ground ginger
8 garlic cloves, minced
1 cup water
Equipment
- Zip top plastic bag
- Smoker or grill
1) Mix the marinade ingredients together. Put the beef roast in a zip top plastic bag, pour the marinade over the meat, and refrigerate for at least 4 hours, and
up to 24 hours. I let mine sit overnight, which allowed the flavor to nicely permeate the meat.
2) Before cooking, remove the meat from the marinade. Sprinkle with kosher salt and black pepper.
3) Set up your smoker for cooking. Using my Big Green Egg, I set up for indirect cooking, putting in the plate setter legs up, with a drip pan sitting on the plate setter. I used hickory wood chunks to add smoke flavor, and brought the temperature up to 250 degrees Fahrenheit.
4) Smoke the meat at 250 degrees for about 45 minutes, then raise the temperature to 325 degrees until the internal temperature of the meat reaches 115 degrees. Note that I normally don’t like my beef very rare, but for this recipe, this is what I was aiming for, as the rare, thin sliced meat comes out very tender and juicy.
5) Pull the meat from the smoker, wrap in foil, and let rest for 10-15 minutes.
6) Slice the meat very thin. Serve on the rolls with barbeque sauce.
Notes from Fearless Kitchen: He wasn't kidding when he said that the meat came out tender and juicy! It made quite the mess when he sliced it:
I almost had to call Crime Scene Cleanup to get rid of it! Of course, FG had a different solution:
Fortunately, Yogi had the sense not to play along.
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