Chopped Smoked Beef for Man Food Mondays

Good morning people. I hope that you had a great weekend. We celebrated the summer return of the girl child from college. Girl child is a bit of a carnivore, so we try to do more meat cooking while she’s here. It’s a hardship as you might can tell. We’ll just muddle through it .

This weeks adventure is smoked beef, which is not a real hard thing to cook. I did this a bit differently than I have in the past and got, as one would expect, different results. I smoked a top round roast using a standard type spicy dry rub. The thing that is did differently here was I used a disposable aluminum pan to hold the beef while it was on the smoker, and I cut the roast into sections to speed up the cooking and to allow me to apply the dry rub onto more surfaces. So, we have a dry rub recipe here and a smoking method to talk about, and I will add in some observations along the way.

So here’s the rub and the smoke:

Chopped smoked beef

Author Steve

Yield 4

Ingredients

1 3-4 lbs top round roast or chuck roast
3 Tbsp fresh ground black pepper
2 Tbsp kosher salt
1 Tbsp white sugar ( I used Splenda. )
1 Tbsp onion powder
2 tsp mustard powder
2 tsp garlic powder
2 tsp ancho pepper powder
2 tsp cayenne pepper powder
2 Tbsp canola oil

Instructions

Dry Rub

In a non reactive bowl combine all the dry ingredients and whisk together making sure that it is evenly blended. Cut the meat into 3 to 4 inch chunks. If you are using a chuck roast, trim some of the fat off it since your cooking in a pan it will not drain away as if you were just cooking on the grill itself then lightly coat the meat with the canola oil.
Place the meat in your disposable aluminum pan (make sure it’s one that will fit on your smoker) and sprinkle the “dry rub” over all sides of the meat making sure that it is fully coated. Cover the meat with plastic wrap and place in the refrigerator for 2 hours or over night.

To smoke

When you are ready to start the smoking process remove the meat from the refrigerator leave it covered and go out to setup the smoker. I used the lump charcoal and hickory wood with the water pan in place. The amount of charcoal will depend on the type of smoker you use. This is around a 5 hour process so have enough charcoal on hand to feed the smoker as the temperature starts to drop. If you have one, use a digital grill thermometer to watch the smoker temp.
Bring the smoker up to temperature and add the hickory wood watch for the flare up of temp, and once the temperature settles in at around 250, it’s time to add the meat. Back to the kitchen to uncover the meat and insert the food temperature probe into 1 or 2 of the larger cuts of meat. Set the pan of meat on the smoker and cover. Remember that you only want to uncover the smoker for a very short time to prevent temperature drop. Then all you need to do is monitor the meat temp and add charcoal and hickory wood as needed. In this smoke I was looking for an internal temp of around 160 and I wanted to hold that temp for about 2 hours.

Courses Entree

So, I did hold the meat at an internal temp of around 165 for the 2 hours. I did this to allow for the meat to start breaking down and to make sure that it took up the smokier flavor. What I discovered was that this is a VERY spicy dish, the kind of makes you sweat spicy, so if this is not your goal I would cut back a bit on all the powdered peppers in the dry rub, the choice is yours. We like very spicy stuff here in the hinterlands, so this was not to hot for us. We did however combine this with a Jack Daniels Sriracha BBQ sauce that I put together which surprisingly was less spicy than the beef….go figure! That one will be shared next week I think!

So take care of your self and check back next week…..

Steve

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