Slapilicious Umami Brisket

For the upcoming Labor Day barbecue weekend, I’m sharing my Umami brisket recipe because many backyard grillers are hesitant to venture into cooking beef brisket because it’s rumored to be one of the most challenging meats to cook well. Some even fear it having failed in successive attempts. Yes, it’s true that if two teams tie in points during a BBQ throwdown in the Texas-based International Barbeque Cookers Association (IBCA) contest, the team with the higher brisket score wins. Beef brisket is a meat category that SYD knows how to cook well and in 2010, SYD won the national KCBS Rancher Reserve Brisket Cup.

Once I demystify beef brisket for you and you follow my umami BBQ brisket recipe, you’ll be a brisket hero in no time at all.
So what is beef brisket? If you are familiar with corned beef or pastrami, then you’ve already eaten beef brisket which comes from the pectoral muscles of a cow.

The first problem you will encounter if you’ve tried to cook brisket like a piece of steak is that you’ll soon discover after cooking it that it chews like shoe leather. Because it is full of tightly wound connective tissue, it takes prolonged cooking to tenderize the meat.

The second issue you will face is that there will likely not be much flavor in the meat after you cook it. So what’s the secret to cooking beef brisket that has made some BBQ institutions in Texas holy shrines for beef brisket?

I’ve made my share of pilgrimages to the brisket holy land restaurants around the country and will reveal my secrets which begin with a story over 1,000 years ago in Japan and continued 150 years ago in Switzerland. In case you’re worried that I will ask you to inject your brisket to give it flavor, rest assured that you don’t need to inject your brisket using my recipe. You have my assurance that you will get close to a competition grade brisket without resorting to the chemical cocktails, MSG, and phosphates that professional BBQ teams often use to win contests. The SYD Umami brisket only uses mostly natural ingredients including some which will be very surprising to the BBQ world and destined to cause controversy and discussion for years to come. Remember that you learned it here first.

If you’re not a food scientist-type and want to skip past my Alton Brown stuff in the next paragraphs, I won’t be offended. So keep reading or jump straight to the Recipe Section if you prefer. I will show you how to create a mouth-watering super tender brisket that will melt in your mouth and will cause your family and friends to hail you as the new Brisket Queen or King of your neighborhood!

SKIP THESE PARAGRAPHS IF YOU’RE NOT AN ALTON BROWN TYPE!

So let me begin with the story of flavor which began in Japan. For over a thousand years, the Japanese have been using brown Konbu seaweed as a base for their soups and stews. If you’ve been to a Japanese restaurant and had sukiyaki or miso soup, it’s likely that the savory flavor of the soup came from that seaweed. In 1908, a Japanese professor named Ikeda noticed that when Konbu seaweed was dried, powdery crystals would form. He tasted those crystals and discovered they had a savory taste that could not be described by the four tastes of sweet, salty, sour, and bitter. He likened the taste to the mouth sensation of cheese and meats and coined the term “umami” which roughly translates to “delicious” in English.

What Ikeda tasted was glutamic acid which is one of the 20 or so amino acids that exist on this planet. He analyzed those powdery crystals and discovered a separate distinct taste sensation caused by monosodium glutamate or MSG. Amino acids are the building blocks that make up protein in living creatures. For example, glutamic acid makes up the majority of the nervous tissue in your brain and is essential for learning and memory retention. So the fact that you’re able to read and comprehend my article shows that glutamic acid is working for you! The term “umami” was viewed with suspicion by Western scientists who felt it was an enhancer but not a unique taste on its own merit. It wasn’t until 2001 when researchers at the University of California San Diego showed that our tongues do have a specific taste receptor for MSG. Today, umami is widely accepted as the fifth dimension of taste.

Fortunately, or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it, a year after Ikeda’s discovery, the company called Ajinomoto was formed in Japan to mass produce the ubiquitous white powder form of glutamic acid called monosodium glutamate aka MSG. Food companies soon noticed how it amped up the flavor of their products and started to use it in mass quantities to achieve a level of deliciousness in their foods by taking the MSG shortcut. Literally centuries of careful and pain-staking recipe development by various cultures throughout the world to develop naturally delicious recipes for soups, stews, and foods went out the window with the introduction of this white powder that became the boon of food manufacturers and the bane of consumers. Today, MSG is manufactured by the ton by glutamic acid producing bacteria. The liquid the bacterium grows in is siphoned off and refined into white MSG powder.

Because glutamic acid occurs naturally, it’s not really toxic to humans and stories of “Chinese Restaurant Syndrome” which refers to headaches, allergies, and malaise after eating MSG-laden food have proven to be false after many toxological studies. The probable reason is the same reason why some folks are allergic to seafood. Most plants and animals on earth have a salinity or saltiness of about 1% in their body. The salinity of the ocean is about 3%. So if you are a sea creature swimming in the ocean and swallowing salt water, the salt will kill you as your body’s salinity will eventually match that of the ocean (called osmotic effect). Many sea creatures like fish compensate by producing glutamic acid in their bodies to prevent the ocean salinity from invading their bodies. This explains why saltwater fish are generally tastier than freshwater due to the presence of glutamic acid. So for folks allergic to fish, they may also be allergic to MSG.

Many foods contain natural glutamic acid, including soy sauce, fish sauce, cheeses, ripe tomatoes, tomato sauce, and many meats. That’s why your Caesar salad tasted so good because it has Parmesan cheese and minced anchovies (tip: next time try putting one tablespoon of minced canned anchovies into your meat stews and you will taste what I’m trying to describe). That’s also why your cheeseburger tastes so good with the melted cheddar dripping over your beef patty.

In my recipe, I use a product that is high in glutamic acid in natural form that was invented in Switzerland over 150 years ago. It is a natural product of a hydrolyzed vegetable protein-based sauce containing high concentrations of glutamic acid. It’s commonly called Maggi Sauce and many cultures around the world revere this condiment and think that their country invented it but it was the Swiss who brought this sauce into the world in 1897.

My second umami ingredient comes from Japan and it was discovered by Professor Kodama, a disciple of Professor Ikeda. It originated from the dried fish flakes of the bonito fish which is a type of tuna. If you’ve ever had a sushi roll in a Japanese restaurant, you may have noticed the chef garnishing the top of your roll with light brown flakes. This umami ingredient works differently than MSG but has a similar pleasing taste sensation.

My third umami ingredient comes from the ancient Chinese tradition of drying shitake mushrooms and rehydrating them in water before using them in Chinese dishes. Shitakes have been cultivated since prehistoric times and are used as food and as medicine, taken for a wide variety of ailments. Dried shitakes are widely used in vegetarian dishes and the Chinese discovered that drying and then rehydrating them makes them tastier than fresh shitake mushrooms. It was not until 1957 that another Japanese researcher named Kuninaka discovered that shitake also had umami properties. His most significant discovery was that the shitake was synergistic with the fish flakes, and with MSG such that a very small amount of each strengthens the overall taste sensation. For example, he discovered that when glutamic acid was mixed with the ingredient in the bonito fish and the dried shitake, it created a very powerful umami flavor synergy that was much greater than the sum of their parts by up to thirtyfold.
My brisket recipe utilizes these three readily available umami Ingredients, plus a couple of others, to create a mouthwatering brisket that I think you will like.

Shitake Mushrooms, Worcestershire, Maggi, Bonito Flakes, and Beef Paste