Brisket Yield Test: How to get the most out of your barbecue
In our most recent Patreon video we did a full yield test on one of our briskets. Calculating the yield on cooked meat is crucial to making the most money out of every pound of meat we buy. In order for us to charge the right amount of money for our brisket, we have to figure out how much it *really* costs. How much do we lose to trim, cook, and render? And how do we have a place for all those pieces to go to generate revenue themselves?
We started with a Heartbrand Beef Brisket we get from Flatonia, Texas and take that weight.
After we trim the brisket, we’ll trim out the lean and fatty pieces from the scrap pieces. We’ll mix all of the trimmed lean with 20% of that weight as trimmed fat, creating an 80/20 burger blend. Each half pound patty is a $14 burger with zero cooking weight loss because it is sold by the piece and it is pre-cooked weight.
The trimmed fat will get ground, rendered in a pot, and strained. That will give us rendered fat we can use for beef cheek confit and frying as well as crispy fat pieces that we can put into our chili as as filler.
After the brisket is cooked and rested, we’ll record that weight and divide it by the original weight to see how much percentage of the initial weight we have lost.
If we compare the yield we get from one brisket where we used all the scraps versus one brisket where all those scraps would be thrown away, the results were shocking. After we add back in the weight of the rendered fat, crispies, and burgers, our yield percentage on one brisket went from 36% to 70%! The amount of weight you can sell for money essentially doubles if you use all your scraps instead of just throwing them away.
