How To Make Juicy Beer Brats!

Hey, I'm Matt with Meat Church. Let's make beer brats. Well, this is a delicious recipe that we're excited to bring you this week when Micah Parsons and the Packers come to Dallas to play the Dallas Cowboys. I fed Micah a number of times. Obviously, amazing player. Just hope he stays out of the backfield this weekend. Well, this is a really delicious recipe, and I think it brought worse, which I had for the first time ever at a Packers game in Green Bay years and years ago. I'll tell you that story a little bit later. This reminds me of other cuisines like cheese steaks and buffalo wings and crawfish and chili, where people that are from the area where they originated are very passionate about how you should do it. And there are a couple ways to cook these bratwursts, which we're going to show you. Do you grill and then submerge them in beer, or do you put them in beer, then you grill them? And as a professional cook that has done it both ways, I'm going to show you my method and tell you why I do it the way I do it. But like I always say, you know, put your own spin on the recipe. No one gets to tell you the right or wrong way or what you think tastes good, so you can do it how you want to do it. But before we jump in, my buddy Woody and I, we cooked these bratwursts in this method probably 10 years ago to competition in a sausage category where people were making homemade sausage in the whole bit, and we went out and whipped them with store-bought bratwursts, cooked in beer, and then grilled. So I know it's a winner. In fact, it's officially a first place winner of a competition. So let's jump into cooking. What we're going to do is we are going to saute down a bunch of onions and caramelize them for about 15-20 minutes, and then we're going to put brats in the pan, submerge them in beer. We're going to cook them until they are thoroughly cooked, so 165 or so. We're going to pull them out. We're going to grill them to crisp up the casings. So what we need to do first, we're going to cook over a live fire. You can caramelize the onions in a pan, on the stove, on a grill, whatever you want to do. We're going to do naturally over live fire. I'm going to light my yakitori, and we're going to saute these onions down. All right, we got our lump charcoal going. I'm going to drop my grate down. We're going to do this in the brand new Yeti Ranch pan. So I'm going to throw that on, let that be heating up. Pretty excited about that. For those of you that don't know, Yeti bought the best American-made cast iron company in the world, Butter Pat. That's where all their skillets are from. And my son and I went down to Austin, and we were involved in kind of meetings in R&D around, hey, are you going to do a Dutch oven? So we're pretty stoked to be the first people to have this pan. It's going to work great for this. You could also do this in a really deep cast iron skillet. Honestly, like any sort of vessel, because we're going to caramelize the onions, and then we're going to put the bratwurst in. So you just need something big enough that you can put the bratwurst in to fill up with beer. So therefore, I think this will work fantastic. And with a little bit of butter, you can use olive oil if you want. All right, butter's melting nicely. So I've mandolin a bunch of sweet onions. It's three medium, maybe a little bit on the bigger side. And we're going to caramelize these down, kind of to however much you want. We're not going an hour like French onion soup or anything, but cook these down for just a little bit. I got to say, the people of Wisconsin and Green Bay are some of the nicest, most gracious people I've ever been around. Been up there a few times. Went this year with my 13-year-old son to the NFL draft. The Cowboys sent us up there when we drafted our man Tyler Booker in the first round. And we had bratwurst, we had cheese curds, but I don't know that there's nicer people in the world. You could be at the gas station and people are like, are you having the best time? So shout out to everybody in Green Bay that hosted Sam and I this year. I think you're going to like this. Talk a little bit about the differences in these recipes. I mentioned earlier, some people grill their brats first, then they submerge them. I want to submerge them first, get all that beer flavor in there. And then I want to grill at the end. So we crisp up that casing and we get delicious flavor from the char at the end. It's kind of like when you cook a steak, I want a steak with all that char. So that's the method we're going with. And no matter what you think, I can tell you this method is delicious. All right, these onions have been rocking and rolling for 20 minutes. I'm not sure if there's a better smell in outdoor cooking than onions, caramelizing and butter, but I'm going to get them spread out here. I'm going to put a little bit of beer in and we're going in with the bratwurst. Use your favorite beer. You guys know I'm a Miller guy. God, that smells even better. Well, here I've got some bratwurst. I just got these at my local grocery store. So these are nothing fancy. I don't know how many are going to fit in here, but we're about to find out. First time I ever had a bratwurst in Green Bay. So years ago, me and my season ticket buddies and the Cowboys, this is my either 24th or 25th year of season tickets. That's why they call me the king of tailgating. Anyway, we wanted to see Brett Favre play before he was done in Green Bay and we knew it was coming up. So we went up, there wasn't even a Cowboys game. There wasn't one on the schedule. And we went to Lambeau. Amazing. Stayed in Sheboygan. If you ever watched Home Alone, you know Sheboygan. That's where the Polka band's from. But we went to the games Monday night. They played their rival, the Vikings. People were so nice. I sat next to two nuns, paid 20 bucks at Brett Favre's steakhouse. It was all you could eat brats, screwdrivers to drink or beer. Loved it. Never forgot it. And this is definitely a staple of our tailgate ever since. So I'm going with the complete submerge method. When I did these on Instagram a while back, I did the half submerge. My man, Nate with the Dallas Cowboys from Wisconsin's like, Hey bro, you got to go full submerge. Who am I to argue? I will say Nate doesn't like the fact that I did my cheese curds and ranch, but I'm a Texan. We put ranch on everything. All right. I'm going a little more than full submerge because I know some of this is going to evaporate over time. But so that was three beers in this, in this pan. And this is very simple. You need to cook the bratwurst all the way through. So ground meat's 165. So they're going to sit here and braise, boil, whatever you want to call it till they're at least 165. Some people, by the way, like to kind of marinate their brats and beer overnight. I didn't think it was necessary. Nothing wrong. If you want to do it, add a bunch of moisture. And some people like to cook these way longer than I'm hitting 165. I'm not going to pull them at 165. We'll go further than that, but they'll probably be to that temp. And, you know, depending on your pan, 20, 30 minutes, but nothing wrong. If you're a person that wants to cook them even longer, then we're going to move the pan over and we're going to grill them and crisp them up. All right. It's been about 45 minutes. Let me tell you how good that smells. Unreal. All right. I'm going to move the whole pan over and we've got the fire ripping down here. Probably going to raise this grate up just a little bit. So I want to directly grill these now. Again, I said in the beginning, I want to crisp up the casing. I want the flavor from that. So you can use direct heat over lump charcoal like this. You could put it in, you know, pellet grill. You could do it in a pan, however you want to accomplish that. But these are going to cook quick. And let me tempt. So I know these are from experience. If you care about the temperature, when you cook them that long, it's boiling. It's going to be over 200, which it is. And you see the casings didn't pop. Now these aren't going to look real pretty yet, right? Obviously they've been cooking in beer. So just grill them to your liking. It's cooked all the way through. Put them on here. I'm going to rotate them, move them. Like I said, these are going to cook quick, so pay attention. Make sure you've got plenty of cold beer nearby because you're not going to have time to go get one. I always tell people when I'm grilling, grilling is, you know, it's visual. You've got to use all your senses. So if something's getting a little more cooked than other, move it over, swap stuff around. Always switch, rotate, flip, whatever you got to do. In this case, if you're running a mil-scale yakitori, I feel like I'm a little hot by that fire. I'm going to raise it up. That's the fun of cooking with live fire. And if your fire's ripping like this, put yourself a little insulated glove on. Let me tell you something. This is definitely going in the tailgate playlist. You're cooking these out in the parking lot, everybody's stopping by. I'm going to tell you, this is my favorite part of live fire cooking right here. Just rotating, like this is the fun in cooking. I want that beautiful color as much as I can get without busting the casing. Like I always tell people, there's a fine line between something being charred and something being burned, and there's epic flavor in char. And then when you think they're done to your liking, pull them. Just constantly turning, rotating, looking for that gorgeous color all the way around as best you can get it. Don't forget these delicious beer onions. Well, let's build one. We've got some fresh split-top brioche here. By the way, looks awesome. And that, you know, that look right there, that's why I like to grill them at the end myself. All right, we're going sauerkraut. Caramelized beer onions are a must. And then mustard. So I'm using Shilo's hot mustard. This is a San Antonio product. I've been told it's the oldest restaurant in San Antonio. It's opened since like 1917. And our buddies, Brushfire Farms, they co-pack this stuff. So I know you can get it on brushfirefarms.com. But use whatever you want, but this stuff is delicious. And honestly, it's not like, it's not like too hot. Being around here a minute, you know I don't like the hot, hot, hot. So that's, to me, that's just flavor. Man, I'm telling you right there, tailgate, that, cold beer, all you need. Here we go. That is insane. I could probably live on that. This is, this is top three in the tailgate playlist. I don't, I mean, I wouldn't be mad if we had this every single week. If this was such a tradition it is in Wisconsin, I'd get down on this with cold beer every time. That's all a man needs right there. That is so good. You know, the beer taste is not overwhelming. It's definitely there more than anything. It kept that sausage nice and moist during the cook. Subtle flavor. But man, the caramelized onions, sauerkraut, delicious mustard, that is unbelievable. If you guys like what we're doing, please like and subscribe. Your subscriptions are how we keep bringing you these free how-to videos. No talking advertisements in the middle of them like a lot of content creators do. Just straightforward how-to education. Hope to see you guys at AT&T Stadium. Come by, see the official pitmaster of the Dallas Cowboys. Hopefully we have a good week. No matter how it turns out, we always win at the tailgate. Go Cowboys. See y'all next week.