Trisket Technique: Why Pitmasters Love This Trick

Hey, I'm Matt with MeChurch. Let's smoke a Triscuit. Well, four years ago, I did this recipe on this channel, said it was a test, I'd been seeing it as a trend, had not really done it, and I actually loved it. Four years has passed, where are we now? Well, the reason I wanted to do this today, there's a couple reasons, but the first is, I was hunting in South Texas at the beginning of the year, and my buddy Rick was like, hey, I brought a tri-tip, I'd love for you to cook it, and I ended up cooking it the traditional way, that came out of California, which is grilling it more like a steak, and about the time we were done, he's like, that's not what I meant. He's like, I love your recipe where you smoke a tri-tip like a brisket, hence the name Triscuit, and I was like, oh, well, I do it a lot, and I actually love it, and right now, 2026, brisket's high, and so one of the reasons I do think this is a great option, this is much smaller than a whole brisket, so it's cheaper, maybe you don't need a whole brisket for your family, it definitely works. We're starting out with a prime grade tri-tip. I feel that you need prime or choice so that you don't dry them out because there's not a lot of fat here, so think about smoking a steak at home for a long period of time. Without a lot of intermuscular fat or a cap on it, you could dry it out. We've got a nice prime grade tri-tip, and what's this? This is a brand new seasoning that we just released, so we thought we'd season with it, and I'm about to tell you what it is in just a minute, but let's jump in. So tri-tip, I got it at my local H-E-B, right out of the case, and it required very minimal trim, didn't have to do a whole lot to it, just cut any excess fat off of it. It's time to season. I love seasoning these with our holy cow or our holy gospel, seasoned very simply. Well, this week, I'm proud to introduce our brand new garlic jalapeno blanco. So what is this? Well, as you know, blanco is a very popular seasoning in our arsenal. I can't quit using it. I've been at my Florida place this summer, and when you look in my spice cabinet, I have more bottles of blanco than anything else because I literally use it every day on every meal. What we've done is we've added additional garlic and jalapeno, obviously, to this, and it took a long time to get it right. I've been working on this for exactly one year. Started this project last year, got it where I wanted it. You're gonna absolutely love it. I put it on all sorts of things, but my favorite is steak, so I know it will be great on this. So we're gonna season this pretty liberally since we're cooking it like a brisket. I'm not using any sort of binder. You obviously could use a binder if you like, but we're gonna make this nice and simple. And it's just as fine as the OG blanco. You'll find that they're very similar. Let me talk about the flavor profile while we're doing this. It's not too spicy. Don't be concerned about the jalapeno in it. I messed with the levels numerous times. At one point, I had it too hot. I don't want that. I want a seasoning that everyone can enjoy. So this is not meant to be a screeching hot rub. This is meant to be something that's just got that delicious Southwestern flavor. Garlic jalapeno's a great base for a lot of things you do. I absolutely love this on chicken, love it in eggs, love it in guacamole. Our chef Gavin put it in pimento cheese the other day. Like, I could go on and on. You guys are going to absolutely love this seasoning. So this is going to be a two-step process. We're going to smoke this like you would a brisket at 250 degrees. You could smoke at 250, 275, whatever you want to do. So we're going to put this in our mill scale offset smoker with post oak right at 250, very traditional barbecue. I'm going to smoke this until it's about 165. Then I'm going to wrap it in foil and beef towel to make sure that it doesn't dry out. I'm not taking it as far on an internal temperature basis as I would a brisket, like mid to high 170s because I don't want to dry it out. So once we've got nice bark, we're going to wrap it up. All right, patting it in, over to the smoker we go. We've been smoking the tri-tip for about three and a half hours. All I've done is I've spritzed with cider vinegar a couple of times during the cook. You could also use something like butter. So we've got a couple of pieces of aluminum foil out here, but let me grab the tri-tip. Check the temp, grab it. We've been checking along the way. We're looking for mid 160s. Yep, it's like 164. As you can see here, it's got beautiful bark, beautiful, beautiful bark. So we're going to choose the wrap in foil. So go back to like, if we were cooking a brisket, you can no wrap, you can wrap in butcher paper, you can wrap in foil, or you can do a foil boat. Well, we have always done this in foil to make sure that we don't dry it out. And then we're going to put some fat in the foil. So we're going to use some beef tallow. You could use butter, you can use nothing at all, but why not give this a little bit of beef tallow, keep it nice and wet. If you remember back on our brisket series we did a couple of years ago where we did briskets with tallow versus not, where we did paper versus foil, wrap versus no wrap. I told you in that series, Joe Zavala smokes all his briskets wrapped in foil. And a lot of people are scared of that. But what we did at the end was we pull it out of the foil to kind of get the bark back for the last few minutes. And that's something we can do here if we think the bark is too wet, but we'll check it out when we're done. All right, so we've got a good amount of foil in there. Two pieces of heavy duty aluminum foil. Just going to wrap it nice and tight. We're going to go back in the smoker. Now you can stay at the same temperature, but I would say after you wrap, just depends on when you want to eat this. So if you're in a hurry, you can certainly increase the temperature to speed up that cook process. 275, 300 if you have to, or you can leave it the same. And then when you're done, we're going to make sure it's nice and tender and we're going to rest it. So back in the smoker we go. It's been two more hours at 250. The tri-tip is tender and I'm going to show you that. I've been checking it with the instant read thermometer, but I'm going to demonstrate that here. Oh yeah, oh yeah. Looks beautiful. It's maintaining all those juices because we're going to need all that. I'm actually going to rest the tri-tip in that, but just to show you here, just like with a brisket, I'm looking for it to be tender. So I don't really care what this says, but like no resistance. It feels really good. And what is it? 205. So we need to let this rest. I'm actually going to set it back in the foil, but just lightly tinted. I'm not wrapping this up so that it continues to cook. We can put this away in a cooler. We're not going to wait that long today. We'll be back. See how we did. All right, well, we've let the tri-tip rest down. It's about 150 degrees. Optimally for me, I'm in the 140s, 150. So you want to let meats like this rest because all the moisture in those muscle fibers are like pushed out to the end and you want to let it relax. That way it just ultimately results in big juicy bites for you. And any tallow, butter, whatever you use, put that on the block. When you go to barbecue joint, it's no secret where all the wetness comes from on the block. So I should have talked about this when the tri-tip was raw, but the grain in a tri-tip runs two different directions. So it's going to be really hard for you to see this now, but the direction in this tri-tip runs this way and this way. I could see it before we cooked it. So fortunately it was kind of like right here in the middle. So you want to cut it that way so that you, it's just like a brisket. Grain going multiple different directions here. Woo. Bam, look at that big ass smoke ring. Heck yeah. Oh yeah. Plenty of smoke. So this piece is going this direction. Oh man, I can tell it's tender. Serrated knife is my favorite. Man, put a little tallow on there. This looks super good. In we go. You can see how tender that is. Damn, that is really, really good. This was 33 bucks. My family loves brisket. And so this is a great option for, I mean, I think four people can eat out of this. Dude, that's so good. I mean, let me hold this up here and show you. Sitting in a smoke for three and a half hours and that post oak smoke on the mill scale did its job. Man, I'm a big fan of this. I know that some people consider this controversial. When we did it four years ago, we knew there was a lot of hate around it. We're not here to tell you what you should be cooking. We're just showing you a way to do it that we know works should you choose to do this. So 33 bucks, much cheaper than a brisket. Give it a shot if you want. It's definitely a method that I like. I gotta tell you, the seasoning is not hot at all. Like, especially when you're cooking something this long, it's great on steak. You're gonna love it on steak. But this, excellent application for it. You know, would I do anything different? I like a lot of coarse cracked pepper. So if I was doing seasoning a little bit different, I might put holy cow and this down. Would both be good. But you guys gotta get you some garlic jalapeno blanco. It's out now. It's on meatshirts.com. It's at your local retailer. So if they don't have it, tell them they need to bring it in because we've been telling them about it for a while. But appreciate you guys being here. We will see you guys next week.