Pulled Beef Recipe
- bbqspark
- 3 days ago
- 3 min read
Everyone talks about pulled pork like it's the best BBQ dish, but that's because they've never tried pulled beef... piqued your interest? Follow the recipe to learn how to cook it!
INGREDIENTS
3 kg of beef fillet
Sweet BBQ Sauce
Chinotto
Round sandwich
Gherkins
White and black sesame seeds
PREPARATION
Pulled beef can be considered a step up from pulled pork, especially in terms of flavor. It's still a cut that's shredded and tenderized, cooked slowly to allow the meat to tenderize and the collagen to dissolve.
The cut we decided to use is the beef rump. Common and readily available in Italian butchers, it comes from the front of the animal between the neck and the shoulder. It's also quite a marbled cut, especially on the back side, facing the ribs, which will help us achieve even more flavor.
Cleaning is not difficult since it will only be necessary to remove, on the front, the normal "cover" of connective tissue that is unlikely to dissolve during cooking.
Don't worry if the two muscle bundles separate during cleaning, because we will have to dissect them later anyway.
To complete the cleaning phase, we need to further divide the cut into smaller pieces: first cutting each muscle bundle lengthwise and then further dividing the meat to obtain uniform cubes.
Let's move on to seasoning. To flavor the meat, we use a rub created by us and included in our online calculator: Kentucky Rub . By accessing the calculators section of our website, you can find different types of rubs with their respective lists of ingredients, weighed according to the quantities you need.
We combine all the spices to create the rub and one at a time we sprinkle each cube of meat generously with the spice mix.
Let's move on to cooking. In our case, we'll use a gas grill, demonstrating how you can smoke with this type of BBQ.
Keeping the lid closed, we preheated the barbecue, turning on only the side burners and leaving the central ones off, and placed steel trays with grill racks on top in the center.
All we have to do is place all the beef cubes on each rack.
Before closing the lid and starting cooking, we insert a probe into the core of a cut of meat, to be able to monitor its temperature and alert us when it reaches 65°C.
We set the BBQ temperature to 180°C.
To smoke on a gas grill, you usually use a smoke box, but we want to show you how you can do it even with a simple aluminum tray.
Simply fill a small tray with wood pellets or chips of your favorite wood essence and place the tray directly over a burner: after a few moments the wood will ignite, producing smoke.
Once the core temperature reaches 65°C, we are ready for the second cooking phase.
At this point the meat will already have a nice brown color, mainly from the smoking.
We continue cooking using a cast iron saucepan placed over an off burner: it is important to continue at this stage too with an indirect cooking barbecue setup, to allow for gentle cooking.
Add all the pieces of meat to the pan and add a little more flavor. To do this, add some chinotto, which will add both a sweet and slightly bitter flavor, and drizzle with barbecue sauce.
We close the saucepan and the barbecue with their respective lids and set the temperature to 140°C.
Since we can't measure the temperature inside the pan because there might be some liquid in it, it could be incorrect. We check every now and then by opening the pan, keeping in mind that it will still take several hours.
The simplest and most effective way to check if the meat is ready to shred is to touch it with your hand using a heat-resistant silicone glove, suitable for contact with food.
Our Gevis gloves they are certainly the most suitable for the purpose.
We take the pan into the kitchen and finish peeling each piece of meat with the help of our gloves.
Take a sandwich, cut it in half and fill it with a layer of meat, some sliced pickled cucumbers and a sprinkling of black and white sesame seeds.
We can close the sandwich and taste all the flavor of the beef.
You'll notice how different beef is from pork, especially in this type of preparation: beef has a more intense aroma and flavor, and the sauce helps bring out its aroma even more, combining the bitterness of the chinotto with the sweetness of the barbecue sauce. The gherkins provide a nice contrast to their sweet and sour flavor, cleansing the palate with every bite.
If you too don't stop at the first version but are for upgrades , this recipe is for you!
