Select vs Choice Taste Test. Select slices are on the outside top left and bottom left.
A visitor from Arkansas complained about the brisket at a local establishment, so we took it on ourselves to prove at least some of us up here in the permafrost know how to prepare proper Texas-style meats. Here’s how that turned into a Select vs Choice brisket taste test.
This taste test would not have been possible a few years ago because Select grade beef did not make it to retail, then supermarkets started adding it to their meat cases with whimsical names like “Butcher’s Promise”. But there was no question about the 14 pounder I bought at Walmart: USDA Select was prominently printed on the Cryovac. It was $5.69/lb; the only available Choice was punitively priced at $10.69/lb in a local supermarket, out of our budget range.
But the very next day, Fred the Butcher ran a special with Certified Angus briskets at $6.99/lb. I was in my car before the pixels dried on my monitor. Time for a Select vs Choice taste test! The one I got weighed 12 lbs so the price for the packaged product was not much different from the Walmart slab. When I got home and started trimming the briskets, however, I discovered the CAB brisket had already been trimmed while the Select brisket yielded a good 2 lbs of fat (which I rendered as beef tallow). We did our usual prep in which both briskets were liberally salted with Kosher salt and dry-cured overnight, then it was time to fire up the smoker.
Choice Brisket on left, Select on right.
The Walmart Select brisket was so big we had to cut it in two to fit our 18 inch Weber bullet. With two different form factors, it was hard to do a straight-up comparison. But we had a hunch Select brisket would not be tough like a Select steak because of the high fat content. To cut to the chase, we were right. After 5 hours in the smoker and 3 more in the oven following our Brisket Recipe, the flat and point sections in both briskets ranged from fork-tender to pudding-soft.
After satisfying our Arkansas traveler (who said we should advertise our brisket as a feature of our Airbnb), close to 20 lbs of smoked brisket went into in freezer to last us through our long bitter winter. It was packaged by weight so we won’t know whether we are grabbing a bag of Select vs Prime, but it won’t make a difference.
