How to Smoke a Perfect Brisket Right on Your Gas Grill

Turn on one of the myriad barbecue shows on cable TV and YouTube, and you’ll find a chef posing in front of a smoker that’s a marvel of engineering. If you’re a home cook, though, there’s one glaring problem: Those smokers are so big, they would barely fit in your garage. They tend to cost as much as a used pickup truck, too. 

“They’re incredible pieces of equipment,” Wallace says. “But they’re really just as much about the show.” 

She’s happy to expound on the joys of working with a big ol’ contest-grade smoker—and far more modest ones, too—but if you’re a rookie, she suggests starting with a gas grill. A gas burner makes it easy to set and maintain the temperature, and the relatively small smoking chamber beneath the lid allows the brisket to get plenty of that iconic wood-smoke flavor.

Begin with a couple handfuls of presoaked hardwood chips: oak is a good, mellow first choice. Place the wood in a small metal smoking basket—or, alternatively, in heavy-duty foil—atop the burner but below the grill, on the opposite side of your meat.

If you’re thinking about a new gas grill, look for a model like the high-performing Napoleon Rogue PRO 425 SIB, which aces our indirect-heat test. 

The great thing about using a gas grill as a smoker is that it lets you easily and precisely control your heat throughout a loooong cook. (Make sure you have a spare propane tank on hand!) 

“Gas grills have multiple ranges for heat—you’ve got one, two, three, four knobs,” Wallace says. “It’s all about the indirect heat, the temperature you create inside.” And having a steady flow of propane, rather than feeding charcoal or wood to the beast hour after hour, makes it much easier to set and maintain a consistent temperature throughout the process. 

And what should that temperature be? The sweet spot is about 250. “It’s not too high and not too low,” Wallace says. Check the temperature with a thermometer that can live inside your grill (not to be confused with the instant-read thermometer you’ll use to check the temperature of the meat itself), so you know exactly how hot it is at any point in your smoking time.

If this is your first time smoking meat—or your first time in a long while—Wallace suggests that you start with something inexpensive and more forgiving than brisket. Think delicious skin-on, bone-in chicken thighs. 

They’re much less expensive than an $80 prime brisket. Indeed, they’re just about the cheapest thing you’ll find in the meat department of your supermarket.

And while you can season the chicken with basic spices—salt, pepper, and paprika—Wallace ups her game with berbere, a warm and comforting spice mixture used in Ethiopian and other East African cuisine. It has paprika, cayenne, garlic, chili powder, onion, ginger, cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice, cumin, and cardamom. You can buy it from brands like Brundo and Spice Bazaar on Amazon if you can’t find it in your local market.

By starting with chicken, there’s much less investment in time, too. Where a brisket can take all day, you can smoke thawed chicken thighs in about an hour.

“They’re easy to work with and much more approachable,” Wallace says.

Best of all, they’re far more forgiving. Unlike a brisket, chicken thighs are pretty hard to overcook. (They’re safe at 165º F, but still tasty at 195.) Once the thighs are at 170º F or so, pull them out and put them over direct heat on the grill, or pop them into a 450º F oven to render the fat from the skin and crisp them up à la Peking duck.

The result is one of the best inexpensive meals of all time.

With a little smoked poultry success under your apron strings, you’re ready to channel your inner Michelle Wallace and smoke your first brisket. The journey begins with a shopping trip.

“To end up with a great product, you have to start with a great product,” she says. “So you don’t want low-quality beef.”

If you’re going to invest all that time and money into the meal, she adds, go to a great local butcher, a farmers market, or the supermarket with the best meat department. A brisket is a seriously large piece of meat, anywhere from 6 to 16 pounds, says Paul Hope, CR’s trained-chef food editor. “Briskets are often sliced in half and sold as two different cuts: point cut and flat cut,” he says. “At a BBQ joint, you’re usually asked whether you want ‘moist’ or ‘lean’ brisket when you order, with moist serving as code for point cut and lean meaning flat cut. I always tell a first timer to buy a point cut, because it’s much fattier and more forgiving.”

Wallace trims the brisket carefully, leaving about a quarter-inch cap of fat around the outside. And even though pork shoulder and rib recipes often involve multi-ingredient rubs, with everything from chili powder to brown sugar, a brisket rub is more basic: salt, black pepper, and maybe a little garlic powder, Wallace says. Many top pitmasters apply some yellow mustard to the outside of the brisket to get the salt and pepper to stick, but Wallace prefers soy sauce, which adds a nice umami flavor without distracting from the flavor of that quality beef.

She puts the trimmed, seasoned brisket in a bin and refrigerates it overnight, giving the rub a chance to work its magic on the meat.

What’s next? Setting your alarm for Brisket Day. Like early, anywhere from 2 to 6 a.m. “If you want to eat by 6 o’clock,” Wallace says, “you definitely have to set your alarm early, very early. Depending on the size of your brisket, you’re probably going to need 12 to 16 hours.”

The first steps of the cook are straightforward. Take your brisket out of the fridge and let it warm to room temperature. Turn on the grill, heat it to that magic 250° F, and add your presoaked wood chips. Put the meat on the opposite side of those smoldering hardwood chips.

For the first 4 or 5 hours, Wallace says the heat will do most of the work, building the barklike crust that’s a hallmark of a great brisket while absorbing the smoke that gives it flavor. So keep the temperature steady and the wood chips replenished.

After that 4-hour mark, start monitoring the temperature of the meat (rather than the temp of the grill) with an instant-read thermometer. At a certain point, the temperature may appear to stop climbing. It’s not your imagination; pitmasters call that “the stall.” You can wait it out by continuing the cook, or you can wrap your brisket in unwaxed butcher paper—pitmasters call this wrapping “the crutch”—and return it to the grill for several hours of additional smoking.

“The paper absorbs oil, so the tallow that comes out as it’s wrapped seeps into the paper, and keeps that brisket moist,” Wallace says. “It’s essentially wrapped in its own fat.”

How do you know when your brisket is done? Wallace says an instant-read thermometer is a valuable tool, especially for a beginner, but she’s learned to employ her senses, too. “Your ending brisket should be anywhere between 200 and 205° F. But before you say, ‘Hey, this is done,’ give your eyes and your hands a final say. There’s a look and an almost jjggly feel that a brisket has when it’s done.”

While timers and thermometers get you into the right temperature zone, each brisket will tell you when it’s truly ready to come off the coals, an ethos Wallace learned while working for the legendary Gatlin family at Gatlin’s BBQ in Houston. “This is the beauty of barbecue,” Wallace says. “I’ve smoked probably thousands of briskets in my life, and the cook is different for every brisket.”

Once you’ve pulled the meat off the grill, it’s time to start patting yourself on the back, right? Not quite. To go from a decent to a championship-quality brisket, you need to let the meat rest. Really, really rest. Pitmasters use a high-quality, well-insulated cooler for this. (See our Top Pick here.) Place the brisket inside, wrapped in butcher’s paper or foil, and let it relax for 2 hours, using a thermometer periodically to make sure the brisket stays at a safe temperature (above 140° F), without continuing to cook.

“It’s a large piece of meat, and it’s been going for hours. It really, truly needs that time to settle down, redistribute all the juices, and become a sliceable, delicious piece of meat,” Wallace says. “You never, never, never want to cut a brisket while it’s too hot. Otherwise, it will just dry out, and all the hard work you put into it will be ruined.”

Words of wisdom from a true expert.

Wallace is quick to point out that a brisket takes a lot of time but adds that it doesn’t require the constant attention of a steak on a hot grill. So she spends the downtime wisely. Sure, she’ll share a beer or two with friends and family, but she also whips up side dishes that truly complement her perfectly smoked meats.

“I love throwing onions on the smoker to make, like, a smoky onion dip, like, for chips and dip, you know what I mean?” she says.

Other favorites include her elevated potato salad, baked beans, and dirty rice with smoked chicken livers.

Her epic option? Smoked collard greens. She starts with the leaves slow-cooked in the smoker. She adds slow-cooked cannellini beans and some smoked goat (though you can totally substitute brisket or pork) and tops everything off with cornbread croutons. The result is a dish that nods to the southern U.S. but also pays homage to Northern Italy, home of classic Tuscan-style bean recipes with escarole.