For today’s brisket and barbecue, fat’s where it’s at
“Lean or fatty?” is a question barbecue fans hear often nowadays. As you step up to the chopping block at your favorite barbecue joint, the pit master will inquire as to your preferred cut of brisket — the “flat,” which is relatively lean and devoid of fat, or the “point,” whose meat is threaded with glistening veins of melted fat.
Just as the American populace is divided almost 50-50 along political lines, I’d estimate that lovers of the lean versus lovers of the fatty are divided similarly. However, unlike the no-holds-barred hostility of politics, barbecue is mostly a live-and-letlive tradition, and there is something of a truce among the two sides.
That’s not to say that each party doesn’t occasionally make fun of the other side. Lean lovers think fatty lovers are suckers for wasting their money paying for fat (brisket is usually sold by the pound, and fatty brisket might be one-quarter fat). Fatty lovers think lean lovers have bad taste — “fat is flavor!” is their mantra.
It didn’t used to be this way. If you walked into a Houston barbecue joint in the 1980s and asked for sliced brisket, you almost always got lean by default. Fatty brisket was reserved for chopped beef sandwiches. This paralleled the trend in American cuisine that started in the 1970s and advocated for more healthful eating with anything “low-fat,” “nofat” and “fat-free.”
The irony, of course, is that we replaced fat with sugar and Americans got fat anyway.
Those were dire times. We stopped eating bacon. We stigmatized egg yolks and made sad omelets just out of egg whites. We unironically decided that a processed product called “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter!” was better and more healthful than real butter.
Then in the 2000s, there was a backlash against this nonfat trend (fatlash?). The artisanal food movement, along with its smoked-meat spin-off known as “craft barbecue,” advocated for natural rather than processed products, even though nature tends to pack on the fat. Bacon was back, baby!
Our understanding of fat became more nuanced. There was good fat (unsaturated) and bad fat (saturated). Still, meat contained saturated fat so foods with unsaturated fat took precedence — i.e., nuts and fish. Recently, though, the floodgates have opened, and even saturated fats are being celebrated for their alleged health benefits, culminating in the popular high-fat Keto diet.
We are living in the golden age of fat. The old standby lard — pork fat — has returned to classic dishes such as the refried beans and tamales at your local Tex-Mex joint. (To its credit, the Fiesta supermarket chain never stopped selling tubs of lard.) British food has arguably improved with the return of suet (a type of beef fat) used in the dough to make pies, puddings and pastries (pasties).
At steakhouses, the once beloved filet mignon, known to be tender though relatively lean, has been eclipsed in popularity by the much fattier rib-eye. Beef marketers have even gone a step further, jettisoning the relatively fat-free “eye” of the rib-eye and just offering the rich, fatty “ribeye cap” that curls around it.
It is rare that you will visit a French or even “New American” restaurant without seeing a rillette on menu, which may be the culmination of our newfound love of fat — it is basically meat cooked and simmered in liquid duck fat.
And, of course, butter and bacon are now unapologetically celebrated everywhere. Remember Paula Deen?
Which brings us back to barbecue. Undoubtedly, the standard-bearer of today’s craft barbecue is a slice of fatty brisket. This is the cut that most newschool barbecue joints are judged by. Terminology varies. You can order it as fatty, moist, loose, wet, top, outside or point and the pit master will know what you want.
And in a case of barbecue trends coming full circle, there is something of a backlash against fatty brisket. Barbecue connoisseurs now consider a sample of the lean cut as the best way to judge a pit master’s skill at cooking brisket. There’s even a hashtag for those making their views known on social media: #lovethelean.