Delicious beef brisket takes special nurturing

I have never had a baby. But now I understand.

I have spent the last several months of my life looking after a small, constantly needy child — actually, it has only been a few hours, but it feels like several months.

It’s a healthy 6 pounder, and I have been tending to its every need, worrying about it, checking on it every few minutes to make sure it is doing fine. I don’t want its temperature to rise above 200 degrees.

I am speaking here about a beef brisket. I thought that was obvious.

As I’ve mentioned previously, I indulged myself for a recent significant birthday by purchasing one of those expensive kamado outdoor grills that do everything for you except walk your dog.

One reason for getting it is that I wanted to use it to smoke a brisket. I lived in Texas for three years, and I acquired a permanent hankering for barbecued beef brisket. Brisket is easy to find now at just about every barbecue restaurant in the country, but I wanted to make my own.

On at least two occasions, I had smoked briskets on my old Weber grill. They were fine. A little tough, perhaps. But not notable enough to try it more than twice.

And that is why I wanted to cook a brisket on a grill that cost as much as a bad used car. This grill can cook at a low temperature all day long without adding more coals and, best of all, can maintain a desired temperature just as long.

In the south-central part of western east Texas, which is where I lived, the only wood used for barbecue is post oak, a smallish and unusually straight type of oak tree that grows all over the place there. It produces just the right flavor of smoke for an excellent beef barbecue.

But I could not find any post oak wood chips, so I ended up using mesquite — another very Texan wood, though it has a distinctly different flavor.

My grill came with a heat deflector shield that keeps whatever it is you are grilling from scorching or burning on the bottom. One month after I bought the grill, the heat deflector cracked from the heat.

I wrote to the company — it was just a month old, the deflector was still under warranty — and they said they would happily send a replacement.

I waited. And waited. And waited. OK, I only waited for a month, but I was eager to make my beef brisket. I wrote to them again and finally they said they they would deliver the new one on a specific day. As it happens, that day was the very day I had planned to make the brisket.

If the heat deflector had arrived in the morning, everything would have been fine and I could have used it. It arrived in the afternoon.

Still, somehow, the brisket was cooked. I lovingly, if not obsessively, checked the temperature of the grill every 10 or 20 or 30 minutes for eight hours. And finally it was done.

I let it rest for another 45 minutes, then sliced it and ate it.

My little boy was delicious.

DANIEL NEMAN/ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH It took eight hours or so, but beef brisket cooked in a kamado grill turned out just like they make it in Texas.