Yeah, I know… I’ve been writing a lot about barbecue lately but it’s another passion of mine besides baking bread. And yesterday, I made what is essentially meat candy!

Last weekend, I made a gorgeous brisket. It was a huge cut of meat. I shared most of the flat (lean side) with a friend and kept the transition and point. Even after I split the transition from the point, I still had a bunch of point meat left. So, yesterday I cubed it up for burnt ends.

At least for me, burnt ends aren’t necessarily about the meat. They’re about the sauce. And because the meat was SO good, I didn’t want to use store-bought sauce, even though there are wonderful sauces out there. I wanted to make my own.

I must come clean about what inspired me to make the burnt ends and sauce. I happened to watch a video on bourbon burnt ends by Meat Church BBQ. And since I love bourbon, and have a few bottles, I thought that the sauce would be perfect for my burnt ends.

But when I looked at my shelf, I saw that I only had top-shelf bottles that are sippers. Bummer. I wasn’t going to use bourbon from $75+ bottles. But then I thought, what about using another spirit? I smiled because I had plenty of rum. So, I concocted a sauce recipe. I call it “Rum Fire.”

Jamaican Rum Fire BBQ Sauce

The idea behind this sauce was that I wanted to showcase the funkiness (aka “hogo”) of Jamaican Rum in a BBQ sauce and also give the sauce a more Caribbean feel as opposed to traditional southwest flavors. That covers the rum part. The “fire” comes from hot chili peppers like Habanero or Scotch Bonnet which also add to the Caribeean theme of this sauce.

Base

• 1 cup ketchup
• ½ cup tomato paste
• ½ cup apple cider vinegar
• 1 cup brown sugar

Rum and Aromatics

• ¾ cup Jamaican Rum
• 1 small onion, pureed
• 4 cloves garlic, pureed
• ¼ carrot, pureed
• 1 tbsp Worcestershire (I prefer Bear & Burton’s W Sauce)
• 1 tbsp Dijon mustard
• 1 tbsp beef tallow or butter

Spice Layer (Jamaican‑leaning)

• 1 tsp smoked paprika
• ½ tsp ground ginger
• ½ tsp cayenne
• ½ tsp black pepper
• ½ tsp allspice
• Pinch of clove (tiny—Doctor Bird amplifies it fast)
• 1 tbsp Meat Church Holy Cow
• 1 tbsp Meat Church Holy Gospel (for dusting after the cook)
• Optional: 1-2 Habanero or Scotch Bonnet chili peppers (seeds removed, finely chopped)

Process

1. Puree the onion, garlic, and carrot in a blender to create a smooth paste.
2. On medium-low heat, melt the tallow or butter, then pour the puree into a medium sauce pan. Sauté the puree until transluscent.
3. Add the Worcestershire and Dijon and completely incorporate
4. Add all the dry spices and incorporate them completely. Cook for 1-2 minutes or until the spices become fragrant.
5. Add all the base ingredients and the chili peppers to the pot and mix well.
6. Once everything’s together, add the rum. Mix until fully incorporated.
7. Allow to come to a slow boil, then reduce heat to low to burn off the alcohol.
8. Simmer uncovered for 30-45 minutes depending on how thick you want the sauce.
9. Once you’ve got your desired thickness, let it cook for 30 minutes.

If you don’t want that Caribbean heat kick, use less chili peppers or devein them before chopping them up.

Making the Burnt Ends

When I’ve made burnt ends in the past, I don’t cook them right after I pull the brisket. The point meat is so soft and fatty that it’ll fall apart. So what I’ve learned to do is to refrigerate the meat. It makes cubing and saucing so much easier! Plus, it limits the amount – if any – the meat breaks up. If the meat was warm, it would tear apart and you’d have pulled brisket. That’s not a bad thing, but not what you’re after.

1. Cube refrigerated brisket point meat into 3/4″ cubes.
2. Sauce the meat just enough to coat. You don’t want the meat to be swimming in sauce, otherwise the sauce won’t caramelize, and that’s what makes a great burnt end.
3. Sprinkle the Meat Church Holy Cow (or a salt, pepper, garlic, smoked paprika mix) over the meat, then gently fold the meat to evenly distribute the sauce and seasoning.
4. Cook uncovered at 300°F for 30 minutes. That said, I like to cook them on my Traeger to give them a kiss of smoke.
5. Fold the meat again, then cook for 30-45 minutes to fully caramelize the sauce.
6. Remove from oven then immediately sprinkle Holy Gospel seasoning (or your favorite that has just a hint of sweetness to it).
7. Gently fold the seasoning into the hot meat.
8. Rest for 15 minutes, then serve, using the remaining BBQ sauce as a dip.

One thing about the baking process is that it is sensitive to changes in many different parameters. Change just one thing and you may get wildly different results than what you expected. For me, the latest change I made was getting a new baking steel after baking for years on a Fibrament D stone.

Take baguettes, for example. I was used to baking them on my stone, and my process revolved around it; mainly from a timing standpoint because my stone took so long to come to temp. But with my new steel, it comes to temp much quicker, and not only that, it retains heat much better than my old stone. Not only that, heat transfer to my dough is much more efficient than my stone.

What this means is that I’ve had to adjust my timings. For instance, I use to be able to bake my baguettes slightly underproofed with my stone because heat transfer wasn’t nearly as efficient and I could get a way with it. But with my steel, I have to take the final fermentation to fully fermented. Otherwise, my loaves would blow up and I’d get huge holes and the loaves would blow through my cuts and not form any ear. But this is a good thing.

With the loaves pictured above, I went a little too far with the final fermentation. They puffed up nicely and the tasted damn good. But I could tell just by looking at them, that I need to make an adjustment to my final fermentation timing.

But one thing I can tell you is this: I’m never going back to a stone for home baking. That super-efficient heat transfer has produced loaves with a glorious open crumb (what you want with baguettes), and more importantly with large format loaves, great oven spring that I couldn’t rely on with my stone unless I heated it up to a very high temperature because it didn’t retain heat as well.

For years I used a Fibrament-D baking stone for baking all my bread. But a few months ago, for reasons I still don’t understand, it started taking forever to come to temperature and then wouldn’t hold it. It was a pisser, to say the least. I was embarrassed to share pictures of my bread because it had that classic look of bread that had been baked in an environment where the ambient temperature was greater than the baking surface. Ugh!

Here’s a rough idea of that effect:

What happens when the ambient temperature is higher than the surface is that the sides and the top bake faster than the bottom. The crust also sets too fast and what you get is an elliptical loaf that is also quite dense.

After a few bakes trying to do different things, I finally trashed my stone and started baking my boules and batards in a Dutch oven. That wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it did limit the size of the loaves I could bake. I really prefer baking on an open surface.

So, since Christmas was coming up, I did some research and asked Santa for a baking steel; specifically, the ThermiChef XL. After using it for the first time last week, I exclaimed, “Damn! I probably should’ve just used a baking steel from the get-go!” But looking back on my original decision to use a stone, I admit that I got caught up in the romance of baking on a stone surface. I had wanted to model my baking on baking in a hearth oven. And it worked great for a while, but I’m really at a loss as to why my stone stopped performing.

But it doesn’t matter now. The baking steel is so much more efficient. It comes to temperature much quicker, and as I got the 1/4″ thick steel, it retains heat much more efficiently. But most importantly, based on what I’ve seen thus far, heat transfer seems to be much better than my old stone, which would cool down at the spots where the dough would make contact. What I’m finding with the steel is that the bottoms of my loaves are much more solid compared to baking on the stone.

Another advantage with the steel is that it heats up a lot quicker than the stone. Even though the manufacturer recommends heating it for an hour before baking, I found that it comes to a stable temperature in half that time. My stone usually took well over an hour to come to temperature. Also, the steel comes back to temperature after a bake much quicker – like 10-15 minutes after a batch, so if I am doing more than a batch, my baking cycles are now much faster.

Finally, at 16″ X 22″, the steel provides much more surface area than my old stone. Furthermore, it has straight sides, whereas my stone had sloping sides. With this new steel, I could easily bake 3-4 800g batards at once.

Yeah, baking with a steel is definitely a game-changer. I may just get another to go into my other oven so I can do two batches at once.