Tri tip masquerading as brisket

Well, we hosted our after-golf potluck last night and I tried an experiment.
Originally I was just going to make a big pork shoulder for pulled pork sandwiches (we keep things simple for these things...).
Then I found out two of my guests don't eat pork, so I decided to do a beef brisket too. Well, I was in a hurry to shop and the grocery store didn't have any briskets. The butcher told me "tri tip is a better choice anyway." I asked if he and I were talking about the same results of fall-apart-tender, and he assured me that we were. I was skeptical but went ahead and bought two.
Up to this point, the only way I had cooked tri tip was grilling it like a steak. (Always with nice results.) I looked online to find out if anyone had ever done a bbq tri-tip and I saw that a lot of people did, but cooked them more like my grilled method. Medium - medium rare in the center.
Well, I neded up cooking the tri-tips in a similar method to how I did the pork shoulder and got exactly what I was after. It got rave reviews!

Here's what I did...(keep in mind, I had to do this sort of "make shift" because I didn't have a full day to put it in the BGE...just a few hours here and there.)

Day before:
Dry rubbed in the morning--mixture of chili powder, ground coffee, garlic powder, onion powder, salt, pepper and cumin.
Around 2pm, seared the meat on a very hot grill. Got it very nicely charred.
Transferred meat to a rack on the bottom of a large aluminum pan. Turned off left side of grill. Put smoking chips (only had Hickory) in foil packets on hot side of grill. "Smoked" at about 250 for about 3.5 hours.

Day of pot luck:
Finished in the oven in a smaller aluminum pan covered very tightly with foil, until fork tender. (About three more hours at 400.) Wanted to cook it lower and slower but the pork (which was also in the oven cooking via the same method) was not getting done quickly enough, so had the heat cranked up a bit. I had to make sure the pork was tender enough to pull. (And it was!)

Just thought I'd share in case anyone was wondering about the versatility of tri tip. (Wish I had taken photos...)

[Jenise]

I'm drooling! I've never tried to cook tri-tip that way, but I can imagine it being great and possibly even better than brisket would have been, as it's less dense.

Funny, I too have a tri-tip discovery story: last Friday night Bob and I stopped at the market on our way home from a barolo tasting. We needed milk, Contac for Bob's cold, and while there I picked up two hunks of meat, a chuck roast because I wanted meat to shred for ravioli and a tri-tip, because that cut was on sale and I like having something like that in the freezer for last-minute meal planning (I'll send it straight from the freezer to the outdoor grill to smoke/grill at the same time, it will be done rare in about three hours.) So when we got home Bob said you go on in, I'll bring the groceries. And I said great, I'll get the ice waters and see you upstairs. When I got up the next morning pretty close to 9 a.m. and went downstairs, what did I find? All the groceries right there on the counter, sans the cold medicine.

Dog excrement!

So I poured out the milk and put both hunks of meat in a Dutch oven with some broth, wine and onions to cover. After a few hours I went to test both pieces of meat: very interesting differences. The chuck had a stronger flavor that I didn't like as well as the milder tri tip, and of course a zillion pockets of fat one needed to cut around. The tri-tip also won my heart on texture, it was very evenly grained and had great mouth-feel. I then tested Bob on both, and he reached exactly the same conclusions. The tri-tip won on everything but price, and even that difference isn't as great as it would appear on paper since the tri-tip had virtually no waste and, of course, the chuck had quite a bit. Next time I make pot-au-feu? Tri-tip.

Interesting Jenise! Funny we should both have a similar discovery!
So, did you use either in the ravioli?

[Jenise]

Interesting Jenise! Funny we should both have a similar discovery!
So, did you use either in the ravioli?

No, never got around to making the third one I'd imagined as too much time went into the first two. I lost my ravioli cutter* and we had to crimp/seal every ravioli with the tines of a fork. Took about four hours to make six dozen ravioli.

*The ravioli cutter actually went missing several years ago but I'd forgotten that, had not been able to find it since moving into the new kitchen. I searched every inch of this kitchen, I swear, and last weekend Bob did too. So on Sunday I went on line and purchased a new one at Amazon.com. So what did I find yesterday? Yup. IT KNEW.