What this video is really trying to solve
Steve Gow opens with a familiar barbecue contradiction: a brisket can be tender enough to pull apart and still chew dry. That is the problem he spends the video trying to sort out. His aim is not to defend one school of brisket cooking over another. It is to separate the things people usually lump together—fat loss, water loss, temperature, hold time, and humidity—so brisket dryness stops sounding like a mystery with ten conflicting answers.
The short answer from his experiment is this: brisket dryness does not come from one switch being flipped. In his tests, fat loss mattered more than he expected, temperature and time at temperature clearly changed moisture loss, and humidity in the cooking or holding environment affected the result enough to complicate any simple rule.
Why tenderness and dryness are not the same thing
One of the more useful ideas in the video is also the most basic: tender and juicy are not identical outcomes. A brisket can be soft enough to eat easily and still leave the mouth feeling dry. That distinction matters because so many brisket arguments collapse those two sensations into one.
Gow treats tenderness as a separate variable from moisture retention. That is why he moves from brisket to beef eye of round later in the video. Brisket is too messy a test subject on its own because every brisket is different in fat cap thickness, marbling, and connective tissue. Eye of round gives him a leaner, more consistent muscle to isolate the effect of temperature and hold time.
What the weight data suggested about fat versus water
To test the idea that brisket dries out mainly because it loses fat, Gow cooked several briskets in different ways. One went unwrapped for 21 hours, another for 13 hours before being wrapped and held, and a third was cooked hot and fast, then wrapped earlier. He collected drippings over time, separated the fat after chilling, and weighed what remained.
At first, that data seemed to point away from fat loss as the whole explanation. But once he looked again and calculated the overall weight lost versus the fat removed, the picture changed. His conclusion was that the super low and slow brisket had lost far more fat than the more traditional low and slow brisket, even though the difference in water retention between them was tiny. In his framing, that tiny water difference looked far less important than the much larger fat difference.
That is the first big takeaway from the video: a brisket that feels dry may not be missing much water at all. It may simply have lost enough fat that there is less lubrication and less masking of the lean muscle’s dryness.
He does leave room for an outlier, though. The hot-and-fast brisket did not fit perfectly into the fat-loss story, since it tasted better despite not matching the low-and-slow pattern cleanly. That is one reason he keeps going rather than claiming the issue is solved.
How temperature and hold time changed the picture
The second theory in the video is that higher temperature causes more water loss through protein denaturation. To test that, Gow turned to beef eye of round and cooked slices to different internal temperatures, then compared moisture loss and perceived dryness.
The trend was straightforward: higher endpoint temperature meant more moisture loss and a drier eating experience. He also tested cumulative thermal exposure by holding slices at around 205 degrees for two hours. Those lost even more moisture than slices that were merely taken to 205 and removed right away. That matters because it shows that temperature is not the only variable. Time spent at that temperature changes the outcome.
He then compared two approaches he uses in his own brisket cooking: taking meat to a lower temperature and holding it for a long time, versus taking it to a higher temperature and stopping there. In his tests, the lower-temperature, long-hold method still lost moisture, but not as much as the higher-temperature cook.
His practical conclusion is clear: if you want to keep more moisture, lower finish temperature helps. If you hold at temperature for a long time, you still lose some moisture. If you go above 200 degrees, the drying effect gets stronger.
Why humidity started to matter
The video gets more interesting when humidity enters the picture. Gow tests eye of round in a very humid holding oven and finds that a higher-temperature sample can retain moisture more like a lower-temperature sample if the environment is humid enough.
That result does not cancel his earlier findings. Instead, it shows that the cooking environment can influence how aggressively meat gives up moisture. Dry air and humid air are not equivalent. Even wrapped meat can still interact with the air around it, according to his observations.
That idea becomes especially important when he returns to brisket. He cooks two briskets to the point of tenderness in a highly humid holding setup, then compares one taken to a higher internal temperature with one finished lower and held longer. In that re-test, the two briskets come out much closer than his earlier experiments would predict. Both are juicy. Both have similar texture.
His interpretation is cautious but meaningful: humidity appears capable of softening the difference between a higher-temperature brisket and a lower-temperature, long-hold brisket.
What the brisket re-test actually showed
This is the point in the video where the argument gets more nuanced. Gow is not claiming that high temperature suddenly stops mattering. He is saying that humidity may change how much damage higher temperature does.
He suggests a few possible reasons. Higher humidity may help meat retain more water, which in turn may affect how muscle fibers denature. Or the pressure created by a wetter environment may help maintain the structure of the meat longer. He does not overstate certainty here. He treats these as plausible explanations, not settled facts.
He also brings marbling back into the conversation. More marbled brisket can taste juicier even if the underlying muscle fibers are fairly dry, because the fat masks that dryness. That is why a heavily marbled brisket cooked hot can still feel rich and satisfying even if the leaner parts are not especially moist.
Gelatin gets its own place in the explanation too. Once collagen renders enough during a long cook, it contributes to juiciness by coating the meat and helping water stay put. Gow’s point is not that gelatin is unimportant. It is that collagen conversion is part of a bigger picture, and once a brisket is properly tender, there is already enough gelatin in play to support juiciness.
What the creator says to do with that information
The practical advice at the end is the most usable part of the video.
First, start with a better brisket if you can. Gow says a well-marbled choice brisket, prime brisket, or Wagyu brisket gives you more protection against dryness because fat masks what the muscle fibers are doing underneath.
Second, finish lower and hold longer if your goal is juiciness. His preferred method is to take brisket to about 195 degrees in the thickest part of the point, then move it to a 150-degree holding oven for about 18 hours. In his experience, that gives tenderness without pushing the brisket into the drier zone that can show up above 200 degrees.
Third, do not leave brisket unwrapped for too long. He describes offset and pellet smokers as acting a bit like dehydrators if the meat sits in them exposed for long stretches. The more time it spends in dry convection, the more moisture it gives up.
Fourth, pay attention to humidity. If a smoker or holding environment is very dry, that dryness matters. Gow mentions methods like closing the stack damper, using a water pan, cooking more meat at once, or working in a more humid environment to help hold moisture in the cook chamber.
What the video ultimately argues is that brisket dryness is not just about one bad choice. It is the result of several forces working together, and those forces do not always point in the same direction. A brisket can be tender and still feel dry because fat, moisture, humidity, and heat exposure all leave their mark in different ways.
For cooks trying to make sense of a brisket that looks right but eats wrong, that is a more useful answer than any one-line rule.
Watch the original video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWBBtftEyiw
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