The complete field reference

The $140 steak is a con.
The pit knew it first.

This is a Reference Bible: 602 finished pages, 246 entries, a 691-term index and a 142-term glossary. Page and entry counts are measured from the delivered PDF, not estimated.

Six hundred and two pages on buying, breaking down, seasoning and cooking the cheap half of the animal, so a $9 cut eats like a $25 one. Not a recipe book. A reference you open at the middle.

The Texas BBQ Playbook
  • 602 pages
  • 246 entries
  • PDF + EPUB
  • $27 · One-time payment. No subscription, no upsell required.
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  • 602 pages · 246 entries
  • 246 entries · 13 parts
  • $27 once · no subscription
  • 30-day refund · keep the files
Why beef got expensive and your dinner did not get better

You are not paying for flavour. You are paying for scarcity.

A steer yields around 490 pounds of saleable beef. Out of all of it, the ribeye rolls come to maybe sixteen pounds. The chuck, which is the shoulder, is a quarter of the whole animal. Nobody measured which one tastes better before setting those prices; the packer simply priced to clear the carcass, and the ribeye's price is subsidised by the chuck's. When the beef industry finally did go and measure, muscle by muscle, it found cuts buried in the cheap shoulder that rank among the most tender on the animal. Those cuts are still cheap. Most people still do not know their names.

Four rules, and the rest of the book is applications of them

Collagen is a switch, not a dial. Pull at 120 to 135°F, or hold at 195 to 205°F for hours, and never stop in the canyon between them. Salt the night before, uncovered, on a rack. Slice across the grain, thin. And remember that the price sticker is measuring scarcity, not quality. Learn those four and you can work out what to do with a cut this book never mentions.

What's inside

What is actually in it

Thirteen parts, built to be opened at the middle. Every entry stands on its own and points to the entries next to it.

  • The Cut Atlas. 66 entries. Every beef cut you will meet at a counter, plus pork, poultry, lamb and game. Muscle name, industry cut number, price tier, tenderness, what it stands in for, the two methods that suit it, and the one mistake that ruins it.p. 76
  • The Methods. 21 techniques explained by what is physically happening: dry brining, the reverse sear, the stall, wrapping, resting and holding, slicing, grinding, sausage, curing, jerky and rendering tallow.p. 244
  • The Cook Files. 28 complete cooks with timing tables and the failure point of each. Every one works on a kettle; most work in an oven.p. 335
  • The Math. Cost per cooked pound, yield tables, the whole-chuck-roll breakdown worked through, and a full entry on the cases where the cheap cut genuinely loses.p. 398
  • Diagnosis. 18 entries organised by symptom, not by cause. Tough, dry, no crust, bitter bark, no smoke ring, fire will not hold. Start with what you saw and work backwards.p. 424
  • The Field Tools. 14 reference pages built to be photographed or taped inside a cabinet door, plus four appendices, a 142-term glossary and a 691-term index.p. 460
A page from inside the book
Real pages from the book: a Cut Atlas entry and the Master Temperature Chart. Every atlas entry uses the same scannable structure so you can read it in fifteen seconds at the meat case.
Another page from inside the book
The linked contents, and a page from the Field Tools. 602 pages, numbered throughout, with a 691-term index at the back.

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Sliced smoked brisket on butcher paper showing dark peppery bark and a deep pink smoke ring Six thick raw chuck eye steaks on a wooden board, each showing one large well-marbled eye of muscle A bed of glowing orange post oak coals with grey ash edges
How it works

How it works

  • 1 · Buy it once $27, one payment, through Stripe. No account, no subscription, nothing recurring.
  • 2 · Download both formats The PDF for the laid-out reference with all its charts, and the EPUB for reading on a phone or e-reader. Yours immediately after checkout.
  • 3 · Open it at the middle Find the cut you are holding, read the fifteen-second spec block, cook it the way the entry says. Then follow the cross-references when you want the reasoning.
Why it earns its place

What it replaces

One ribeye dinner for four at a steakhouse, in the worked example on page 413, comes to roughly $312 with tax and service. The same four people fed from this book's flagship cook, a chuck eye steak reverse-seared and finished in rendered tallow, comes to roughly $46. The book costs $27 and does not run out. That is arithmetic on a stated price basis, not a promise. Your store is not the store in the example, and page 404 is an entire entry on the cases where the cheap cut loses.

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Who this is for

It is for you if

  • You cook beef regularly, you have looked at what a ribeye costs lately, and you would rather learn the animal than keep paying for the fashionable end of it.
  • You want the reasoning as well as the numbers. Why the collagen rule works, why searing does not seal in juices, why the smoke ring contributes nothing.
  • You own a grill, a smoker, or just an oven. Every method here is written to work on a kettle, and most of them work indoors.

It is not for you if

  • You want a short book of recipes with photographs of finished plates. This is a reference: dense, cross-referenced, and organised by cut and problem rather than by dish.
  • You want competition barbecue technique. There is an entry explaining what competition cooking optimises for and why this book does something different.
  • You are looking for a business or income opportunity. This is a cooking reference and it makes no claims of any kind about earnings.
30-day
refund
policy

The guarantee

Read it, cook from it, and if it is not what you wanted, email within 30 days for a full refund. You keep the files. There is nothing to send back and no form to argue with.

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Questions

Is this really 602 pages?

Yes, and the number is measured from the delivered PDF rather than estimated. 602 pages, 246 numbered entries across 13 parts, 253 tables, 115 tool cards and charts, a 142-term glossary and a 691-term index with page numbers. There is no filler, no transcript dumping and no blank worksheet padding. The book was built against a checklist that treats all three as release blockers.

Do I need a smoker?

No. Every method in the book is written to work on a 22-inch kettle grill, there is a full entry on turning a gas grill into a smoker with a foil pouch, and another on what a kitchen oven can and cannot do. There is also an entry for people who cannot light a fire where they live at all. The smoke is the smaller half of what makes barbecue good; the dry brine, the collagen rule, the temperature control and the slicing are the larger half, and none of them need a smoker.

What are the printable cards I saw mentioned?

At checkout Stripe offers one optional extra: The BBQ Cheat Sheets, $10, unticked by default. It is twelve pit-side reference cards and two wall charts covering temperatures, safety, fire, rubs, timing, buying, substitution and diagnosis, sized to print at home and cut out. Nothing in it is new material; it is the Playbook's own charts reformatted for a cabinet door, and the book is complete without it. Tick it or ignore it. The price on this page is the book.

Is this the same as the old book?

No. This replaces a 45-page guide that was sold here previously. It is a different product: a complete field reference at roughly thirteen times the length, rebuilt from the ground up with an index, a glossary, appendices and cross-references throughout. If you bought the old one, email and you will get this one at no charge.

What formats do I get, and is any of this dangerous?

PDF and EPUB, both, immediately after checkout. The PDF is laid out for reading and printing at 6×9 with the charts intact; the EPUB reflows for a phone or e-reader. On safety: the book gives temperatures below the USDA safe minimum, because that is how steak is cooked everywhere. It states that trade-off in full on its second page rather than burying it, lists exactly who should not cook below the minimums, and flags mechanically tenderized beef (which must always be cooked to 160°F) wherever it comes up. The curing chapters use sodium nitrite and are explicit that it must be weighed on a gram scale. Where the book and current USDA guidance ever disagree, it tells you to follow the USDA.

Brisket David
Who wrote it

About the presenter, plainly

"Brisket David" is an AI-generated presenter and narrator. The persona is a production device, and it is disclosed here rather than buried. The material behind it is not generated hand-waving. The cut anatomy, the industry cut numbers, the temperatures, the chemistry, the history and the arithmetic are drawn from the published sources listed in the book's References: USDA FSIS, the USDA meat purchase specifications, the Beef Checkoff muscle profiling research, and named histories of the Central Texas meat markets. Where cooks genuinely disagree, the book says so instead of picking a side quietly. Where a widely repeated claim is false, it says that too.

Old Texas pit tricks for people who refuse to pay steakhouse prices. The YouTube channel this book was written from.

Brisket David · Brisket David

That is the whole offer

602 pages, 246 entries, PDF and EPUB, $27 once, downloaded the moment you pay, refundable for 30 days with the files kept either way. One optional $10 extra at checkout, unticked. No countdown, no bonus stack, no second price appearing anywhere.

Get the Playbook · $27

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The Texas BBQ Playbook · $27 · One-time payment. No subscription, no upsell required.Get the Playbook · $27