BBQ Brisket Fans Should Skip This Costco Kirkland Signature Item

A barbecue brisket with a flavorful bark, an inviting smoke ring, and a tender middle is indeed a thing of beauty, but unfortunately, this hunk of beef takes a very long time to prepare. This is why fully-cooked store-bought options that simply need reheating are so convenient. However, not every BBQ brisket dish deserves a spot in your cart. For instance, you should definitely skip buying a box of burnt ends from Costco. According to customer reviews, this product is not up to par for the price point.

One of the 7 Costco Kirkland signature foods that aren't worth the price, an average-sized pack of burnt ends will set you back around $30, depending on the individual weight of the box. This ready-made option features all the classic ingredients you'd find in a home-made batch of burnt ends, like beef brisket, brown sugar, and seasonings. However, it also includes yeast extract (to lend the meat a super-savory flavor) and coffee, which is sometimes added to brisket to give it a robust and aromatic bark. 

Given all this, you'd expect it to have a top-notch flavor, but according to customers, it fails to deliver on two fronts. Firstly, the texture of the meat is dry, and it doesn't have a fresh flavor — while burnt ends are supposed to have a crispy exterior (so some textural notes are to be expected), they should be tender and succulent beneath that well-flavored bark. Secondly, they lack that distinctive smoky aroma that would normally lend this dish a fragrant depth.

Worse still, Kirkland's burnt ends don't come with barbecue sauce, which means you have to shell out for a separate bottle if you like your smoked meat to have a saucier quality (the instructions for the stove-top heating method advise adding the sauce to the meat once it's heated through). Perhaps if a sauce were included, it would lend some much-needed moisture to the brisket and solve its dryness problem. That said, the lack of an included sauce does give you the freedom to select a store-bought barbecue sauce of your choice. In our opinion, the best barbecue sauce for chicken is made by Kinder's Gold, but you can just as easily pair it with beef.

The one thing a box of Kirkland's burnt ends does have going for it? The meat is fully-cooked, which means it only needs 20 minutes in the oven to heat through. But of course, seeing as it falls short of ticking those flavor boxes, the quick cooking time is of no relevance anyway. You'd be better off investing your time and making your own batch of burnt ends in a smoker in the backyard (if you don't have one, there's an easy way to turn your gas grill into a smoker with wood chips and aluminum foil).