We love barbecue foods in our house, but we don’t really have the equipment to make authentic barbecue at home. Like lots of people, we just have a basic gas barbecue. It’s convenient but doesn’t offer the smoky, slow-roasted flavors you can get with charcoal and wood. These Smokin’ Joe’s BBQ Fully Cooked Brisket Burnt Ends from Costco promise to deliver an authentic barbecue dish that you can make easily and quickly in your oven or air fryer. Did they pull it off?
If you’re hosting a big barbecue, Costco has a ton of other products that are suitable to serve like the Kirkland Signature Smoked Pulled Pork, Kirkland Signature Seasoned Pork Ribs, Stonemill Kitchens Homestyle Red Potato Salad, Stoney Creek Shaved Beef Au Jus, Kirkland Signature Iced Tea, Bulls-Eye Barbecue Sauce, Kirkland Signature Chicken Wings and the Kirkland Signature Sour Cream Butter Pound Cake.
Location in Store
You can find these burnt ends in the refrigerated deli section at Costco, near the fresh pasta. The item number is 5551019.
Taste
As you’re prepping and cooking the burnt ends, your house will have a nice smokey barbecue smell. It definitely made me hungry!
I cooked my burnt ends in the air fryer at 400 degrees Fahrenheit and they came out looking pretty close to the ones on the box after seven minutes. After eating them, I wished I’d maybe given them an extra minute or so, but the air fryer did a good job.
The burnt ends were pretty tasty. They have a good smokey barbecue flavor as you’d expect and the brisket is mostly good. My biggest complaint is that there’s lot of variation from piece to piece. The good pieces are really delicious, but I’d say only about half of the pieces are good pieces. That’s probably being generous. The bad pieces can be tough, gristly and fatty depending on the piece. None of them were horrible, but some weren’t very enjoyable.
Cost
The box, weighing 650 grams, is priced at $15.49 Canadian. It includes a vacuum-sealed bag of burnt ends and a separate bag of sauce.
Convenience
Prepping the burnt ends was a bit frustrating as they came out of the package all stuck together and I had to spend a couple of minutes breaking them apart before coating them in sauce. There was a lot of fat in the package, so that was why the pieces stuck together. They’re already fully cooked so you’re heating them.
The burnt ends should be stored in the refrigerator, and they have a best-before date of approximately six weeks from the date I purchased them. One option is to serve the burnt ends in a bun. Alternatively, you can enjoy them on their own, accompanied by some coleslaw and baked beans as a delicious side dish.
Nutrition
Calories
A 3/4 cup serving contains 370 calories, 24 grams of fat, 19 grams of carbohydrates, one gram of fibre, 13 grams of sugar, 20 grams of protein and 1000 milligrams of sodium. I think that’s a ton of sodium! Especially considering that most people will be eating these with side dishes that also contain sodium.
Ingredients
The ingredients list looks pretty typical for a grocery-store-bought barbecue-style product. There is soy and mustard in the burnt ends but no dairy of gluten!
Scoring
Taste: 6/10
Cost: 7/10
Convenience: 9/10
Nutrition: 2/10
Overall
Walk on by!
Even though there were some tasty bites there aren’t enough to justify buying these in my opinion!
Have you tried these burnt ends from Costco? What did you think of them?
Please note that this review was not paid for or sponsored by any third party. This product was purchased by Costcuisine for the purpose of producing this review. The opinions in this review are strictly those of Costcuisine. Costcuisine is not affiliated with Costco or any of its suppliers. In the event that Costcuisine receives compensation for a post from the manufacturer of a product or some other third party, the arrangement will be clearly disclosed (including where the manufacturer of a product provides Costcuisine with a free sample of the product).
These were terrible! The meat is almost all grissol and chewy, nothing like what I was expecting at the Costco price of $15.49.
I got frustrated for sure and have only had 1 time before and they were ok but will never experience another try. The company that makes these will be hearing from me & so will Costco!
Don’t waste your money. Fatty and gristly. Not good at all especially for the price
We bought a box of Smokin Joe’s Burnt ends, because of a JD Smoke house we have in Sudbury Ontario makes an amazing Burnt ends, and we can’t always go in there when we are hinkering “Burnt ends”, so we decided to try these when we found them at Costco. From the start, the meat package comes in a vacuum sealed bag that when you first open it the contents smells like dog food. The texture of the contents is glued together in a brick of congealed “meef” (not quite meat, not quite beef). You must break apart these piece of “meef” into cubes all while inhaling the toxic smell of canned dog food. Once you get it apart you mix it well with the barbecue sauce to cover up the dog food smell. Toss the coated pieces into the air fryer, and cook for 7-10 minutes. Once you pull it out of the air fryer, you serve the contents to your guests(but remember to pull the drip tray out to retrieve the sauce that ran the hell away from the “meef” to not be associated with this mess… if you think of burnt ends, you think of something soft, juicy, full of flavour, melt in your mouth goodness… this on the other hand taste like the barbecue sauce, but you feel like you’re eating celery… Celery because you chew so much that you wear out the carti In your jaw, to the point of no end with losing more calories then you gain… the burnt ends are so disgusting and disappointing that you will wish you bought a pound of bacon to serve instead… Please save your Money, and don’t buy this product, it’s like chewing on a rubber eraser with the same flavour! Definitely not worth it! Very disappointed in the product! Won’t buy it again! If you want burnt ends, go to a restaurant that serves burnt ends!
This review is unfortunately spot on and I wish I’d googled this product before I bought. Shame on them for invoking Texas and NC on the box. My dog wouldn’t eat it.
First box was quite tasty, so bought 2 more boxes. As previous mentioned, the meat was all grizzle and poor cuts. Dont waste your money. The company also is difficult to find and email other than a phone number on the box. These will not be around costco long.
Yes this is exactly what we had just poor bbq almost every piece was fat and Gris not a good purchase.
Bought these and I was experiencing maybe too much out of it ? After seeing burnt end on Instagram and YouTube I was really excited to see that at Costco. Whe I open the bags I was very disappointed by the size of the portion and the bite were pretty hard to bite in.
Will not buy again and for the price I would have give it a 4-5/10 not a 7.
We found them tough and not that great at all. It turns out this is part of Lou’s! Who knew?
Walk on by, I shall. I’m hoping to do my own brisket on my Big Green Egg in the coming weeks. So real burnt ends done right. All pieces will be done to perfection. I find so many of these products sell sub-standard product and cover them with sauces to distract you from the quality.
As for the air fryer. The biggest mistake people make is short-changing themselves on the time. If things aren’t crunchy/crispy, just leave them on. But at some point they will be done … and not long after, overdone. And then they will catch fire and burn your house down if you don’t keep an eye on them. Things change really quickly once the fryer hits it stride.
But who wants soggy fries and wings? Yuk.
I came to the same conclusion. Seems as if it wasn’t slow cooked long enough and didn’t have the same bark and smokey flavour as a true Texas style brisket. The sauce gave most of the flavour rather than the brisket.