15th of April 2007 - Beer brisket

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Mark's Daily Weight Update: 93Kg

Tonight's a classic quick sunday night recipe. And it's another slow cooked cheap meat special - I'm just beginning to realise how many of these things I've been making lately!

Brisket is a silly-cheap tough cut of beef, but with extraordinary flavour, and when slow-cooked it is heavenly, far tastier than your quick-cook expensive and tender cuts. Yesterday I got lucky and was able to pick up a brisket piece of Orkney Gold, my (excellent) local butcher's best grade of beef. It's beautiful meat, from slow-grown grass-fed suckling herds (as opposed to fast-grown, factory farmed cows which are forced to put on weight as fast as possible to get them out of the doors - this has a significant effect on the development of flavour!).

To top off a perfect cut of beef O.G. is hung for a minimum of 21 days on the bone to develop flavour and deep-down moistness - most supermarkets (and sadly many butchers) will hang beef for two or three days, a week at most. And how much did this piece of some of Britain's best beef (enough to stuff two people) cost me? Just over 3 pounds sterling. The cheapest cuts of the best meat - can't beat em!

Beer brisket

Large piece of brisket (the size is fairly standard - weighed 2 or 3 pounds on the bone I reckon (most of it is bone))
2 large cloves of garlic
Salt
2 bayleaves
1 large onion
Small handful of fresh thyme or (if you must) 1/2 teaspoon dried thyme
3/4 pint of (preferably) ale - just don't use cheap lager.
1 tablespoon of brown sugar
1 cube of beef stock (I didn't have any in yesterday so I used veg stock)
1 tablespoon of ground black pepper
1 tablespoon of cornflour

Preparation is simple. Just put the brisket in a roasting tin or casserole dish - but first sear it on both sides in a very hot frying pan. Don't wuss out on this, you want it almost blackened when you pull it off the surface. The effect on flavour is mindblowing - those little browned bits have as much flavour as the rest of the meat put together, and when they dissolve into the gravy they work magic.

Once it's seared and in the dish, thinly slice the onion and cover the brisket evenly with it. Mix together everything else except the cornflour, and pour a bit into the hot frying pan and scrub about with a spatula or wooden spoon to deglaze it (get the browned bits off the surface) - don't waste that flavour magic! Then pour all the liquid over the brisket in the dish, and wrap the whole thing in foil. Put it in the oven and cook it at 150 for a good 4 hours.

		Unwrap the dish and lift the brisket out - if you're lucky, it should look like this. Good eh? Mmm...unbelievably succulent. It just falls off the bone - literally, I picked it up with tongs and it fell apart. But because brisket has so much texture it stays firm, not jellyish.
	The remaining fluid in the casserole. Scoop the onions out, then mix the cornflour with a little bit of water. Mix it into that pan juice, slosh it into a pan and heat it on the stove, stirring till it thickens to make a beautiful rich gravy.
		With the bones lifted out, the brisket goes back in the dish and you can pour the gravy over it.
	And the finished beer brisket is served up, in this case with mountains of buttery mashed potato and a spoonful of the onions for me. It was ambrosial.