Slow Cooked Beef Brisket
Beef brisket, baked potatoes and creamed spinach
This is a recipe which once prepped you just leave to cook away in the oven, it is brilliant for feeding a family, or even a crowd with minimum effort. Beef brisket is a wonderful cut, it needs slow cooking to tenderise the meat, which should just melt by the end of cooking and have incredible flavour. Always ensure you invest in higher welfare meat, ideally organic meat. My motto is buy less meat and always buy the best quality meat you can afford. I serve this with baked/ or mashed potatoes and a green vegetable. The iron rich taste of green vegetables, pairs beautifully with the meat. I hope this will become a family favourite in your house, this is a weekend warmer that my kids love.
6-8 portions, depending on appetite!
Ingredients ~
3 onions, peeled and halved
3 large carrots, trimmed peeled and halved
1.2 kg organic beef brisket, rolled and trimmed of fat
4 tablespoons tomato puree
8-10 garlic cloves, peeled
small bunch thyme
2 bay leaves
1.1 litres water
2 low-salt beef stock cubes (I use Kallo)
n.b. you need a casserole dish, suitable for the oven and with a lid
Preheat the oven to 140C fan oven.
Into the casserole dish add the onions, carrots, thyme, garlic, tomato puree and bay leaves. Place the brisket into the pot: remove the any string around the meat before cooking, as you don’t want it to hold its shape, you want it to break down into the stock. Next measure out 1.1 litres of boiling water, whisk in 2 stock cubes and add to the pot. The liquid shouldn’t fully cover the brisket, but come up both sides. Cover with a fitted lid and cover the lid with foil, so the juices don’t escape. Place into the preheated oven and cook for 5.5 hours. Check halfway through cooking: I push the meat back under the juices and also check the level of the juices. You shouldn’t need to add more water, but every oven is different!
At the end of cooking remove from the oven, you should have beautiful melting brisket, in a rich sauce. Lift out portions of brisket, it will break apart easily, and serve with the juices. It is delicious alongside baked/ or mashed potatoes and steamed green vegetables.