Brisket

In these parts, everyone knows that “low and slow is the only way to go” when it comes to making barbecued brisket. Whether prepared in the oven, on the grill, or in an old-fashioned barbecue pit, it takes hours and a gentle heat to transform this tough cut into the tender, flavorful dish that shows up at shindigs throughout Texas—from UT tailgate parties, where on game days folks set up steel-drum barbecues in parking lots during the wee morning hours, to family get-together, ranch weddings, and backyard cookouts. My mom, who adored brisket, took it often to parties and family events, and I’ve recently resurrected the tradition. James De Wolf helped develop this recipe. I carted our brisket halfway across Texas—from Frederickburg’s five hours’ drive east to Long view—to share it with my family at our annual homecoming potluck.

You’ll need a slow-cooking barbecue smoker to make this pastrami. Use apple wood, cherry wood, or another subtle wood to bring out the flavor in the meat. Homemade pastrami keeps for five to six days as opposed to commercial pastrami, which uses preservatives to extend its shelf life. Extra rub will keep for four to five days in the refrigerator. Besides pastrami sandwiches, you can make pastrami and eggs, or pastrami hash, in which case you just substitute pastrami for the corned beef (see page 183). Be sure to start this well in advance since the meat must marinate overnight.

Corning beef is a lengthy process, but it is very rewarding. It requires brining a brisket for a week and then, for corned beef, boiling the brined brisket for a couple hours. For brining, always use a nonreactive (ceramic, enamel, stainless steel, or glass) airtight container. It needs to be large enough to hold a brisket submerged in liquid brine. You will also need two ovenproof “turkey bags” or oven bags. Most supermarkets or box-type stores such as Walmart and Costco carry these. The bags will keep the fridge smells out of your beef as it cures/brines. Always note the date when you start to brine the meat so you’ll know when it’s ready. Keep in mind that this is a big piece of meat. Corned beef is meant to be used for leftovers. If you are going to corn a brisket, serve it for dinner and make hash with the leftovers. You could also make a corned beef and cabbage dinner. If you make Homemade Pastrami (page 182), make sandwiches with the fresh stuff, and serve pastrami and eggs with the leftovers. These meats will keep for up to a week in the refrigerator.

Credit my Irish-Italian, Chicago-native wife, Kathy, for inspiring this dish. She loves corned beef, a Windy City favorite, so I’ve cooked it many times for my family. But I’ve always thought it was a shame that we enjoyed the delicious brisket but ignored the flavorful cooking broth, which typically isn’t consumed. So I thought, look at it the Japanese way—add noodles. I tried it and it tasted fantastic. So now when I make corned beef, my Irish-Italian-Japanese children always look forward to corned beef broth noodles with leftovers the next day. This dish takes time to cook slowly, but it’s easy to prepare. You can also use leftover corned beef for hash and sandwiches.

Brisket is tough, and it is best suited for braising and slow cooking, which tenderizes the meat from within by dissolving the cut’s plentiful collagen and fat. Brisket is very often smoked in the South; in fact, barbecue means brisket in Texas, as barbecue means pork in the Southeast. Buy fresh brisket (not corned or brined), ideally the flat or first cut, which is leaner than point or second cut, and has a layer of fat running across it to help keep it moist. Hungarian paprika, ground from dried sweet peppers, gives the sauce another layer of flavor and a slightly reddish color. There are six types of Hungarian paprika, ranging from delicate to hot; any of them would be fine in this dish. My mother and Aunt Lee took a whirlwind trip to Eastern Europe several years ago. True to their natures, they did have enough time, however, to shop. Knowing how much I like to purchase local ingredients when I travel, Mama brought me paprika as a gift. It’s basically a lifetime supply. I store it in the freezer in an airtight container to help it last as long as possible and not become stale and flavorless.

Brisket is a cornerstone of Texas cooking, as much a part of the culinary fabric as sweet iced tea and biscuits. This version is a great “prep it and forget it” dish. You can pull it together and toss it all in the roasting pan in just a few minutes, and then put it in the oven and do something else for 3 hours. The house smells amazing while it’s cooking and the result is meltingly tender brisket and a tangy-sweet sauce. Toward the end of cooking, toss a green salad and make some White Rice (page 126)—or if you’re feeling more ambitious, place the Broccoli and Rice Casserole (page 123) in the oven 30 minutes before the brisket is done—and dinner is served!

Here’s a barbecue-style surf and turf! This recipe combines both barbecuing and grilling techniques, with slow-cooked brisket slices wrapped around fresh scallops and cooked on a hot grill. Our tasty way to use up leftover brisket slices was featured on Live with Regis and Kelly in 2007. Serve it hot off the grill as either an appetizer or a main course.

The following brisket recipe was developed over a period of three years specifically for cooking competitions. It began after learning the requirements of the Kansas City Barbecue Association’s competition cooking circuit. I made a trip to my favorite Alabama butcher and asked to see the beef brisket. He proudly told me he had the largest selection of that particular cut in the area. The four varieties of corned beef looked good, but they were not exactly what I was looking for. It seemed we both had a little to learn about barbecue beef brisket. Many years and tears later I fell in love with the rich beef flavor of this recipe. In the restaurant we serve our brisket as thin slices with the juices drizzled over the fresh cuts of beef, but in competitions we separate the flat from the point and reserve the cooked point to make burnt ends (see page 86). Brisket has become one of our most consistent categories in cooking competitions, including wins at the American Royal Invitational Contest in Kansas City, Missouri, and the Best of the Best Invitational BBQ Cook-off in Douglas, Georgia.

Burnt ends are the charred end pieces and flavorful crumbles that are left in the pooled juices and drippings after a beef brisket has been sliced. I consider them the most flavorful part of the brisket. Usually it’s the early bird who gets the worm, but in the case of brisket, it is the last person in line who gets to scrape the cutting board. Burnt ends have become so popular that people have come up with ways to make more of these flavorful brisket bits.

To the Horror of chef Daniel Rose (see page 68) of Spring Restaurant in Paris, it is impossible to find an American brisket in France. It just doesn’t exist. American butchers tend to cut larger pieces of meat. Five- or six-pound briskets (poitrines) or huge rib-eye steaks (entrecôtes) are the result of sawing through the muscle or the shoulder section of the animal. French butchers, by contrast, cut around the contours of the muscles to yield more tender but much smaller pieces. French Jews tend to use a breast of veal that usually has a pocket inside it for stuffing for their brisket. In this version, Daniel applies French techniques to make a perfectly delicious brisket with a subtle hint of orange in the sauce. I always make this dish a day in advance.

Alsace is the only part of France with a tradition of France with a tradition of both pork and beef charcuterie. When I asked a butcher in Strasbourg about pickelfleisch (corned beef ) and pickled tongue, he paused to think a minute. Yes, he told me, both are eaten primarily by Jewish clientele. Of that charcuterie, pickelfleisch is the crown prince. Basically corned beef cured for eight to ten days with salt, sugar, spices, and saltpeter and then baked or boiled, it is more garlicky, with more varied spices, than that in America. Try making your own corned beef. It is great fun. Eat it as is or in a choucroute garni (sauerkraut dressed with meat and potatoes).

In Southern Morocco, this Sabbath stew was cooked first over a wood fire and then kept warm in a pot tucked under the hot sand. In Spain and northern Morocco, it was cooked in communal ovens in the Jewish quarter of cities. Called by the Jewish youth of France today “daf marocaine,” this flavorful stew, also known as skeena—meaning “hot” in northern Morocco—is preferred by many young people to ordinary cholent (see page 213) for Sabbath lunch. Today in France the meat is usually beef rather than the lamb or mutton more commonly used in North Africa. For this one-pot meal, the rice and/or wheat berries or white beans must be kept apart for cooking, so that they can be served separately. Carène Moos encloses the seasoned rice and wheat berries in pieces of gauze or cheesecloth, knotting the cloth to make two individual bundles.

This is a pot roast. It is a specialty of Sri Lanka’s Burgher community, which owes its origins to a happy mixture of European colonialists, mostly Dutch but some Portuguese and English as well, with the local population. Burgher cuisine is a glorious by-product of this union. Here, a simple pot roast has been made wonderfully Sri Lankan with the addition of roasted coriander, cumin, and fennel seeds—the main ingredients in Sri Lankan curry powders—and, of course, coconut milk. Some people add a little simple lime pickle, or tamarind water or vinegar, to give it a tart edge. I have used red wine vinegar. A few simple steps are required here: The spices need to be roasted and ground. Then, after the meat is browned, everything goes into a pot and is braised slowly in the oven. The meat is sliced, and some of its own sauce is ladled over the top. It may then be served with rice, noodles (Sri Lanka has exquisite rice noodles, so Thin Rice Noodles would work), or mashed potatoes, if you prefer.

Chef Todd Aarons of Tierra Sur at Herzog Wine Cellars in Oxnard, California, shared this recipe as part of a Hanukkah cocktail party menu he created exclusively for Epicurious. Aarons insists this dish is even better the next day, so braise the meat the day before then quickly assemble the sliders before serving. The spicy pulled brisket also makes great tacos, served with corn tortillas and garnished with red onion and chopped fresh cilantro.

These succulent stews, roasts, and piquantly spiced meat dishes are among our heartiest entrées. Slowly baked in casseroles or simmered in large stockpots, they'll suffuse your kitchen with wonderful aromas. Most of these well-stewed entrées were developed by Eastern European Jews, because the tough and sinewy cheaper cuts of meat they could afford required hours of cooking to become tender. But that's not the whole story; other meat recipes hail from the abundant sheep- producing regions of the Middle East, where lamb is traditional spring fare and the featured entrée at Sephardic Seders. Some entrées in this chapter are suitable for an elegant dinner party, while others consist of everyday dishes like meat loaf, corned beef hash, and potted meatballs.

Every cook should have a good brisket recipe at the ready, and this one's a doozy. Braised with lots of browned onions, carrots, and celery in a mix of chicken broth and crushed tomatoes, the beef exits the oven full-flavored and fork-tender, ready to be shredded for the country hash or sliced and served with mashed potatoes for a homey dinner (though it's even better if you can wait a day). By all means, freeze the leftover braising liquid; it's wonderful as a sauce for fettuccine or as the base for a vegetable barley soup.

Not everything Feniger serves at her restaurant is typical street food, and here's a delicious case in point. The intriguing combination of shredded brisket, diced root vegetables, and apples is based on a recipe that Feniger's grandmother Sylvia Morgan often made for family meals in Toledo, Ohio. Roasted poblano chiles, a nod to the chef’s days at Santa Monica's Border Grill, add a spark of heat, and a fried egg makes it enormously satisfying.

In my take on the French classic, chicken with forty cloves of garlic becomes brisket with thirty-six cloves. All that feisty garlic turns sweet and mellow with gentle braising; when pureed, it forms a seductive gravy, which is finished with a zing of chopped raw garlic and lemon zest. Why thirty-six cloves? Beginning with aleph, which equals one, each letter of the Hebrew alphabet stands for a number, and so every word has a numerical value. All multiples of eighteen, the numerical value of the Hebrew word chai, life, are considered especially auspicious, which is why donations to charity and wedding and bar mitzvah gifts are often given in multiples of eighteen.

Editor's note: This recipe is from chef Wolfgang Puck. Braising is a great way to coax tenderness from tough cuts of meat. The term applies when the main ingredient is a relatively large cut and the amount of liquid is relatively small. The moist, gentle heat gradually breaks down the meat to melting softness while releasing the big flavor that hardworking muscles develop. Beef brisket is one of my favorite candidates. The cut comes from just under the first five ribs, behind the foreshank. Large and stringy, brisket is usually sold cut into halves, one relatively square and the other tapering to a point. Both are delicious, but the point cut, as it is known, has more flavor because it is slightly fattier. Here I braise the meat in a combination of beef broth and red wine, with aromatic root vegetables and dried apricots, a popular Eastern European flourish.

Brisket is commonly used to make corned beef, but I find that it lends itself well to other preparations. And once it's in the oven, you can forget about it for hours—it's that easy to prepare. This brisket with a south-of-the-border kick is one of my very favorites. The meat actually tastes better to me when it sits overnight so all the flavors have more time to marry. It will hold well for a few days. While good reheated the next day, the meat served cold in a sandwich is a delicious alternative to leftovers. I serve the brisket alone or alongside a grilled steak, as it emphasizes steak's meaty flavor.

Editor's note: The recipe below is adapted from Elizabeth Karmel's Web site, girlsatthegrill.com. This rub originally accompanied Karmel's recipe for Slow-Cooked Texas Beer Brisket .

Editor's note: The recipe and introductory text below are adapted from Elizabeth Karmel's Web site, girlsatthegrill.com . On the road to Lockhart, Texas in the Hill Country outside of Austin, I discovered barbecue heaven where smoke meets beef. This slow-cooked brisket is crunchy and almost burnt on the outside, tender and juicy on the inside. After tasting a delicate 2-pound portion, I got some tips from the pit master himself and promptly went home and created my own version. The simple salt-and-pepper Lockhart Dry Rub is favored by the old guard and the Tricked-Up Brisket Rub is akin to what some of the younger up-starts in the barbecue world are doing to add a little more dimension to their burnt ends. Both rubs are great for slow-cooking and smoking brisket. You only need to make one rub to make this brisket so just pick whichever is more appealing to you. Be sure to purchase an untrimmed brisket. The meat needs all of the fat cap to keep it moist during the long cooking time.