Silverknife

Monday, 20 April 2009

Slow Cooking Cheap Cuts: Beer Brisket

Another repost, from April 2007

Brisket is a very cheap, tough cut of beef, but when you cook it slow and long those tough fibres soften into tender but firm meat. The flavour, moreover, 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 local butcher's best grade of beef. It's great 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 Orkney Gold 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 three pounds sterling. The cheapest cuts of the best meat - can't beat em.

Beer brisket (for two people)

Large piece of brisket (about two or two and a half pounds - a lot of it is bone)
Two large cloves of garlic
Salt
Two bayleaves
One large onion
Small handful of fresh thyme or (if you must) half a teaspoon dried thyme
Three quarters of a pint of (preferably) ale - just don't use cheap lager.
One tablespoon of brown sugar
One cube of beef or vegetable stock
One tablespoon of ground black pepper
One tablespoon of cornflour

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 major - 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 (dissolve 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 150c for a good four hours.

Unwrap the dish and lift the brisket out - it should look like this. Mmm...unbelievably succulent. It just falls off the bone, I picked it up with tongs and it fell apart. But because brisket has so much texture it stays firm and steaky, 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 nice 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 piles of buttery mashed potato and a spoonful of the onions for me.

Labels: Beef, beer, Black pepper, brisket, Cook, Frying pan, Garlic, Gravy, Mashed potato, slow cooking, tough cuts

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Thursday, 26 February 2009

How to Make a Real Beefburger

Image via Wikipedia

There are few more tasty and satisfying easy meals than a good beefburger, but as the definitive fast food they're also one of the most abused, stuffed full of gristle, mysterious discarded body parts, mechanically recovered meat and preservatives.

Making your own is a far more healthy option, and biting into a juicy, perfectly-cooked burger you know contains nothing but healthy meat is your reward.

Ingredients (two each for four people)
- Two pounds of beef mince. Most packaged minced beef is very lean and a little too finely ground for a perfect burger, you're better to ask your butcher (or the guys at the meat counter at the supermarket, if they can do it) to take a relatively fatty cut and grind it medium-fine for you. If you have to use lean mince, add a little fat (maybe a tablespoon or two) in the form of oil, or better still beef dripping. You need the fat to add moisture and bind the burger, and to stop it burning instead of browning.
- Half a tennis ball-sized onion
- Salt and pepper

Before you start preparation, let the beef sit (in a sealed container) at room temperature for a couple of hours. If it's fridge-cold, it'll be very hard to get the patties heated through (or cooked through if you insist on well-done, you savage) before the outside burns.

Spread out the beef in a thin layer on a cutting board or worktop, and grate the onion over it. Add a sprinkling of salt (about a tablespoon of sea salt should do it) and a good grind of black pepper. If the beef is lean, now is the time to add a drizzle of oil or dripping. Then knead it all together like dough, and divide it up into eight pieces.

Flatten each piece between your palms into a neat patty, working round and round and using your thumbs to push in the edges to stop them breaking up. Make them as thin as you can - they'll tend to shrink and thicken as they cook through the natural elasticity of the meat.

To cook your patties perfectly, you need either a grill or a grillpan and a good high heat. The ideal burger, IMHO, is well-browned on the outside with just a hint of pink on the inside - although if I'm eating somewhere with really good ingredients and feeling particularly carnivorous I'll go all the way to rare and bloody. However you prefer your meat done, it should be well-browned on the outside to bring out the wonderful flavour of the beef.

Get the heat up, give the grill or pan time to get to smoking, then slap on your patties. Don't be afraid to let them brown and stick a little, that's when the flavour is really coming out, although it's a delicate balance between brown-and-tasty and black-and-bitter. If you're going for well-done, you may need to bring the heat down a little at least at first to make sure they cook through before the outside burns.

If your beef has a lot of water in it (and most modern meat does, sadly), you'll see it sweating out and sitting on top of the patties - they'll also get very plump in the middle. In this case, press down firmly with a spatula or spoon until water stops coming out. You should only have to do this once in the cooking process.

If you're making cheeseburgers, put a couple of slices of good mature chedder on top just before you pull them off the grill (a couple of minutes before, if you're using a grillpan where there's not so much heat on top), just long enough to melt.

Once they're browned to perfection, sling your patties into a nice floury bap with some fried onions, a dash of ketchup or whatever you like, and wolf 'em down. That's the taste of a real burger, my friend.