As we approach the festive holidays our minds are firmly fixed upon cooking arrangements, and if you are the one in the household that has been left in charge of such a task then the pressure is almost certainly on you. Not down to the fact that you have guests coming from all locations across the country, or even the world in some instances, but the whole of Christmas Day dinner lies firmly in your hands.
A well cooked beef brisket can literally be one of the most amazing things you will ever taste in your life, if cooked correctly. One of the main things that separates a n excellent brisket from a poor one if how you go about cooking it, what you add to it in terms of seasoning and how much time you take preparing it.
Food like this should never be rushes, and that is exactly why cooking it in a slow cooker far outweighs the method of oven cooking. So if you haven’t got a slow cooker then we suggest that you go out and buy one as they are very cheap but they offer more cooking opportunities to you, from casseroles, stews and beautifully slow cooked curry mixes.
Firstly, before we even begin getting to work on the piece of beef we need to look closer at the ingredients we are going to be using. As these are all going to be introduced into the slow cooker you will get an idea of the wonderful tastes, flavours and smells that this dish is going to produce and the one thing we can tell you is that anyone in a sniff away is going to be eager to taste this comfort food.
Grab yourself some olive oil, a couple of red and yellow onions, some salt and pepper, 2 cups of beef broth, a couple of tablespoons of Worcestershire sauce, a tablespoon of soy sauce, and finally 6 cloves of garlic which we will crush into the mix.
In terms of the beef brisket you ideally want something that weighs about 3 to 3.5lbs, and as beef is one of the more inexpensive meats this shouldn’t break the bank.
The key to most successful dishes is in the preparation work you put in, and to begin the cooking process off you will want to begin cooking some of your ingredients outside of the slow cooker. First we want to fry up the onions with some olive oil until they have caramelised, and while these cook away slowly on a medium-low heat you will want to begin patting the beef brisket dry to get rid of any excess moisture that is visible on the outside.
Once you are happy we can now season the brisket with some salt and pepper, rubbing it into the meat all over the outside.
By now you can remove the onions from the heat and take the brisket to a large skillet to sear it. All we are doing here is making the crust or fatty parts of the meat golden brown in appearance and slightly crunchy. You only need to keep the brisket in the pan for a few minutes and then we can put it into the slow cooker with that fatty side facing upwards.
The fun part to this dish is adding all these wonderful additional ingredients to the slow cooker, so at the moment you should just have that seared brisket in the cooker. Now add some crushed garlic to the top of the brisket and then throw in the onions that we cooked while preparing the beef brisket.
Next, mix those 2 cup fulls of beef broth with the 2 tablespoons of Worcestershire sauce and 1 tablespoon of soy sauce. Pour this mixture onto and around the beef brisket.
You are now ready to begin the cooking process…
Put the dial down to a LOW temperature setting on the slow cooker and let that beef brisket slowly cook for around 7 hours until the meat becomes very tender, succulent and mouth-watering. Remember once you have cooked it, it’s always advisable to leave it to rest for a good 15 minutes so that the juices can redistribute themselves around the meat which just makes the brisket more tender than it already is and moist to the bite.
When you come to serving up the brisket it should literally shred at the cut because of how tender the meat is, but you can also slice it as well this is your choice. Pour over the liquid mixture and onions and then let your dinner guests tuck in.