In celebration of the 6th night of Chanukah :), I made the brisket of beef. It’s a very simple recipe with very short list of ingredients but with a lot of flavor. Here is the recipe.
Ingredients
- 1 5-6 Lbs first-cut brisket of beef
- 1-2 Tbsp unbleached all-purpose flour
- Coarsely ground black pepper
- 1/4 cup vegetable oil
- 8 onions, thickly sliced and separated into rings
- enough tomato paste to cover the brisket
- salt
- 2-3 cloves garlic
- 2 whole peeled carrots
Instructions
- Preheat the oven to 375°F. Trim the fat from the brisket and dust the meat with flour and black pepper.
- Brown the brisket in the oil in a large brasier or casserole with a lid that can go into the oven.
- When both sides of the meat are brown, take it out and set it aside. Cook the onions in the same pan until they are soft and nut brown. Turn off heat.
- Place the brisket on top of the onions and spread the tomato paste on the meat like icing. Place carrots and quartered garlic cloves on top of it. Salt. Cook the covered casserole in the oven for 1 1/2 hours.
- Take the brisket out of the pan, and slice it thin (1/8″). Taste and adjust seasoning. Put the sliced meat back in the pot and fan it out. Cook in the oven covered for another 2 hours. The meat should be pork-tender.
It’s very time consuming, but most of the cooking time is spent in the oven, so it would be a good dish to make when you are doing stuff around the house all day. I wanted to serve this with latke, but by dinner time, I was too tired, and made simple pan-fried potatoes and red cabbage cole slaw with roasted beets and celery. I diced the potatoes small so that they would cook quickly. I pan fried them in a mixture of vegetable oil and butter on a large nonstick frying pan. I am looking forward to lots and lots of left-over brisket for salads and sandwiches for days to come.