Friday nights are the perfect night for a vegetable free meal. It is also the perfect night for take-away or delivery (if you are lucky enough to live close to these establishments) as you have worked hard for the week and deserve a night off from cooking. For me, Friday night means a quick and easy meal like homemade pizzas, taco nachos, hot dogs or just simply dumplings. If it is a cold winter night it often involves a bath with a glass of wine! This to me is heaven.
Speaking of cold, Autumn is well and truly here with cool nights and glorious sunshine during the day. It is one of my most favourite seasons and I am loving the cooler weather! It is time to start cutting wood for the fires inside and to pull out the slow cooker. The slow cooker would be my SECOND favourite cooking appliance after Kevin. I do a lot of slow cooking as I can turn it on at lunchtime, head out the door and forget about it until dinner time. Easy peasy. It doesn’t have a name yet so suggestions are welcomed!
During the week I visited a local butcher as I was after some beef cheeks (another recipe coming soon) and beef brisket. He didn’t have the cheeks (sob) but did have the brisket which he cut off the carcass for me then and there. We had quite a lengthy chat about his shop and how the cost of living is affecting his business (he is a fourth generation butcher and the business has been in his family for 38 years). He also blames the increased business hours of major supermarkets and the ability to sit in the car with your children whilst someone does your shopping for you (and dutifully brings it to your car when you are parked outside) as another major factor in cutting out the butcher from your weekly shopping trips. I found this really sad! I am guilty of partaking in the click and collect frenzy that has swept our local town but I don’t rely on buying my meat from the supermarkets as the quality can be unreliable and just plain dodgy! I like to go to the butchers to see what cuts they are specialising in and pick up something easy for dinner that has already been cut up, marinated and packaged ready for cooking. At least they know where there meat is sourced from.
He made a mention of how he knows when families are starting to struggle financially as they come in with their last $5 notes and hand these over. It’s always towards the end of the week when he starts to see those $5 notes coming in. Again, I was really flabbergasted by this observation. I left the shop hungry (he has won the national title of best Australian pork sausages a couple of times in the last decade) but also worried for the future of his business. I made a solemn pledge to visit every time I shopped locally to get the meat that I wanted as I know he expects quality like I do. Perhaps we all need to think a little more about this before we embark on our shopping trips??
This is what I did to his beautiful piece of brisket (head up to the Printable Recipes tab for the recipe):
I made up a rub based on quite a bit of research. By all means you don’t need to add all of the ingredients if you don’t have them. Just tweak it a bit and work out what you like and don’t like (leave out the chilli powder if you don’t like it hot). Here is what I used:
About a heaped teaspoon of all
This is how your final spice rub will look!
I laid out the beef brisket (2kg) and cut it in half. I then drizzled over some local extra virgin olive oil and rubbed half to three quarters of the mix in.
Flip over both pieces and rub in the remainder of the spices. Place in a ziplock bag and refrigerate over night if you can.
On the morning that you are to eat your brisket take it out of the fridge and prepare the barbecue sauce. I used a combination of sauces that I had in the pantry so just use your imagination a bit and keep adding similar flavoured sauces. Here is what I used:
A quarter of a cup of the following: apple cider vinegar, tomato sauce (ketchup), tomato paste, brown sugar, barbecue sauce (a fancy one is good here as it has more flavour – try ETA if in Australia or Stubbs in America). You can also use a bourbon flavoured sauce if you can find it (Sweet Baby Rays in Woolworths or Aldi sometimes). A good splash of Worcestershire Sauce and a good grind of salt and pepper. Mix it all up in a jug, spray your slow cooker with olive spray and turn it on to low. A piece this size will take 8 to 10 hours to cook so I put mine on at 8.30am for example. You can also do this at the high setting too, just halve the cooking time.
Place about a quarter of the sauce on the bottom of the slow cooker. Put one of the pieces in meat side down and pour some more sauce over it. Repeat with the second piece and again, pour the rest of the sauce onto it.
After half of the cooking time, baste the brisket with the juices in the slow cooker and flip over both pieces. This will ensure that the meat stays nice and tender and juicy.
Once you get to 10 hours turn off the slow cooker. This is what you will be presented with.
At this stage you will have two pieces and so you can remove them both and either “pull” them apart using tongs and a fork, or you can carve the pieces as they are. If you pull the beef you can then place it in a bowl and pour some of the barbecue sauce on it to make it quite moist. I topped the buns with cheese, pulled beef brisket and then coleslaw. I then spooned the juices from the slow cooker on top of the burger bun to make it extra saucy. You can also spoon the juices onto the beef on your bun. I did try it both ways, pulled and sliced and I think they are both as good as each other.
I was debating how much it would actually feed and if you did small sliders I reckon you could make 20. It depends on how much you fill the buns of course.
If you have leftovers, you can make pies! Place the brisket into your pastry filled pie holes and cook for roughly 5 to 6 minutes. Freeze these for later. Thanks Kevin!
This recipe would be perfect for the upcoming Easter long weekend. Have a go at it and let me know what you think. And remember, visit your butcher for all of your fresh meat supplies and support local family businesses.
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