Big Hunk o’ Beef for Shabbos

True confession:  I cook chicken all the time, and ground meat, and turkey, and still MORE chicken… but I have never really known what to do with a great big hunk o’ briskety meat such as my ancestors knew and loved.

I have been known to buy a pickled brisket and boil the life out of it and serve it with sauce – that’s easy, and we love it.  But grabbing a plain hunk of unseasoned beef from the freezer and turning it into something lovely?  Tough – but hopefully, I don’t mean the meat.

Anyway, that’s what I had to work with:  a hunk of frozen brisket bought on sale months ago (see the 30% off tag???), and I figured it couldn’t be improving through its stay in the deep-freeze.  Nor were my cooking skills.

I wanted to use a crock pot, to help me get a jump on Friday’s many tasks, and I found two recipes that looked like likely candidates:  Crock Pot Brisket #1 and Crock Pot Brisket #2.  Ultimately, I went with #2, because it calls for a quantity of Coke, and we still have a TON of Pesach coke hanging around downstairs.

Here are the rest of the ingredients:

And here it all is, dumped over the frozen brisket (technically, an INSIDE BLADE ROAST NY BNLS – I have no idea what any of that means except it’s BoNeLeSs). 

It is nowhere near this lurid orange colour in real life – it’s a nice mellow brown; picture mixing coke with ketchup and a bit of mustard.  I checked the flavour of the sauce before I dumped it over the meat… quite nice.  More mustardy than I would have assumed was wise, but a little snappier than you might otherwise end up with – which is hopefully a good thing.

So now it’s all sealed up… the recipe says “8 hours or overnight,” but I think I’ll give it 10 because it’s currently frozen solid.

    

I’ll keep you posted on how this experiment turns out!

Postscript:  Here’s what it looked like at 11 am after 9  hours in the crocky – and again, please disregard the astonishing orange colour.  My camera really is lousy at colours.

 

I separated the meat for slicing and the gravy for thickening.  Yum!  And then my mother called to cancel … so we have this all to ourselves!