It started a couple of weeks ago. I had some chest freezers I had to clear out of a building, so I msg’ed my mates @quyhallestate. Yes, sure they’d take them off my hands. So I ended up going over in the truck and dumping them off at their lovely farm. Being decent people (as well as the finest suppliers of gloriously happy and sustainable beef in the outer spiral arm of the galaxy), they wouldn’t let me leave without giving me the pick of their considerable store of astonishingly good cuts.
Did I go for the performative tomahawk? The high-luxe filet? Well, no. The economics of these businesses is insanely tight. And when I saw a big old brisket in the freezer, I thought Yes! That I can use. I’ve met their cows. Happy, plump little buggers... plodding around fields, eating natural stuff and getting... well, basically fat and happy. A brisket might be a second-grade cut to some people, but to me, that’s going to be all about the character of a pretty exceptional animal.
Scroll forward a couple of weeks, and Lib is coming home. She’s graduated. She’s handed her flat back to her mafia landlord, and I’ve done the ‘parent run.’ You fly in low, hover over an LZ that’s defended by withering cover fire from Hammersmith Council Parking Dept in the treeline. You extract your team and their kit and torch anything left. I don’t think we actually touched the ground. To you, it’s a rusty Honda CRV. To Lib and I it’s a Jolly Green Giant.
But the Prodigal’s Return required a good dinner. And I had advance warning. I thought straight away of the brisket. I mean, c’mon. If there’s anything in the world that say’s the warmth of homecoming, it’s going to be brisket. First, I thought about BBQ. But honestly ... it makes me weary. I can tense my forearms and hold my gut in for a certain amount of time, but not while continuing to breathe. It’s too butch. Fuck it.
Then I got really enthusiastic about Italian/American ‘Sunday Gravy’. A big, cheap cut of beef, some sausage, maybe some guanciale. All cooked for a couple of days in a tomato sauce and then served with pasta, on Sunday to a delighted family.
I thought about it. I even started assembling ingredients. And then I went online for a recipe.
There’s a metric shit-ton of recipes for ‘Sunday Gravy’ and all are distinguished by the terrifying level of crap in the comments. Apparently, Italian Americans in Jersey call it ‘Gravy’, but Italian Americans everywhere else call it ‘Sauce’... and ‘below the line’ in online recipe writing, is where they need to fight about this.
Jesus wept.
I really wanted to cook it. But after ten minutes of reading third-rate suburban plumbers slagging each other off like they were mafia bosses, it honestly felt like I didn’t want it in my house. Genuinely. Fuck you! It’s a family-friendly slow cook. It’s Irish Stew. It’s lobscouse. It’s cholent. If you genuinely feel you have to escalate Sunday lunch into whacking Sammy ‘The Bull’ Graziano on the sidewalk outside Springs. Y’know what... go back to your Sopranos box set. Not in my kitchen.
Then I remembered @petes_pans.
Peter Hanley walks an interesting line. He’s all about authenticity, but he also loves food to an absurd degree. He investigates the way food is cooked, forensically, but less as ‘recipes’ than as ‘foodways’. I’ve met Peter. He has a daughter the same age as mine. Whatever he thought was a good way of welcoming someone home was ... well, it was worth listening to.
So I dug out his YouTube about the Gascon Daube. He does his with beef cheeks, which, of course, work brilliantly, but he points out that it can also be done with a macreuse, a paleron, a jarret, or any other powerful but challenging slab.
Marinade your meat with wine and aromatic veg. Sear it. Soften the veg from the marinade, then add the liquid. Simmer, then add the meat back and cook for weeks. Remove the meat, strain the braising liquid. Reduce and serve. That’s a ‘foodway’.
The intriguing difference in Peter’s ‘Gascon’ daube, though, is that the meat is left as a single large piece. Not cubed down. It’s little short of genius. And, of course, it’s the ideal way to treat a big ol’ chunk of fine Cambridgeshire beef brisket.
Watch Peter’s YouTube here. It’s where I started.
If your brisket is rolled, unroll it. Chop up some onions, leeks, carrots, celery, and garlic into coarse chunks and kettle them in a Ziploc bag with your brisket. Add pepper, salt and a bottle of red wine. Store in the fridge for a day or two.
I rendered down some guanciale I had lying around, in a bit of pork lard. If the idea of that doesn’t give you stirrings, leave now.
Take the brisket out of the marinade and sear it on all sides. (I should write ‘Set aside’ but I genuinely can’t. Nobody talks like that.)
Then strain the solids out of the marinade. Soften them in a little olive oil. Add the liquid from the marinade, the meat, and enough wine, or chicken stock, or both, to cover. Put a lid on. Rack the temperature down to something absurd... I mean the braising liquid should be somewhere around 90º... and let it cook for about a week. Peter will hate this, but my induction ring has a built-in probe thermometer. I set it to 92º, hung the probe in the braising liquid, and just let it go for ten hours while I went about my business.
I had a load of dried morels in the larder so I soaked them for ages and then also ‘set them aside’ along with their soaking liquid.
Once the brisket had got to a core temperature of 92º, I lifted it out, let it cool, and refrigerated it overnight. I passed the cooking liquid through a sieve, then added the soaked mushrooms and their liquor. That, too, was refrigerated.
On the day, I set the meat to warm up in the sauce. I turned off the extraction so the kitchen would smell like an anteroom in heaven, and I sweated down a tonne of onion, aiming for maximum sweetness.
As soon as the internal temperature on the brisket hit 75º, I hauled it out onto a serving plate. Then I added the onions and the morels back to the sauce, reduced it, and poured it over.
I also made chips.
There’s no ‘hero shot’. Partly, I didn’t want to be prancing around with a camera; I wanted to be serving it. Carving off thick slices of brisket, the texture of jelly, and ladling over sauce that looked like melted chocolate. And partly it’s the best example I’ve ever seen of Elizabeth David’s idea that photography sells food short.
It was the brownest thing I’ve ever cooked.
Also, quite possibly, the best.
I think Peter would be proud.
I strongly approve. I usually keep split trotters and sheets of pigskin in the freezer for just such uses, but this time I out of stock. Had to make do with guanciale.
My dad used to do a 3 day daube, one of the core ingredients being a pig's trotter.