Italian slow-cooked beef
Ingredients
- Marinade (Night before):
- 1.5 lb beef brisket
- 1 Italian salad dressing mix (see note)
- 1/2 c vinegar (red wine)
- 2/3 c olive oil
- 6 cloves pickled garlic
- For the Morning:
- 2 T oil (as needed)
- 133 g canned chopped tomatoes
- 1/3 c basic vegetable mixture (medium dice, see note)
- 1/2 onion (white or brown, cut into 4ths)
- 1/2 t Salt (Table)
- 1/2 t dried oregano
- 1/2 t ground rosemary
- 1/8 t ground black pepper
- beef stock (as needed, 3 - 4 cups)
- For the Afternoon:
- 2 carrots (cut into 2" chunks)
- 2 potatoes (waxy, good sized chunks)
- 4 oz sliced mushrooms (button)
- 1/2 onion (white or brown, cut into 4ths)
- And Lastly:
- cooked rice (for serving)
Method
Make up the marinade. Trim the fat off the brisket. Bag the brisket with the marinade and pickled garlic & leave it in the fridge overnight.
Get your pot very HOT, add a bit of oil, and sear the brisket. Lower the heat, add the rest of the morning ingredients, and enough stock to cover the meat. Slow cook for about 4 hours, or until you can get to it again.
Add the vegetables (afternoon ingredients) and move around to mix. Slow cook another 2 hours or so.
Remove meat and let rest for slicing. Remove and reserve larger chunks of vegetables. While meat rests, use an immersion blender or a blender to get the juices fairly smooth. Add more potato, carrot, and mushroom if it's not as thick as you desire. Check seasonings. Slice the meat.
Serve slices of meat with reserved vegetables and gravy over rice.
Notes
SJ Note 20 March 2010: This is my adaptation of a pressure cooker recipe. It was tasty! It did need more liquid than called for, for the amount of beef I got (half the original), so I've reflected that here. I used http://myst.starforge.co.uk/index.cgi?block=3&op=view&id=313 for the Italian salad dressing mix, omitting the step to dehydrate the vegetables since I was using it immediately. It worked well! You could also just use Italian salad dressing instead of the mix, oil, and vinegar.
I found the finished gravy needed much more seasoning than originally called for, so I've upped the amounts here a bit, and will try to keep track the next time I make this. But remember, I use salt-free homemade stock; if your stock is high in sodium (storebought is), adjust the salt down, because it's much easier to add salt than to take it away! The gravy was rather thinner than we usually like it, but that worked really well with this dish.
The original recipe (see the source link) also includes directions for freezing this in ready made portions, if you desire that.
The original recipe actually called for mirepoix, but I just used some basic vegetable mixture ( http://myst.starforge.co.uk/index.cgi?block=3&op=view&id=328 ) instead, as I'd be needing some more of it the next night. Worked just fine.