Eat Something Good

beef brisket

My grandmother used to make a side dish (banchan) called jangjorim.  It was beef and korean peppers braised or boiled in a liquid with lotsa soy sauce.  Because it was so salty, you could only eat a little bit at a time.  But that’s how you’re supposed to treat all banchan.  They’re little dishes of food served on the side of the meal, to be enjoyed with the meal.  Typically, they bring banchan out first if you’re in a korean restaurant.  Anyhow, today is Greek Easter for Steve and I wanted to make him something special.  He’s not a big lamb guy.  He can’t take the smell, so I bought a beef brisket and searched and searched for a decent recipe.  I liked the ingredients in this marinade.

Here’s what I did.  I took a whole slab of beef brisket and marinated it in beef broth, red wine vinegar, brown sugar, garlic, onions, dijon mustard and soy sauce.  I let it sit in the fridge overnight and started cooking it up this afternoon.  Early this afternoon.  It takes a long time to cook.  4 hours.  You don’t touch it for four hours so you don’t really have to do that much.  I served it with a potato dish I learned how to make from a chef years ago.  You bake up potatoes whole (skin on) with olive oil, s & p.  Then when they cool slightly, you split them in half and use a fork to make “crumbles” of potatoes.  To this, I added finely chopped scallions, fresh parsley, olive oil and s & p.  That’s it.  It can be molded much like a rice dish.  (I was too lazy to do that part but I had thoughts.)  For the veggies, I just took some frozen broccoli and sauteed it with chopped garlic, olive oil, s & p.  The picture of the dish doesn’t look great because my knife is really dull and I couldn’t get decent slices of the beef.  Here’s what we thought.

Steve (and a little guest) really liked it.  As an afterthought though, Steve thought it might have been too salty.  I let him know that it was all soy sauce, that I did not add any salt to the dish at all.  Little guest & I really enjoyed the marinade.  I ladled it over the meat.  We didn’t find it salty like Steve did.  The potatoes were good, but I would have preferred chives over scallions but I couldn’t find any.  The broccoli was good.  A little garlicky and not too oily as some sauteed veggies can be.  Oh, back to the beef brisket.  The meat was very tender and flavorful.  Steve kept commenting about how beefy the flavor was which means he was liking it.  Oh, the story about jangjorim.  This marinade, because of the soy, tasted similar to it.  It was a good thing for me and reminded me once again of my awesome grandmother, home chef.  I think we all inhaled our special dinner tonight.

I’ll post the recipe as is, but I actually doubled the recipe because I had a huge slab of beef.  The recipe is from bigoven.com.

Marinated Beef Brisket Recipe:

Ingredients:

2 lbs beef brisket

2 cups beef broth

1/4 cup firmly packed brown sugar

3 garlic cloves, minced

1 cup chopped onions

1/4 cup dijon mustard

1/4 cup soy sauce

Directions:

1. In a medium bowl, combine all ingredients besides beef brisket.

2. Marinate beef brisket in the liquid.  Do this  in a bag or baking dish for at least 8 hours or overnight.

3. Place the beef brisket and about 1 3/4 cups of the marinade in a covered baking dish.  (We used a dutch oven.)

4. Cook for 4 hours or until the meat is tender.

So, this dish takes time but not that much labor.  It’s just a lot of waiting around.  It was well worth it!  Steve just commented again about how much he enjoyed dinner.  Yey!  Alright guys, try this recipe if you have the time and as always, Eat Something Good!