Brisket's the Bomb

Passport & Plate - Passover Brisket

Tunisia | Friday, March 6, 2015 | 1 photos

Ingredients
• 2/3 cup quartered dried apricots (about 4 ounces)
• 9 large garlic cloves
• 31/2 teaspoons ground cumin
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon
• 1/4 teaspoon ground black pepper
• 1 4 1/2- to 5-pound flat-cut beef brisket
• 3 tablespoons olive oil
• 4 cups chopped onions
• 2 medium carrots, coarsely chopped
• 1 tablespoon minced peeled fresh ginger
• 1 teaspoon ground coriander
• 1/8 teaspoon cayenne pepper
• 1 cup dry red wine
• 3 cups homemade beef stock or canned low-salt beef broth
• 2/3 cup pitted prunes, quartered
• Chopped fresh cilantro

 

How to prepare this recipe
Combine garlic, cumin, salt, cinnamon, and pepper and rub over room temperature brisket.
Heat oil in heavy oven proof pan big enough to hold brisket. Sauté to brown brisket (about 5 minutes per side). Transfer brisket to plate.
Sauté onions over medium-high heat 5 minutes until beginning to soften. Add carrots, ginger, coriander, cayenne, and apricots. Add wine and boil to reduce stirring up brown bits.
Return brisket to pot. Add broth. Spoon veg mixture over brisket. Cover. Place in preheated 300 degree oven and forget about it (just kidding!). Roast 2 ½ hours basting every 30 minutes.
Add prunes and roast covered another 30 minutes or so. Check regularly. When brisket is very tender, it is done.
When done, cool uncovered.
Remove brisket to cutting board and slice against the grain. Boil gravy down until at desired consistency. Spoon over sliced meat and garnish with chopped cilantro.

 

The story behind this recipe
We view holidays as an opportunity to eat and celebrate family, so when my daughter, who was on a spiritual quest, or "religion shopping" as my agnostic husband put it, asked us (a non-Jewish family) to celebrate Passover, we said sure--as long as she did the research on how we should celebrate it. The result was an amazing dinner of discovery-- a Seder complete with a fantastic brisket with Sephardic flavours and matzoh ball soup (with matzohs the size of softballs) and a place for Elijah at the table. Our one-time foray into Passover left us more knowledgeable about a religion and culture (and admittedly exhausted! wow! the work involved). Fifteen years later, we have shifted back to our humanist celebration of Christian holidays, but the legacy of that long-ago Seder is that we always have brisket now for Easter. I use the same recipe and everyone agrees that "Brisket is the Bomb."