A brilliant winter warmer recipe from Native Beef’s talented sister Susie! Beef brisket with ale, root veg and porcini. This is a very easy and very lazy recipe, leaving out all the browning that casseroles usually involve, but the ale and dried mushrooms add lots of flavour, and the slow cooking makes it wonderfully tender. The quantities aren’t exact, depending on the size of your brisket you can add more or less veg, liquid and flour (see below for recipe).
Beef brisket (around 1kg)
3 carrots
2 parsnips
3 onions
2 sticks of celery
3-4 garlic cloves
beef stock
1 bottle of ale
plain flour (2-3 heaped tablespoons)
2-3 bay leaves
salt and black pepper
1-2 handfuls of dried porcini mushrooms
Cover the mushrooms with boiling water and leave to soak for 20 minutes to soften. Peel the vegetables, cut into bite-sized chunks and place into a casserole dish. Sprinkle over the flour (the more flour, the thicker the gravy), and the salt and pepper, and give it all a stir. Add the bay leaves. Scoop the mushrooms out of the water and add to the pot. Line a sieve with a piece of kitchen paper, and pour the mushroom soaking liquid though it into the pot (the dried mushrooms can sometimes be gritty, so the straining allows you to keep the flavoursome liquid and lose the gritty bits). Place the brisket on top of the vegetables. Pour over the ale, and enough beef stock to cover the veg. Cover with the lid and place into a cool oven (circa 140C) for at least four hours. Keep checking, and take out when the beef is soft and flakes easily into pieces, and the sauce thickened. If it starts to dry out, add more stock or ale.
