Western Style Brisket

 Jan here, with a recipe rerun. 

Some exciting stuff is going on around here. But let's go back in time a year or two...

Back in January 2019, we were looking for our new place and were anticipating selling our house in town, so we took a long weekend to paint the living/dining/kitchen/stairway (aka "Great Room.") It was a lot of work, but we were happy when we painted over the drab brown/dark brown combination with a light buttery yellow! Here's a sample of what the house looked like during the eight years we lived in it:

Then in our house hunting, we found our current home! It had a great floor plan for our needs, a lovely setting, and fabulous views!

But the walls...

Ignore the former owner's belongings, and look at the wall - this new place had the same color combination we had painted over just a few months earlier! Brown with dark brown accent walls!

This week, we finally got around to painting them! And what color did we choose?

Well, when you have five gallons of a color you love sitting in the garage, it isn't a hard decision!

I hope the color shows up as yellow on your computer!

Once the pictures are back up on the walls, we'll enjoy it even more.

And we finished in time for our annual November birthdays celebration!

When our children were young, we had twelve people on my side of our extended family, and six of those people had birthdays in the first half of November, so we started celebrating those birthdays together. Times have changed, but we still have three November birthdays among the family here in South Dakota, so we still honor that tradition.

This year, I'm going to fix the brisket that's been waiting in our freezer for an occasion like this, and I'll use this recipe I shared several years ago. This is a rerun of a rerun recipe, because it just keeps on changing! Enjoy this post from an earlier time:

Western Style Brisket

Western style brisket is on the menu today. This is a repeat recipe from a while ago, with an update because in cowboy country, once you let people know you want to fix a brisket, you get loads of advice.

I would be reluctant to change my original recipe from The Pioneer Woman (below), but then I tasted the brisket my friend, Mel, fixed.

Oh, my, was it tender, moist and delicious!

So I made some slight changes in the recipe I shared last year, and they'll show up in bold italics as we go along.

So here's the amended post:


Even though I'm "The Midwesterner" at the cafe, right now we live in the western part of the Midwest.

Cowboy country.

Open spaces, big skies, antelope, coyotes...

...and cattle. Lots and lots of cattle.

What do you think happens when you add multiple-thousands of acre sized ranches with tens of thousands of cattle?

Branding time.

This is what the western prairie looks like in April. By June the grass
is knee-high and emerald green.

Once the grass starts greening up and the spring calves have all arrived, each rancher needs to round up the cow/calf pairs and bring them in to a central location. The calves are roped, vaccinated, given a quick once-over and branded...all in about a minute each.

Starting late April through Memorial Day, ranchers meet at each other's spreads to join in the work - and fun - and the traditional branding day meal.

This branding day spread is a big deal. This is where the rancher's wives can really show off what they can do - I mean besides working alongside their husbands day after day.

One of the traditional meals is brisket.

I don't have a branding crew to feed, but I did get a brisket with the half steer we put in our freezer last January. I knew that somewhere along the way, I'd have to fix it.

So I went to the internet to look for recipes. I could have "corned" it, and had corned beef. (Yes, that was tempting!) Or I could have smoked it (but we don't have a smoker, like Mindy did when she fixed her brisket. You can read her post here.).

I ended up at the Pioneer Woman's website, and found a recipe I could fix in my kitchen. Here's the link to the original recipe.

Of course, I had to change things up a bit so I could use what I had in my pantry. Here's the recipe I ended up with:

Braised Beef Brisket

Ingredients:

1/2 envelope onion soup mix (like Lipton)

1 cup water

1/4 cup lemon juice

3/4 cups Soy Sauce

1 teaspoon Liquid Smoke 

2 cloves garlic, minced or crushed

4-6 pounds beef brisket

Now, to begin with, the brisket is a pretty tough piece of meat. It comes from the chest of the steer, and is tough and stringy.

That is, until you prepare it correctly. That's why corned beef is so popular - the pickling breaks down the fibers of the meat. This marinade, combined with hours of slow roasting, does the same thing.

Combine the first seven ingredients in a large roasting pan. (Don't do what I did and try to make do with your 11x13 baking dish - but it was the only one that would fit in the refrigerator.)

Put the brisket in the liquid, turn it once to coat both sides, position the meat with the fat side up, and cover the pan tightly with foil.

Refrigerate for 24 to 36 hours.

Read that again: refrigerate for 24 to 36 hours!

Remember all those tough fibers? This cut of meat needs that much time.

If you were smart and used a large roasting pan, you can just stick in the oven as-is.

But, of course, I needed to transfer mine to a larger pan.

Set your oven for 250°, and let that meat s-l-o-w-l-y roast for about eight to ten hours. 

This is where I changed the recipe after tasting Mel's version - extend that time to twenty-four hours.

Yes, you read that right!

(Is anyone adding up the time? If you want to serve this meat for Thursday dinner, you need to start marinating it on Tuesday morning. This dish takes some planning ahead!)

Amended time: start roasting the meat on Wednesday night for Thursday dinner - and start marinating it on Monday morning.

About ten minutes before serving, take the meat out of the oven and let it sit for a few minutes.

Slice it thin, across the grain.

Serve it with some of the juice from your pan, and you have a delicious main dish! 

And be sure to plan for leftovers!!!

When you're ready for the leftovers, take the cold brisket out of the fridge, and slice it.

Heat it up with some of the leftover juice and a few tablespoons of your favorite barbecue sauce...

Ever since living in the Kansas City area many years
ago, we've become BBQ sauce fanatics. This brand
is from Blue Springs, Missouri, and delicious!

...and you have Sunday night supper all set to go.

Wait! I forgot to tell you the best part! 

Even though these two meals were hours (and days!) in the marinating and cooking time, the actual prep time was only about ten minutes!

When you're on a deadline, that's priceless!

*  *  *  *  *  *  *   *  *  *  *  *

Back to 2020...

I'm looking forward to our birthday celebration already! I'll need to take the beef out of the freezer in a few days to start preparing it for the 14th. We'll have some sourdough rolls along with it, and I'm sure there will be some cake and ice cream to round out the celebration!

Jan Drexler has always been a "book girl" who still loves to spend time within the pages of her favorite books. She lives in the Black Hills of South Dakota with her dear husband of many years and their active, crazy dogs, Jack and Sam. You can learn more about Jan and her books on her website, www.JanDrexler.com.