Beer-Braised Beef Brisket with Branston

 I made a version of this recipe when I had a lesson at the London Barbecue School courtesy of Branston; we used thin steaks rather than beef brisket as they were quicker to cook, and they had been pre-marinaded.

 

I liked it so much I decided to make the full version of this recipe at home, which you can find on the Branston website here.

 

To serve 4, you need:

 

500g beef brisket

Bottle of dark beer – I actually used Liefmans Fruit Beer for a lovely fruity taste

1 tbsp honey

1 head of garlic, cut in half

100g Danish blue cheese, crumbled

150ml buttermilk

1 tbsp cider vinegar (I used white wine vinegar)

1 tsp garlic powder (available in the spice section of supermarkets)

Pinch of pepper

½ head of Savoy cabbage, core removed, and thinly sliced – I don’t like cabbage generally so used mooli instead

½ red onion, thinly sliced

1 carrot, peeled and grated

4 large flour tortillas (I actually served mine on the little gem leaves as I was avoiding carbs)

Branston Smoky Tomato & Chipotle Relish

2 sliced medium Jalapenos or green chillis (I left these out)

 

Marinade the beef overnight in the beer, honey and garlic.

 

 

When you are ready to cook, pre-heat oven to 120C – a pretty cool temperature. You are going to braise the beef, in the marinade, for 3-4 hours until cooked through and tender.

 

 

When it’s ready, carefully transfer the beef to a plate or chopping board and cover with foil. Strain the cooking liquid into a pan and reduce to a glaze.

 

Use two forks to shred the beef, and add to the pan with the glaze and fold in.

 

Meanwhile mix the cheese, buttermilk, vinegar, garlic powder and pepper in a large bowl until smooth. Add the cabbage, carrot and onion and stir until all combined.

 

 

 

To serve, place a tortilla (warmed in a skillet if you like) onto a plate, top with little gem, the slaw and pulled beef brisket. Add a dash of the Smoky Tomato and Chipotle Relish and sprinkle with chillis if desired.

 

 

I often make chicken fajitas but this was the first time I had served my husband pulled beef in a tortilla wrap and he really liked it. I don’t normally buy beer or have 4 hours to cook something in the oven so this isn’t something I’d probably make again, but I did really enjoy it – and it showed me once again how versatile Branston is.

 

Beer Can Chicken with Jim Beam Honey Ginger Ale

 

 

This recipe is also known as Drunken Chicken; either way it looks fairly undignified for the poor chook!

 

It's also more of a concept than a recipe - a way to cook roast chicken that makes it really moist and tender and gives it a hint of flavour from the drink - though don't worry, you don't end up with a chicken that tastes of beer! I used a can of ginger ale rather than beer - which had Jim Beam honey in it - giving a lovely gingery, slightly sweet flavour. In fact while I haven't tried it with beer (as per the recipe I found) I think this way is a lot better!

  

Your chicken will take the same amount of time as normal to roast so check the packet - usually about 20 mins per 500g plus an extra 20 mins but don't take my word for that. Preheat the oven and make sure there aren't any giblets inside the chicken cavity.

 

Open your beer can or ginger ale can and drink or pour out a little so the can is about 3/4 full. Rather unceremoniously up-end the chicken so the beer can stands up inside the cavity with your chicken upright on top!

 

 

 

Roast until the juices run clear. The steam from the liquid in the can will almost steam the chicken from the inside while it roasts on the outside (I'd advise you throw away what's left in the can - I know some people make gravy from meat juices but in this case the can will have what's dripped from directly inside the chicken... not fat that comes from roasting the skin).

 

I had to take the middle shelf out of my oven so it would fit. It does look quite funny, doesn't it?

 

 

 

Carefully remove the can from the chicken and carve the chicken as normal to serve - a bit unconventional I admit, but delicious!

 

 

Super-Fast Chilli and Cheese Beer Bread and Vegetable Soup

Last weekend I decided to make soup and bread for lunch. I had a packet of diced vegetables that were called 'soup mix', the idea being you just bung them all in a pan with some stock. I'd planned to set my breadmaker machine the night before so we could have nice fresh bread in time for lunch - and completely forgot.

Was I going to have to give up on the idea of having fresh bread with soup (or send the reluctant other half out to buy some)? Surely there must be a quick bread recipe out there that I could make in a couple of hours from start to finish (I didn't get up very early on the Sunday morning so lunch was only a couple of hours away!). Luckily, there was: there are bread recipes you don't need to leave to prove, and this is one of them.

It's a recipe from the Telegraph for 'easy beer bread with parmesan and garlic'. I think the beer replaces yeast and all you have to do is mix everything and cook it for just under an hour.

I did change the recipe a fair bit as I didn't have buckwheat flour, polenta, fresh thyme and couldn't be bothered to go into the garden to see if I still had any rosemary (it was raining!), oh and I did't have any parmesan either! Instead I looked in the fridge to see what I did have and decided to create my own flavour of mature cheddar and chilli. I also forgot to add the little bit of butter at the end but it was fine without. So here's what I did:

Super-Fast Chilli and Cheese Beer Bread - an original recipe by Caroline Makes

260g strong white bread flour
100g wholemeal plain flour
1 tbsp. baking powder
60g caster sugar
3 cloves garlic, crushed
50g mature cheddar, diced
2 tsp Very Lazy chopped red chillis
300ml bottle beer

Preheat oven to 190C and grease a loaf tin. Mix all the dry ingredients.

Add the beer and mix in well

Spoon into the prepared loaf tin and bake in the oven for 50 minutes

In the meantime here is my soup mix, which I simply simmered with some vegetable stock until the veg was soft, then put it in a blender.

I added some more water as it was a bit thick

 

 Here's the finished loaf of bread

The garlic, cheese and chilli flavours all came through really strongly, so this is a good bread to serve alongside a simple soup - one that perhaps doesn't have an overpowering flavour of its own.

Lunch! And possibly the fastest loaf of bread I've ever made.

I'm sending this to Bready Steady Go, hosted by Jen's Food and Michelle of Utterly Scrummy.

And also to Extra Veg, hosted this month by Elizabeth's Kitchen Diary on behalf of Michelle at Utterly Scrummy again, and Helen at Fuss Free Flavours.

Movie Night: Chocolate Marshmallow Popcorn and a Beer Glass Review

Last April I bought my boyfriend a popcorn maker for his birthday and a recipe book, as he loves popcorn and I thought it would be fun to add some more interesting flavours – even though I knew I would be the one using the recipe book! That was right around the time we were preparing to move house so the popcorn maker ended up being packed – and then our house purchase was delayed, and stuff ended up in a storage unit. When we finally moved at the very end of August, the rest of the year was taken up with decorating and getting the house how we wanted it. So it was only very recently that the popcorn maker saw the light of day.

I’d bought a bag of ‘raw’ popcorn and was amazed at the tiny amount we needed to put into the popcorn maker to make a massive bowlful of popcorn. I know you can make popcorn in a saucepan but this machine was far more fun, and very quick. You do need a big bowl underneath to catch the popcorn as it comes shooting out!

I did have a look through the recipe book but as it was quite last-minute, I didn’t have a lot of the ingredients to hand and some of the recipes involved making the popcorn, covering it with toppings and then baking it in the oven, which I didn’t want to do as we wanted popcorn right away! So instead I threw together a couple of things and decided to share this in a post as it really did taste wonderful.

I simply made a chocolate sauce, by melting chocolate and butter and adding a little golden syrup, and stirring it through the popcorn along with some mini marshmallows. The chocolate cools quite quickly, so while you might get a little messy eating this, it’s not that bad. Popcorn is pretty healthy and you don’t need to add much chocolate or marshmallow to feel like you have a really indulgent snack.

The perfect accompaniment for your bowl of popcorn and a movie is a tall glass of your favourite tipple, whether it’s beer or a soft drink. I was recently sent a selection of products to review by Flamingo Gifts, a website that offers unique gifts for all occasions, ranging from funny novelty items to leading brands like Bombay Duck, Ted Baker, Orla Kierly and Sass and Belle. They also have a large range of Lolita glasses, which I’ve loved ever since I was given a martini glass for a birthday present several years ago. These glasses are beautifully decorated, all hand designed and painted in varying themes. They come in gift boxes and really do make wonderful gifts. Flamingo sent me this movie-night themed beer glass, which is large enough to hold a pint and the designs on the side make it feel very special – perfect for the man in your life to use on movie night. Just don’t forget the popcorn!

Nigella's Chocolate Guinness Cake

When  Janine at Cake of the Week challenged us to make something using beer for her Baking With Spirit blog event, my mind immediately went to Nigella's chocolate Guinness cake. I don't drink beer but always wondered what this cake was like - it's featured in her recipe book Feast, which I have at home. We also had a bake sale coming up at work and I figured that even if I didn't like the cake, there might be beer drinkers in my office who did! But as it turned out, the cake was absolutely delicious, and didn't particularly taste like it contained Guinness - in fact it was one of the nicest chocolate cakes I've ever made!

I think Nigella herself puts it best when she says: "This cake is magnificent in its damp blackness. I can't say that you can absolutely taste the stout in it, but there is certainly a resonant, ferrous tang which I happen to love. The best way of describing it is to say that it's like gingerbread without the spices."

The recipe is available on her website here or in her book Feast.

Measure out the Guinness

Pour into a saucepan, with 250g butter - a whole pack, which seemed like quite a lot! Allow the butter to melt and mix well.

Add 400g caster sugar and 75g cocoa powder. At this point you will have a thick, dark mixture (and you should have turned off the heat by now).

Add 142ml sour cream and mix gently. I realised too late that I was supposed to beat the sour cream with 2 eggs and a dash of vanilla first, then mix it in, but I didn't read the recipe properly. So I added the cream first, then the other ingredients - it seemed to work fine.

Slowly add 275g plain flour and 2.5 tsp bicarb of soda and carefully fold in. This is the first time I've made an entire cake in a saucepan!

Pour into the tin. Nigella's quantities state this is for a 23cm tin, though I don't know how deep hers would be. I have to admit I don't actually know how big any of my cake tins are and I just use the same one for most of my cakes - I ought to get around to measuring it! It must be smaller than 23cm though, as the tin is quite deep and I found I had enough mixture to fill two tins!

Bake for 45 mins at 180C. When the cakes come out of the oven, they are literally black! It made me think they had burned but in fact they were cooked to the perfect consistency, and still nice and soft on top - the black colour comes from the Guinness!

Here's a slightly better picture showing the black colour of the cake

To make the topping, whisk 300g cream cheese with 150g icing sugar

Add 125ml double cream and beat again until it is fairly thick

I also decided that because I had two cakes, I would sandwich them together with a chocolate filling; I used buttercream mixed with a little of the leftover sour cream.

Spread the filling on the bottom cake. I didn't go right to the edge as the cake looked fairly heavy and I didn't want the one on top to make the filling ooze out.

Spoon the topping onto the cake; the idea is that it looks like the froth on top of a pint of Guinness. Which I think it does!

Ta da.... as I said, I was very impressed by this cake and pleased that I have finally found something to do the next time I have leftover beer after a party!

I am sending this to Baking with Spirit as the ingredient this month is beer.

 

I am also sending this to the linkup party This Week's Cravings at Mom's Crazy Cooking

Beer-battered Cod

 

 

Janine at Cake of the Week runs a monthly challenge called Baking with Spirit, that chooses one alcoholic ingredient each month and lets our imaginations run wild. The challenge only started last month and I took part with these pina colada cupcakes, containing September's ingredient of rum (OK, in my case rum flavouring). I wanted to take part in the second challenge this month and was hoping it was an ingredient I would like... or at the very least not something disgusting like creme de menthe! I'm not sure whether I was pleased or disappointed when Janine chose beer! It's cheap and easily available but I don't even drink beer, let alone cook with it!

 

One of the first things that sprang to mind when I thought of beer was beer-battered fish. I happened to have just bought some cod, and I love fish and chips, so I decided to give it a go, even though I've never deep fried anything and was a little bit scared!

 

I checked out a few different recipes on the internet and decided they were all pretty much the same. The beer I used was Guinness, which does have a strong flavour (which I hate in fact) and I thought it would probably have been better to use a lighter beer, but I had half a can of Guinness left over from another recipe... which you will read about soon! I did find recipes for beer-battered fish using Guinness on the internet so I was confident it would work.

 

First I measured out the flour - a cup and a half, though this ended up making way too much, but it was the right quantity for the amount of beer I had left so decided to go with it.

 

 

Pour in half a can of Guinness, add some salt and pepper and mix well to make a batter. Leave to stand for at least 15 minutes.

Coat the fish in flour then dip in the batter. It didn't look particularly appetising at this point and I really didn't know how the sludgy batter would look anything like what you get from the chip shop!

Heat some oil in a pan - a few inches deep. This is the part I was quite nervous about, as I don't have a deep fryer and have never cooked anything in this much oil before!

I carefully slid the fish into the pan and it was fantastic - it bubbled up right away and within a matter of seconds the fish had a gorgeous golden coating. It was actually quite exciting!

I also made some tartare sauce, from a spoonful of mayo, some fat-free Greek yogurt and some capers. I cheated and used chunky chips from Tesco. I have to say that I think the taste of the Guinness did come through in the batter and as I hate Guinness, that wasn't really a good thing. But the batter was light and crisp and I was pleased with the way it turned out. I doubt I would have tried making this if it weren't for the Baking with Spirit challenge, so thanks Janine!