Southwestern pulled brisket sandwiches with Mesa Grill potato salad

This post combines both of my rather modest goals for the summer: cooking new things in my slow cooker (new to me, anyway) and using the produce from the Buying Club in summery ways.

My previous summers in Miami I pretty much ignored the climate and made whatever looked interesting, but I guess I'm just in a different mood this year. Running the oven in a 90 degree kitchen just doesn't sound appealing. So I'm keeping an eye out for dishes both served cold and requiring less cooking. Certainly I'll be making exceptions, but I do want to shift the majority in that direction.

I found both of these recipes on the Food Network's website. The Mesa Grill recipe is Bobby Flay's obviously. The brisket is from a 2004 episode of a show called Making It Easy that I don't think I've ever encountered. I'm no expert in either slow cooker cooking or Southwestern cuisine so I didn't make any significant changes in either recipe. I hope you don't mind a bit of cutting and pasting from the original sources as they both had quite a few ingredients and I don't see any particular reason to rewrite a scrupulously followed recipe.

Pulled brisket ingredients:
3 pounds beef brisket
Kosher salt
Freshly ground black pepper
2 tablespoons vegetable oil
5 cloves garlic, peeled and smashed
1 Spanish onion, halved and thinly sliced
1 tablespoon chili powder
2 teaspoons ground coriander
2 teaspoons ground cumin
1/4 cup apple cider vinegar
1 1/2 cups water
1 (14 1/2-ounce) can whole peeled tomatoes, with their juices
2 whole canned chipotle chiles en adobo
2 bay leaves
3 tablespoons molasses
Soft sandwich buns
Pickled jalapeños [sweet pickles are just as good. The results aren't really all that Southwestern]

1. Season the beef generously with salt and pepper, to taste. Heat a large, heavy skillet over medium-high heat. Add the oil and heat just until beginning to smoke. Add the meat and cook, turning once, until browned on both sides, about 10 minutes total. Transfer the meat to the slow cooker; leave the skillet on the heat.

2. Add garlic, onion, chili powder, coriander, and cumin to drippings in the skillet and stir until fragrant, about 1 minute. Add vinegar and boil until it's almost gone, scraping the bottom of the pan with a wooden spoon. Stir in water and pour the mixture over the brisket. Crush the tomatoes through your fingers into the slow cooker; add the tomato juices, chipotles, bay leaves, and molasses. Cover the cooker, set it on LOW, and cook the brisket until it pulls apart easily with a fork, about 8 hours.

3. [The original recipe calls for just pulling the meat apart in the cooker and serving, but I wanted a thicker sauce which requires a few more steps.] Remove meat and bay leaves from the slow cooker. Turn off the slow cooker or remove the cooking vessel from the heater or pour out the sauce into a large bowl. Discard the bay leaves and let the brisket and sauce cool a bit.

4. When it's cool enough to handle, pour the sauce into a food processor or blender and blend smooth. Return to slow cooker if it has a High setting that's pretty high or pour into a pot on the stovetop. [I tried the former first but switched to the latter.] Cook the sauce down until it's thick enough to splatter when it bubbles.

5. Meanwhile, pull the brisket apart with forks and/or tongs. When the sauce is to your ideal thickness, mix it with the meat.

Serve on buns or in tortillas with the pickled jalapeños on top. Over egg noodles or rice wouldn't be bad either.


Ingredients for Mesa Grill potato salad:
[I halved these amounts. If I had known how poorly potato salad freezes, I would have quartered them. Instead, I've been eating potato salad way too many meals in a row. It's good but I've got my limits.]
1 1/2 cups prepared mayonnaise
1/4 cup Dijon mustard
2 tablespoons fresh lime juice
2 tablespoons chipotle pepper puree [or one chipotle en adobo chopped fine]
1 large ripe tomato, seeded and diced
1/4 cup chopped cilantro leaves
3 scallions, chopped, white and green parts
1 medium red onion, thinly sliced
1/2 teaspoon cayenne
4 cloves garlic, finely chopped
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
16 new potatoes, about 3 to 4 pounds

1. Heat a large pot of water. Cut potatoes into large, similarly-sized pieces. When water comes to a boil, add potatoes and a generous amount of salt. Lower heat to medium-low. Simmer until potatoes are tender. Remove to cutting board, let cool until you can handle them and slice into 1/2-inch thick slices.

2. Combine all the ingredients, except the potatoes, in a medium bowl and season with salt and pepper, to taste. Mix in potatoes. Check seasoning and serve warm.


I cooked the sauce down more after this first sandwich but this picture isn't too far off from the final version. The sauce tasted a bit muddy at first, but the flavors clarified after a night in the refrigerator with more of the spices unique character coming through instead of just a general heat. The small amount of vinegar in the sauce isn't enough to balance on its own; the pickles (of whatever sort) are important to cut through the rich meaty flavors. And I'm pleased that there is some meaty flavor left in the meat. Often it's all leached out after 8-9 hours of cooking.

As for the potato salad, I can't recall ever having better. Just the lack of chunks of raw celery is a huge plus. Beyond that, large tender slices of potato are an improvement over chunks. There's a freshness from the scallion and cilantro that balances against the creaminess, slight tartness and gentle heat. Nicely complex and a lovely pairing with the the brisket. The only possible issue is that the sauce to potato ratio is pretty high so it might be better to put the potatoes in a large bowl and add the sauce to taste.

Crockpot follies

Just like my second attempt at an angel food cake, my second attempt at crockpot cooking was a wretched failure. And for the same reason too: overconfidence. The third time I made angel food cake I stopped trying to improvise as if I knew what I was doing and followed the dang recipe and it turned out just fine (although I really ought to use pastry flour to get the full angel food experience). So I'll have to find some real crockpot recipes if I want to keep using this thing. To tell the truth, though, I'm not sure why I'd want to. It's about the same as putting a medium-sized pot on the stove, but with less control over the temperature. It was forgetting that and imagining that it had some slow-cooking magic that caused my problems.

What I tried to make was a futher mutation of the Korean short ribs recipe I modifed last month. I used some random scraps of lousy cuts of pork and threw in a bunch of vegetables and seasonings, as I said up top, it didn't work out so well.

First thing, while ox tail or short ribs can stand up to four hours of simmering, most meat can't. Best to keep things under the boiling point so the meat doesn't dry up and get tough. Also, if you're going to slow-cook it's a darn shame not to include some bones in the pot to cook out their gelatin.

I had a bit of trouble with the vegetables, too. Onions and peppers cook down, of course, and if the liquid base wasn't soy sauce, tomatoes work work well too over the long run. Dried shiitake mushrooms held up quite well. Thick cut carrots got an interestingly yam-esque texture after a while. My big mistake was adding scallions and broccolini. Even a half hour was too much for them and they fell apart.

But, really, and kind of surprisingly, the real problem was the cooking liquid. An strongly-flavored high-quality soy sauce, plus sugar, garlic, ginger and star anise made for an intense sauce that soaked into every other flavor in the dish. It's a pretty good flavor, but way too much of it. I'm thinking of straining out all of the overcooked solids, diluting it down and keeping it around as a marinade. But, as is, it's inedible. Not very photogenic either so you'll just to have to imagine a pile of limp overcooked vegetables stained black with soy.


Oh, and speaking of failure, I took another look at some of those oddly large numbers in my blogiversary post. I haven't actually got seventy-some regular readers. What I have are seventy-some monthly visits from regular readers. And since regular readers probably visit at least once a week, that number should be divided by at least four. I think the dozen subscribers are a legitimate count, though, so let's say two dozen readers. I suppose that's not too bad considering my lack of a real gimmick for this thing.

Korean veal ox tail

A couple days ago I saw a recipe for Korean Short Ribs on the A Good Appetite blog. The author, Kat, wrote: "Isn't it amazing how a recipe gets around the internet? I found this recipe for Korean Short Ribs on Dinners for a Year & Beyond, she found it on A Year of Crockpotting, who had gotten it from City Mama. It's also interesting to watch how it changes. City Mama made it as a stew with beef chuck then on Crockpotting it became beef or pork ribs. The other thing I noticed is everyone uses a different amount of jalapenos. Maybe its just me, but I love seeing how a recipe like this develops from person to person."

Since mutating recipes is kind of my mission statement here, and because her pictures make the dish look fabulous, I had to make my own version. From the Subject line of this post you can see that my first change was to switch out the short ribs for veal ox tail. That's one more point on my Omnivore's Hundred as I haven't cooked with ox tail before. And this counts; nobody uses tails from actual oxen anymore. It's all cows. I only used veal because I figured the smaller rounds would fit better in my crock pot.

Something you don't see in the subject line is that I noticed the recipe is pretty close to a Chinese dish called red simmered pork, although that generally uses less sugar. I pushed the seasonings in that direction so the "Korean" above is probably inappropriate. But I left it there for continuity's sake.

One other point, I'm pretty sure the box my crock pot came in says it's a slow cooker, but it's only got one setting and that's pretty hot so I'm going to call that a crock. I suspect every such device, or at least every model, is different and you just need to get to know yours to figure out your cooking times. Exactly what cut of meat you use makes a difference too, of course. In this case, Kat's ribs were holding together at six hours. My ox tail pieces were falling apart after three and a half.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. The first step was to give the meat a good sear, two minutes per side: top, bottom, left and right.



Meanwhile, on the bottom of the crock I put:
1/4 large onion sliced very thin
5 serano peppers quartered (which is rather a lot)
2 inch knob of ginger, smashed

I covered that with:
3/4 cup packed light brown sugar
1 cup light soy sauce
1 drizzle sesame oil



A quick stir to dissolve the sugar and in goes the ox tail.

After three hours I added a chopped fresh bamboo shoot that I had picked up at an Asian grocery that morning. I had remembered seeing chunks of bamboo shoot colored a deep red from soaking up a sauce like this so I figured they'd work well. Checking The Thousand Recipe Chinese Cookbook confirms the idea. The author also suggests adding scallions, garlic, star anise, dried cabbage, salt fish, lily buds, cloud ears, carrots, turnips, celery, hard boiled eggs, squid, peastarch noodles, tofu, mushrooms, and/or abalone. That just counts as one of the thousand, by the way; good cookbook. Star anise and salt fish jump out at me as particularly good ideas. But that's next time.

This time, after a total of four hours, here's the result:
Sorry I can't get a better close-up. Go to Kat's page to see more detail.


As I mentioned above, the meat is falling off the bone tender and the fat is almost all melted away. I had hoped the marrow in the center of the bones would have melted too, I didn't think that happened, but after a night in the refrigerator the sauce solidified so a good bit of gelatin did seep out. While warm, the gelatin gives the sauce enough body to cling to the meat. I think there's a bit of a glaze there too; I might consider a quick turn under a broiler to bring that out if I thought the meat would survive the experience.

You can see from the ingredients that the flavor is nothing exotic, just salty, sweet, meaty and hot, but there's nothing wrong with that. Even after four hours of simmering the flavors haven't completely melded; the meat is seasoned by the sauce, not overwhelmed by it, and the bits of pepper floating around still have a bit of bite to them. It's familiar and homey in that crock-pot sort of way and plenty tasty. I do have the urge to complicate matters, but that's just me not the dish calling out for it. Some things are best simple and this may well be one of them.