Cooking Brisket: An Essential Jewish Skill

Cooking for large groups of hungry 20 somethings is no easy feat. Being able to prepare an entire Shabbat meal, or any meal for so many people can brew up several challenges. One of the largest difficulties involved in creating such a meal, is having everything be ready and warm at the exact same time. For my blog, I am going to teach you how to prepare a super tender and delicious brisket, which will even impress your Bubbe, and will require about 10 minutes of preparation at the most. This may not be the best method of preparing brisket, but we have already served it several times in Moishe House LA with rave reviews. I am going to give you the basic rundown of how to prepare this brisket, and then leave you with a list of ingredients you can mix and match to create your very own recipe.

Question: How much brisket should I buy?
Answer: I'd say each pound will happily feed 3 people...
To keep yourself under budget, serve foods with carbs (pasta, cous cous) that will fill folks up for less, and then the brisket will feed more people. Cooking Length: You should cook the brisket for 8 hours at 200 degrees if you want it to be extremely tender. Make sure someone is home during this entire process.

Preparation:

1. Get a pot that has a good cover that will fit your brisket inside. If you're making a larger sized one, you can get those aluminum tins at the market and cover with foil.
2. Put the brisket in the pot and fill the pot with liquids of your choice (see below) until it is about a half inch below the top of the meat.
3. Add spices and vegetables
4. Cover, place in oven, Set it and forget it!

Sauces (mix and match):

• Coca Cola
• red wine
• onion soup mix (or just throw in a whole onion)
  
• ketchup
• bbq sauce
• beer
• whiskey

Spices (mix n match):

• Salt
• Pepper
• Garlic
• Hot Paprika
• Cayenne
• Cinnamon
  
• Coffee grounds
• Cocoa Powder
• Cumin

After 8 hours are up, just take out the brisket and slice it up! You can use the leftover sauce to pour over rice, or you can use it instead of water to make cous cous or rice.

If you make some brisket, respond to this post with what you did, and how it came out!

Thanks,
Benjie

gefilte fish with guajillo-chipotle sauce

When people ask me about being a Mexican Jew, I joke that we eat spicy gefilte fish. Which is actually not such a joke – the title of this post is a recipe my cousin Fany contributed to an article on Latin-Jewish cuisine that just came out in Jewish Woman Magazine. The article is timely as we approach Pesach, noting that the story of exile and exodus repeats itself throughout Diaspora history, and wondering how customs and tastes inspired by new locales enrich ancient Jewish traditions and create new traditions to pass on; in this case, the new locales being countries in Latin America. And indeed, the author writes, “local cuisine definitely makes its voice heard at the Passover table of several Mexican families. Some Latinas I spoke to have suggested that this may reflect a special relationship the long-standing, stable Mexican-Jewish community enjoys with its host country. Fany Gerson, a Mexico City–born pastry chef [and my cousin!] deeply proud of the culinary traditions of her native country, explains it differently: ‘Maybe Mexican food is simply so tasty that they needed to translate that into traditional dishes…[it’s] probably the most rich and varied within Latin America.’” I Love this answer, as it suggests a metric for comparing the tastiness of different foods (the fact that Americans adhere pretty strictly to ancient Jewish recipes: oy ve). But more broadly, I Love this perpetual imprint of new places on our customs and tastes – when I eat my mom's spicy gefilte fish in California, I'm tasting both her family’s exodus from Poland and Austria, and her exodus from Mexico. And of course, I Love the possibility of seasoning brisket with tamarind and garnishing Matzo Ball Soup with cilantro, chile, lime, and avocado.

So if you wanna spice up this year’s Passover (hey, some extra spiciness – especially for the unsuspecting – can certainly satisfy the same function as bitterness, Mexican-style), go for my cousin's Gefile fish with Guajillo-Chipotle Sauce. And, spelling it the way Mexicans do, Hag Sameaj!

MHSeattle, Neal Schindler, 9/24/2008

Food is a big part of the Moishe House Seattle experience, and I've found that four weeks among people -- and not just people, mind you, but Jewish people -- who like to cook has inspired me to do more inventive and exciting cooking than I've done in many, many years. Tonight my friend Elana came over and we made a dessert whose recipe we'd gotten from Rabbi Jacob Fine (of UW Hillel and Jconnect) and his wife, Julie. It was Mexican mocha pudding with pumpkin cream, something I'll surely make again in time for Halloween, if not before.

Being in a kitchen that's well stocked, and working with a pantry that has a lot of basic ingredients already in it (haven't had such a thing at my disposal for, again, many years), is thrilling. I've been eating too much lately, moving steadily toward the dreaded "Freshman Fifteen" that Masha warned me about, but hopefully I'll be able to straighten myself out fairly soon and eat in greater moderation. It is nice, however, to eat so well and to witness such passion for food and cooking on a daily basis. And I'm so, so grateful to live in a house where I can wander upstairs hungry around lunchtime and find that Tamar has made beans and rice, quinoa tabouli, and hummus for everyone to enjoy. I'm one lucky Jew.