This recipe comes from The New Basics Cookbook by Julee Rosso and Sheila Lukins. This is Eastern European comfort food at its best. It’s one of those great recipes where the finished dish is so much more than the sum of its simple ingredients. The brisket is great the day it is made, but improves on succeeding days. It also freezes and reheats beautifully. The only change I’ve made to the original recipe is to add more carrots. The original only called for one carrot, but we love the flavor of slow cooked carrots, so I usually put in 4 or 5.

Ingredients:

1 first cut brisket of beef (5 to 6 lbs)

Coarsely ground black pepper, to taste

¼ cup olive oil

8 onions, thinly sliced and separated into rings

2 Tbls tomato paste

1 ½ tsp coarse salt

2 cloves garlic, quartered

4-5 carrots, peeled and sliced into inch pieces

1. Preheat oven to 375 degrees
2. Trim the brisket of most of its fat. Sprinkle with pepper.
3. Heat the oil in a large heavy flameproof casserole. Add the brisket, brown on both sides over medium high heat until some crisp spots appear on the surface.
4. Transfer the brisket to a dish. Keeping the heat medium-high, add the onions to the casserole and stir, scraping up brown particles left from the meat. Cook until the onions have softened and developed a handsome brown color, 10-15 minutes.
5. Remove the casserole from the heat, and place the brisket, along with any juices that have accumulated, on top of the onions. Spread the tomato paste over the brisket as if you were icing a cake. Sprinkle with pepper and the coarse salt. Add the garlic and carrot, and cover tightly. Place the casserole on the middle rack in the oven, and bake for  1½ hours.
6. Remove the casserole from the oven, and transfer the meat to a carving board. Cut it into 1/8-1/4 inch thick slices. Return the slices to the pot, overlapping them at an angle so that you can see a bit of the top edge of each slice. (In effect reassembling the brisket, slightly slanted) Correct the seasoning if necessary, and if it seems dry, add 2 to 3 teaspoons of water to the casserole.
7. Cover and return the casserole to the oven. Cook until the meat is brown and fork-tender, 1 ¾ to 2 hours.
8. Transfer the meat, onions and carrots to a platter. Serve and enjoy.