Leftover Smoked Brisket Makes Great Beans!

This is a story of a post-Christmas culinary miracle.

Can You Just Make a Big Pot of Beans?

You know how you get tired of rich holiday foods and just crave something down-home and honest? That’s how The Grill-Meister was feeling a couple of days after Christmas when all the family had left, and we still had oodles and gobs of cheeses, paté, casseroles, cakes, cookies and candies. “Can you just make a big pot of beans?” he asked, somewhat plaintively.

Can I? Of course I can!

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Taking Inventory

I took inventory before getting started. Did I have the goods?

Where to get the flavor?

We had some leftover smoked brisket in the fridge that had been dumped unceremoniously into a bowl with its ends and pieces and the fat that had drained when it was sliced.

Check!

I didn’t have any homemade stock but found a smoked turkey carcass in the big chest freezer we have out in the garage.

Check!

I had two kinds of dried beans: a pound of pinto beans left in a 4-lb. bag, and a half pound of black beans. I can’t remember the last time I made beans from scratch but I figured dried beans don’t go bad; right?

I always have The Trinity (onion, bell pepper and celery) on hand, and had plenty of chile peppers, so I was in business!

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Smoked Brisket Beans: There’s Not Really a Recipe, But Here’s the Method

This isn’t a fine-tuned recipe, since it’s a throw-down of what was on hand. But like the Seafood Boil Leftover Chowder, which is one of my most-clicked posts, I’ll share the method with you. The results were mind-blowingly good – that’s the post-Christmas miracle part.

Beans

I didn’t have time to soak the beans overnight because this was a Comfort Food Emergency so I used the boiling water method, putting them into a casserole dish, adding boiling water to cover and letting them sit, covered, for a few hours.

Brisket (Meat and Fat)

Separating the leftover brisket from the fat and juices we had saved, I diced it into small cubes, between ¼ and ½”. I ended up with a little over 3 cups of cubed brisket meat. I set aside the fat to use for sauteing the vegetables, and the juices for making the stock.

Stock

I fished the smoked turkey carcass out of the freezer. The turkey that it came from was from LAST Christmas – I had forgotten it was there, so it was a lovely and timely surprise. I put the turkey bones in a stock pot filled with water, and added the brisket juices and burnt ends along with the ends of the veggies I was using: onion, celery, bell pepper and a couple of carrots. I boiled the stock on medium high for about 90 minutes.

Vegetables

I sauteed these vegetables in the reserved brisket fat for about ten minutes:

• 1-2 bell peppers, diced
• 1 yellow onion, diced
• 3 stalks of celery, diced
• 1 large carrot, diced
• a handful of chile peppers, minced (from jalapeno to serrano to one ghost pepper)
• 5-6 large cloves of garlic, minced

Assembly and Cooking

It was a lovely day, so I did much of my cooking in the outdoor kitchen. Below are the components of my dish:

To repeat:

• 10 cups of stock
• ~3 cups of leftover brisket
• ~½ cup of brisket fat
• Vegetables: peppers, onion, celery, carrot, chilé peppers and garlic
• 1 lb. of pinto beans, ½ lb. of black beans, soaked
• Salt – a tablespoon or more, but starting with just two teaspoons

I put all of the ingredients together in a big pot, stirred and tasted the broth. WOWZA! Even before cooking the beans, the taste was AMAZING. There was no need to add any herbs or spices, only salt. The flavor combinations were part of the post-Christmas miracle.

I brought this soup pot full of beany love to a boil, stirred and reduced to a simmer, letting the beans cook for two hours and stirring occasionally. At this point, I tasted the beans, and while the flavors had continued to marry and become even more beguiling, the exterior of the beans was still somewhat tough; they hadn’t softened and gotten creamy in that lovely way that cooked beans do. They were the tastiest too-crunchy beans anyone ever made, at that point.

Uh Oh!

I was worried that my beans would be inedible. But – Google to the rescue! After some research, I added about a tablespoon of baking soda and cooked the beans for about 45 more minutes, and they were done to perfection. Salvaging the texture of the beans was another part of the post-Christmas miracle.

Serving Up a Simple Meal

While the beans were cooking, I made some rice with some of the fabulous smoked turkey stock. We had a simple dinner of beans and rice, garnished with sour cream and our Glover Gardens pico de gallo.

This was exactly what The Grill-Meister wanted in the wake of all the fancy holiday food, and he decreed them the best beans he’s ever had. That’s some high praise!

The Beans Kept on Giving (not in the way you think!😃)

We had the beans again as a side dish for smash burgers the next night – they were even better. I froze some in individual 1-cup containers for future use, and froze another large container to take with us to Gumbo Cove in Mississippi a couple of days later. I like having an arrival-day meal already prepared, so we can ease into the bayou life without a lot of trouble. That night, we had some of the beans with some cajun sausage, in the style of red beans and rice, with a side of cheesy jalapeno cornbread. It was another hit. I was sick for most of the week while we were in Mississippi and didn’t cook again for days, but The Grill-Meister was happy to keep eating the beans. They were that good.

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Key Takeaways

There were several key learnings along the way in this brisket bean miracle journey:

• Leftover brisket was made for beans. Using the remains of our brisket throughout the dish helped to develop the deep, smoky taste. From the fat I sauteed the vegetables in to the burnt ends and juices that enhanced the stock to the chopped bits of brisket in the beans, the beefy, smoky taste permeated the dish.
• Never throw away a smoked turkey carcass – or any bones that you’ve grilled or smoked that could become stock. The turkey stock added to the sultry, smoky depth of flavor.
• This meal from leftovers and dried beans cost only a few dollars. Using what we had on hand, I was able to throw together a truly memorable meal. As the Duchess of Leftovers, I’ve decreed that this dish will always be what we do with leftover brisket.
• Yes, beans do get old, but there’s a way to fix it if they don’t soften. I learned in my panicky Google research when the beans were way too al dente that there were a couple of reasons my beans were too hard: soaking them in hard, mineral-rich water impedes their softening process during cooking, and when beans age, they don’t always soften. We have well water at Glover Gardenss and it is super-hard, so I won’t be soaking beans in our tap water again, and I’ll be more careful about the sell-by date on dried beans (truth be told, those beans were about 3 years old). But the baking soda fix worked like a charm, and was an important part of the post-Christmas culinary miracle.

I don’t think I’ve ever made a big-batch dish like this one in which I didn’t enhance the flavors with herbs and spices, but these beans simply didn’t need anything other than their main ingredients. I wouldn’t even try this dish again without leftover brisket and smoky stock, because that’s where the magic came from.

Although… I think there could potentially be a good vegetarian version with smoked vegetables in place of the brisket and smoked turkey stock… but that’s an experiment for another day.

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