Category: Recipes

A place for ZC recipes. Simple and nutritious.

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ZC Salt Beef Recipe

1KG beef brisket

For the brine:

1 tbsp juniper berries

2 tsp black peppercorns

300g coarse sea salt

4 bay leaves

4 cloves

4 sprigs of thyme

The brine ingredients

Put all the ingredients for the brine into a saucepan, pour in 500ml of water and gradually bring to the boil, stirring to help the salt dissolve. Once it comes to the boil, let it bubble away for two minutes. Take off the heat and leave to cool completely.

Beef brisket skewered all over

Pierce the meat all over with a skewer. Put it in a large mixing bowl and cover the meat with the brine, rubbing it in and coating it well. Put into a zip-lock bag and pour in any leftover brine. Seal the bag removing as much air as possible. Leave in the fridge for seven days.

Salt beef in brine and set in the fridge for 7 days

Take the beef out of the bag and rinse it. Put it in a slow cooker adding enough cold water to cover. Cook on LOW for up to 6 hours until the meat is very tender.

Remove from slow cooker, slice and eat warm.

Hot salt beef straight from the slow cooker. It seemed to dry out really quickly.

Serve hot or cold. I found the beef to be a bit dry, so ate some cold with a generous dollop of cream cheese with herbs and garlic. While I did like the results, I found the meat tastes mostly of salt rather than beef, which some people may like, but I like to taste the beef and found the brine to be a little overpowering.

Cold salt beef with garlic and herb cream cheese

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Creamy Blue Cheese and Egg Salad

Creamy blue-cheese and egg salad

When eating Zero Carb you may eventually be happy with just one type of meat on your plate, such as a juicy rib-eye steak or a huge pile of bacon (me), but if you are also catering for non-ZC family members or friends who come round for lunch or dinner, then you don’t necessarily have to go out of your way to make them something that you cannot eat.

This is just such a recipe and as long as you can handle dairy OK without it giving you any issues, then this Creamy Blue Cheese and Egg Salad can be used in place of regular egg mayonnaise and also commercially made blue-cheese dressing that both contain non-ZC ingredients.

Creamy blue-cheese and egg salad

This recipe is simplicity itself and you can tweak the amount of ingredients you use to suit your taste and needs. Here is my basic recipe:

6 hard-boiled eggs, chopped
1 tub (300ml) soured cream
1 tub (200g) full-fat cream cheese
150g Danish Blue or Stilton cheese, crumbled

Mix everything together in a large mixing bowl. Chill in the fridge until needed. Serve with your meat and enjoy!

If you want something that more resembles an egg mayonnaise salad, then leave the eggs quite chunky and use less soured cream. You can buy smaller tubs of soured cream (150ml) to use and this will give you a thicker result.

If you would like to use the mix more like a dipping sauce, then put the chopped hard-boiled eggs and crumbled blue cheese into the mixing bowl first and mash with a fork until smooth.

Add the cream cheese to the egg and blue cheese mixture and blend together. Use a larger tub (300ml) of soured cream and gradually add the cream a bit at a time, blending it into the mixture as you go. This will give you a thick yet smoother blue-cheese dipping sauce which is great for serving with chicken goujons (coated with crushed pork scratchings) or for dipping crispy bacon rashes into etc.

I hope you enjoy this recipe!

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Minced Beef, Bacon and Cheese Bake

This is a recipe for a meaty, cheesy kind of bake. I sort of stole this from the Sunday Brunch TV show and adapted it for ZC.
Trying to encourage my son to try something different 🙂

Ingredients:
500g minced beef
250g bacon (chopped)
1 tbsp dried mixed herbs (if you can tolerate them)
Salt to taste
300ml double cream
Gruyere cheese (about 100g, but to taste)
125g mozzarella cheese (sliced)
50g grated Parmigiano or parmesan cheese

Method:
In a large mixing bowl, combine the minced beef, chopped bacon, salt, dried herbs. Add the double cream and stir well until combined.
Pour mixture into a baking dish and flatten down. Sprinkle the grated Parm over the top. Place a layer of sliced mozzarella over the top.
Top with thin slices of Gruyere cheese.

Bake at 200C for about 30 mins or until meat is cooked through and the cheese topping is brown and bubbly.
Leave to stand for 10 minutes before serving. Can be frozen, thawed and re-heated. Enjoy!