This is the easiest ever Pulled Beef in the Oven method!

Flavoured by our Korean Kalbi sauce, this is the easiest way to make pulled beef! I've finally finished working on this cooking video too. Took me forever! Really makes me admire those who can keep filming and churning out daily and weekly videos! It is really quite a skill!

There's so many different flavours one can make pulled beef with but the most important part is the method. The easier the better! Right? Yep!

I've always made Korean Kalbi braised beef with the boneless beef short ribs but one can use the brisket cut too of course. However in Switzerland, the cut is slightly different and sometimes the marbling isn't so nice. Only recently I found the perfect marbled brisket and also short ribs from a butcher not too far from me - so you can imagine how happy I am!!

This started about 10 years ago and I was cooking them in the oven for a straight 8 hours..... my whole apartment smelt of Kalbi the whole entire day! If it's winter, it's quite alright as I can leave some windows open and air the house. If it's in the summer, I can't!!! The bugs and mosquitoes will just swamp my home! As it's a rented apartment then, it didn't come with window or door insect screens. So it is really quite annoying and seriously hot in the apartment when I made these braised ribs.

Thus, I began to experiment various ways till I found the essential trick that must be followed when making braised/pulled beef - that is one must use a proper fitting lid with a pan (I used to just cover my roasting tin with aluminium), and one must use the right size of pan to cook a particular size of meat. If the pan is too big, then the sauce will dry up in the process. It also can't be too small - pieces of meat shouldn't be stacked on top of another as this would mean the pieces on the top will not be braised in the sauce. 

So finally, it is a breeze to make braised beef and thus pulled beef. It only takes 3.5-4.5 hours in a 130˚ Celcius fan oven. So if I cook a strip of 1.3 kg boneless beef short ribs (as in the cooking video), I will use a smaller pot and when I want to make 5 kg of braised beef, I will use my larger roasting pan with a fitting lid. The amount of time is exactly the same.

Well I didn't start to make pulled beef from this cut till a few of years ago when everyone around me was going crazy over pulled meats here in Switzerland. Essentially, braised beef is the same as pulled beef - it's soft enough to be pulled into strands and it's definitely more deliciously to me than the common BBQ sauce which is often too sweet for my tastebuds.  

Our Kalbi sauce is perfect for this as it is full of flavours from ginger and black pepper with the acidity from kiwis - it helps to cut through the fat essential to break down and moisten the meat. It is tradition to use pears to add acid to the Kalbi sauce but since I live here in Switzerland, it is not at all easy to get the right pears.... so a friend recommended a different solution - Kiwis! Our sauce is also not too sweet which thus gives a balanced flavour of savoury and sweetness. This is quite the most important criteria to me when I created my recipe for the Kalbi sauce. 

One of my favourite ways to eat pulled beef is on crispy Peking duck pancakes! It's the usual frozen ones one can buy in the Asian supermarkets. I like to make them crispy by toasting them on the pan, after they're been heated up. Really easy to do and you can keep them overnight uncovered and they become even crispier! Like chips! My kids loved eating them like chips!

My favourite condiments with pulled beef are my homemade Kimchi, smashed avocado, Japanese mayonnaise and Srirarcha chili sauce! I never enjoyed store bought kimchi and only loved to eat freshly made kimchi so I've been doing without it since I moved out of the UK. I've always thought that it was very difficult and takes too much time, so I kept putting it off! So I've finally gotten off my lazy bum and started to make my own kimchi! As it turned out, it was really quite easy! I may make a video out of it and I'll definitely write more on this on a different blog post.

It's never an issue to make too much pulled beef as this can be easily kept frozen and one can always add it to almost any dish - salad, noodles, rice, and in all sorts of wraps with many different combinations!

The grilling of my favourite Kalbi flank rib steaks (like the Korean American style) is essentially the same, except that it requires less cooking time in the oven, a different cut of the meat and the sauce reduced to a thick gooey goodness!. This I will elaborate more in another video that will be dedicated to that method. 

I sincerely hope that you will start making pulled beef after watching our video! You can use any marinade and not just our Secret Sauce. The method stays the same. I guarantee it is the easiest method to make pulled beef! Ever!