Corning Your Own Beef

That's not a euphemism for something dirty... just salty. In honor of the day of dear St. Patrick, I am sharing with you the ancient art of corning one's own beef. Actually there's nothing ancient (to my knowledge) or artful about it... other than the fact that you have to start a week in advance (sorry, I should have posted this2 days ago), it's pretty much the easiest thing you can do: rub, turn, boil.I've made corned beef every St. Patty's for the past few years, but this is the first time that I didn't just buy one of those vacuum-packed numbers floating in red goo and spices (which usually end up being totally delicious). Instead, I decided to do my own corning after I looked up corned beef recipes on Cooks Illustrated, and the only one they had called for a home-corned beef brisket (for ref, all corned beef starts as brisket). CI's recipe is a dry brine rather than a wet one, and it looked stupid easy so I figured if I could find all of the very exotic ingredients (see below), then I'd do it myself. The final deciding factor came when I was standing at the Commissary, reading the ingredients that make up the red gelatinous muck in which the pre-packed corned beeves float. In a word, eek! So it was decided: home-corning it would be.

I wish I could say that I did all kinds of research and then, after careful consideration, chose to go with the Cooks Illustrated recipe. Instead, I got my brisket a-corning on Sunday evening, but found myself lying awake in bed later that night, terrified that the dry brine was a mistake. So only then did I go back and google beef-corning, in particular comparing the CI recipe with others that used a wet brine (e.g., Alton Brown's). I was also nervous because those recipes all had a laundry-list of ingredients, including one called "saltpeter," which I was 99.9% sure I didn't have in my pantry. In short, here's what my 30 minutes of sleep-sacrificing googling revealed:

*Saltpeter is used in corned beef to make it pink. Saltpeter is another name for potassium nitrate.

*Potassium nitrate is kind of scary (I mean, you usually have to buy it from a pharmacist) and potentially hazardous to your health.* Not to mention a critical component of gunpowder

*Saltpeter is wholly unnecessary to making a yummy corned beef; it just won't be pink.

*Dry brining is easier than wet brining (I didn't need Google to tell me that).

*Brining for any longer than 5 days just makes your corned beef saltier, not necessarily tastier

Comforted with the soothing murmurings of fellow bloggers and ask.com, I stayed the course with my CI dry brine.

The following Saturday (6 days after commencement of corning), we hosted an early St. Patrick's Day dinner for some friends, including said corned beef. I finished the recipe per CI, and it was a big hit. Huge hit, actually. Everyone (except the kids) had seconds and/or thirds, and there was hardly any left.

All that said, it's a couple days too late to start this for this year's St. P's, but in preparation for next year, file this one away:

Home-Corned Beef, New England Style

(adapted from Cook's Illustrated)

Ingredients:

• 1/2cup kosher salt
• 1tablespoon black peppercorns , cracked
• 3/4tablespoon ground allspice
• 1tablespoon dried thyme
• 1/2tablespoon paprika
• 2bay leaves , crumbled
• 1beef brisket (fresh, 4 to 6 pounds) [the recipe calls for 'point cut', but all I could find was 'flat cut' so I went with that; I left on a good bit of the fat to keep it moist during cooking and just trimmed it off before
• serving]
• 
  

• 1. 1. Mix salt and seasonings in small bowl.

  2. 2. Stab brisket about thirty times per side with meat fork or metal skewer. Rub each side evenly with salt mixture [there will be a lot-- you'll feel like you're piling it on]; place in 2-gallon-size zipper-lock bag [I found these at the Commissary, so they can't be that rare], forcing out as much air as possible. Place in pan large enough to hold it, cover with second, similar-size pan, and weigh with two bricks or heavy cans of similar weight [I used a 5lb bag of flour and a 2lb bag of sugar, which, over the course of the week, turned into a 1.5 lb bag of sugar]. Refrigerate 5 to 7 days, turning once a day [or in my case, as often as you happen to remember to turn it].

  3. 

     
     

     
     

     
     

     
     

     
     

     
     

     Beef + Flour (5lbs, whole wheat optional) + sugar (I use organic because this lady told me to)

     
     

     
     

     
     

     
     

     
     

     4. Rinse the brisket and pat it dry [I really have no idea why you pat it dry before you put it back in a pot of water and boil it, but I did it anyway]. Bring the brisket to boil with water to cover by 1/2 to 1 inch in large soup kettle or stockpot (at least 8 quarts), skimming any scum that rises to surface. Cover and simmer until skewer inserted in thickest part of brisket slides out with ease, 2 to 3 hours [mine took 3 hours]. [Ok, so I don't actually own a pot big enough to hold 8 quarts of water, much less that plus a 4 pound hunk of meat. So instead, I put it in a cast aluminum dutch oven that was able to hold about 4 quarts of water and a 4 pound brisket. About half way through cooking, I took out about 4 cups of the broth and replaced it with clean boiling water... this was too keep the broth from getting too salty, and I thought it made a big difference.]

     
     

     

     
     

     
     

     
     

     Whoa there, big fella. (Side note, did you know that you can totally photoshop dirt off of your kitchen floor? Not that I did that here...

     
     

     
     

     
     

     
     

     
     

     
     

     
     

     
     

     3. Remove meat from pot to cutting board and cover with foil. Allow meat to rest for 10-15 minutes, then cut across the grain into 1/4-inch slices [at this point I usually arrange the meat all fancy-like on a bed of sauteed cabbage]. Moisten with additional broth from the pot and serve.

     
     

     Servings vary. In our case, it was 4 adults and 6 little girls with hardly any left over.

Ta da! Or well, after the ta da. And the eating. In the madness of slinging food for 4 adults and 6 little girls under the age of 6, I forgot to take a pic before we served.

* It's only fair to point out that this is highly debated. I'm not a scientist/nutritionist/appointed government official, so I can't say definitively either way, but I think we can all agree that it won't hurt you to NOT eat potassium nitrate.

PS I'm sorry for the funky formatting of this post. Blogger and I aren't getting along today.