Friday, April 13, 2007

Food Post - Making Corned Beef

Hi all, I thought that it was time to post a few more of my food exploits over here. This post - home made corned beef! Two things prompted me to try it out: access to curing salt (the pink stuff below) and beef brisket, a cut that's very hard to get in Australia.

The recipe I started with was based on Alton Brown's (from Good Eats, a show on the Food Network) but I adapted it a little. The ingredients I used were:
2 quarts water (about 2 Litres)
1 cup kosher salt
1/2 cup brown sugar
5 tsp pink salt (25g)
1 cinnamon stick, broken into several pieces
1 teaspoon mustard seeds
1 teaspoon black peppercorns
8 whole cloves
8 whole allspice berries
12 whole juniper berries
2 bay leaves, crumbled
1/2 teaspoon ground ginger
2 pounds ice (about 1kg)
1 (4 to 5 pound) beef brisket, trimmed and halved
1 small onion, quartered
1 large carrot, coarsely chopped
1 stalk celery, coarsely chopped

The idea is that you first make a curing brine, cure the beef for about 10 days, then cook the brined beef for a few hours until tender.

Boil the water, adding the other ingredients down to the ice and letting it sit and infuse for about 10 minutes. Remove from the heat and add the ice to drop the temperature; you want the brine cold before adding the meat. Once chilled, divide the brine between two 2L ziplock bags and add a piece of the brisket to each. Seal and store in the bottom of the fridge for about 10 days, squeezing the bag evert couple of days to redistribute the brine.

After ten days, rinse off the brine from the brisket and place in a pot with the onion, carrot and celery. Fill the pot with enough water to cover the brisket by a couple of centimetres, put over high heat and once it comes to a boil, reduce to a simmer and simmer for about 3 hours, until you can pull it apart with a fork.


Weighing the pink salt.


Rinsing the meat after 10 days in the brine.


A piece of corned beef ready to eat!


The final product, served with braised red cabbage and roast potatoes.

1 comment:

Brad Ladewig said...

Wow, that is a pretty amazing recipe for corned beef! When I was a kid we made corned meat, using some of the cuts from cattle we butchered ourselves (including brisket, although it was not a favourite of mine, really fatty).

Our recipe went like this:
Beef
Copious quantities of coarse salt (not sure if it was kosher)

My mouth was watering reading your recipe, I can imagine it tastes 1000 percent better than the stuff we made :)