Re: Official 2017 BBQ, Smoking, Grilling, Baking and Beer thread
Homemade Corned Beef
So I'm not Irish but I do love corned beef; I always have. However, I hate store-bought corned beef. I think it's the fact that they use preservatives like sodium nitrate and sodium erythorbate. Those preservatives allow the beef being "corned" to retain it's natural red color by protecting the myoglobin from breaking down but I feel they impart a bad flavor to the meat.
So what's a good Irish boy supposed to do? I dunno, I'm Italian....
Then it hit me, I decided to get my full-Leprechaun on and "corn" my own beef!! The term "corn" or "corned" is simply a different way to say brined beef. It's a little specific to the American Irish culture in that the Irish immigrants wanted to recreate some of the cooking from their home land and the salt they could obtain for brining purposes was very large crystals of it, almost the size of corn kernels. Hence the name, "corned beef".
Here's the recipe I used for brining -
6 cups of cold water (I used bottled water to avoid the nasty chloramines in my tap water)
1/4 cup of McCormick Pickling spices
3/4 cup coarse sea salt
1/4 cup dark brown sugar
2 Tbsp dark molasses
4-6 small pieces of crystallized ginger
4.5 lbs beef brisket (flat portion, trimmed)
Mix the first six ingredients in a medium sauce pan, cover with a lid and bring the solution to a boil. Remove from heat and allow the brine to cool, covered, to room temperature. Best to do this in the morning as it takes several hours for the brine to cool
Here's the meat cut in two large pieces. I also pin tenderized it quite a bit and gave it a couple of good slashes with the boning knife on the fat side as you want the brine to penetrate the meat -
Here's a shot of the dark, rich brine (it smells like cinnamon spiced wine but tastes like slightly sweet seawater) -
Place the pieces into 1 gallon size ziplock bags and fill each bag with half the brine. Get all of the air out of the bags so that the meat is fully submersed. Place the bags in a container and refrigerate.
Proper brining will take anywhere from 3 days to a week...
Well, we'll see what happens. I fully expect the meat to turn a grey color as there are no preservatives to keep the myoglobin from breaking down. That's ok though because that has no impact on the taste as all the flavor should come from the brine. I will follow up in the next post on this topic with the actual cooking recipe for corned beef & cabbage with horseradish sauce.
