Corned beef...how do I make a good one?

I love corned beef. My mom’s was always delicious. But what I buy packaged with seasoning in the stores doesn’t come close to tasting like what she made.

What’s the trick?

Look at my experiences in this thread with both Pastrami and Corned Beef: http://www.wineberserkers.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=86153#p86153

Make your own “corned” beef…not the pre-corned stuff that makes the beef stay pink after cooking.

Well using a curing salt is an essential part of making corned beef. However I prefer to make my own cure with lots of fresh spices versus buying a pre-cured brisket that has been injected with who knows what.

I like the canned stuff, ya know, the ones with the tiny square potatoes pieces. I’m ghetto like that…oh wait, that’s corn beef hash. My wife buys corned beef from Whole Foods, it tastes good when she makes a Reuben sandwich.

Joe, cook up some potatoes and then saute them together with a bunch of onions and the chopped up corned beef from Whole Foods. Yum! I like to add some pickled beets into mine as well.

I haven’t tried this, but it sure looks like the real deal. Alton FTW as usual. http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/alton-brown/corned-beef-recipe/index.html

That is basically the same recipe as Ruhlman except for the recommendation to use SALTPETER. No one really uses that anymore. I was able to track down a “pink salt” that has milder chemicals. The other trick I have found is balancing the saltiness. 10 days is a looooong cure. I tend to do 5. If the meat ends up pink all the way through, then you cured long enough.

I am going to do one soon enough now that I have some free time. My plan is to start with a Wagyu Brisket from Majinola and go full throttle on my first attempt. Might as well go to eleven.

Alton, Ruhlman, or Cooks Illustrated versions all have merit. I tend to like the corned beef versions where I don’t taste the bitter, metallic taste of the pink salt used (sodium/potassium nitrite). The CI version, doesn’t even use a “pinking” cure…which is fine as long as the meat tastes good when it’s done.

What salt do you use Eric?

Saltpeter is potassium nitrate. Some of the nitrate ions (NO3−) in the curing solution get converted to nitrite ions (NO2-). The nitrite further breaks down into nitric oxide (NO), which reacts with the hemoglobin in the meat to produce the characteristic color of cured meat.

“Pink salt” (a/k/a Prague powder #1) is a mixture of salt and sodium nitrite, with food coloring added to make it pink. The sodium nitrite provides the nitrite ions (NO2-) in the curing solution. From there, the the chemistry is the same as if you were using saltpeter.

I don’t think it accurate to say that sodium nitrite is “milder” than potassium nitrate.

I like the Ruhlman recipe as a starting point (although I guess it’s probably a Polcyn recipe), but agree with Eric that it’s a starting point (I like a “headier” cure, so I’ve played around with it a bit) . I use it mostly to pickle tongues rather than briskets, though. And I like the effects of pink salt better than the effects of saltpeter

I use the Prague Powder #1.

Eric, thanks for posting that link. Though it took the last 15; minutes of my day at the office, it was worth the diversion. (FWIW, though the great corned beefs in NYC and elsewhere are made with the wet cure, I’ve found it very difficult to effectively wet cure a whole brisket to pink. Those places use brining machines, which leave nothing to gravity, osmosis, etc.)

FWIW, I use the Morton’s “Quick Cure”, which is a curing salt with both sodium nitrate and nitrite in in, as well as some sugar, which will give the meat the eye-pleasing blacker color of NY pastrami’s outside…when it is smoked or steamed.

I have some sugar in my cure in addition to a lot of other spices.

On a similar, but unrelated note, I acquired my first pork belly today for making bacon. I used Ruhlman’s maple cured bacon recipe from Charcuterie. I will report back in a week, with pictures, if it turns out well.

This thread pushed me over edge to buy one of these.

I did a corned beef as part of a meat preservation class and we used one to inject the brine into the thick parts of the brisket.

I wasn’t a huge corned beef fan until I had that one. Making your own makes a huge difference… it tastes like beef!

I have one of those…ana find it amusing to use it on poultry. They puff right up.

The big operations use brining machines for corned beef and for pastrami. They must be something to see in action.

Stop by Vienna in Chicago. Takes about 3 seconds to brine a brisket with a nasty looking, machine.

I get pretty good “pinking” using large sewing needles on my tongues (sounds terrible), before I brine

Man, now I have brisket on my mind…time for a corned beef experiment!