How to Make Corned Beef

Preserving meat for winter by soaking in salt brine is a time-honoured method. Corning is an ancient technique for preserving raw meat for long periods. It involves rubbing the meat in a mixture of salt and spices and then keeping it covered in the resultant juice brine for a minimum of two weeks or much longer. The familiar corned beef is one of the few remnants of this practice still popular today. While it is very simple to purchase corned beef in the supermarket, either in ready0to-cook bags or already cooked and sliced, making it a home is almost as easy and much less expensive. You also have the option of using different cuts of meat. If you like corned beef you will like corned tongue. The flavour is identical, the only difference is in texture and appearance. After the minimum period of curing, the meat can be cooked and eaten and will be delicious. Longer curing will result in richer flavour and will not harm the meat at all.

Several different cuts of beef as well as tongue are excellent candidates for corning, in fact, except of steaks, any cut can be brined. Obviously, the brisket is a good choice and boneless chuck roast or round roast are also very fine. An entire eye of round will make a splendid corned beef subject and would be very nice served cold on a buffet.

The thing to remember is that while you are actually preserving the meat with salt you are also adding a great deal of flavour with the additional ingredients added to the curing mixture. You will be using black pepper, allspice, thyme, sage, paprika, bay leaf, rutabaga, onions, carrots, and garlic. If doing pork, be sure to collect some juniper berries as they add a special dimension to the flavour of corned pork.

The corning process can be done in a large stone crock but is really much easier if you use freezer zip-lock bags. Assemble enough bags to hold all your different cuts of meat, one cut to a bag. Mix all the ingredients together in a small bowl, except the juniper berries. Place all the meat in a roasting pan and cover all sides with the salt mixture, rubbing it in well. Put each piece of meat into a bag and divide the remaining salt mixture among the bags. If you are doing a piece of pork, add the juniper berries to that bag. Remove as much air as possible from each bag and seal. Pack all the bags into a large bowl or crock and weight them down under a plate and about 10 pound of weight. Place in the bottom of the fridge. Check the bags in a few hours. The juice should be running freely from the meat. Massage each bag to work the cure into all the crevices of the meat. Repack into the container, reweight and return to the fridge. Turn the bags and massage daily to make sure the cure is getting into all sides of the meat. Leave the meat to cure for at least two weeks, three is better, before cooking one.

Before cooking, you will have to soak the meat in several changes of fresh cold water to remove the excess salt. The longer the meat is cured, the longer it will take to soak. Twenty-four hours should be enough. The meat will lose its rubbery texture and begin to feel like fresh raw meat again.