A Brisket, a Tasket: Corned Beef

As with all new resolutions I want to start strong and so I decided to tackle something that I've wanted to do for a long time; I'm going to make corned beef from scratch!  It's not terribly difficult, really.  Meat + brine + time + slow cooking = corned beef.  But it takes a lot of ingredients and a lot of patience, so I'm not too surprised more people don't do it, or that I haven't done it yet.

Side note:  I'm not really sure how to count this in my "recipe a week" total since I'm starting it this week, but it's not going to be done for 10 days or so.  I guess I'll count it for this week just in case I don't get something else done. :)

My first step was research!  I have seen the Good Eats episode where Alton makes corned beef, so I figured I'd start with his recipe.  As you can see there are quite a few ingredients that you probably don't just keep on your shelf.  That's another reason more of this tasty dish doesn't get made, I'm sure.  Luckily I not only live near Seattle, but walk right by the Pike Place market every day on the way from my bus to my office.  There are not one, but two very good spice stores in the vicinity. (I'm getting the hang of these blogging tricks!)

The one ingredient I wasn't sure about was saltpeter, and sure enough, neither place listed it on their website, so I tried to track some down.  You can order it over the internet, but I did some more research and learned exactly what it does, which is basically makes the meat stay pink.  It guards against bacteria as well, but in this day and age it's not nearly as important.  Still, I like pink corned beef so I eventually settled on a bit of a compromise.  There is a substance called Prague Powder #1 that is used extensively in curing meats, especially for "fast" cures like corned beef.  It contains a low dosage of sodium nitrite mixed with salt.  I picked some of that up to replace the saltpeter.  It is stuff that you should be very careful cooking with, though, so I looked up a lot of recipes that use it for corned beef and adjusted mine to use it (and erred on the side of caution, even then.)

The biggest hassle in the whole production was getting a 2 gallon ziploc bag.  Most grocery stores only carry up to the 1 gallon size.  I was thinking that I might have to either order them online or visit a real restaurant supply store to pick them up, but luckily some research turned up a possible alternative; hardware stores.  Many such stores carry canning and curing supplies which include large plastic bags.  A few calls quickly found them at my local store.  Yay!

The first step was purchasing the meat.  There's a nice butcher shop in Pike Place where they were happy to sell me a nice brisket, and trim it for me as a bonus.

Yummy!

Right next door to the butcher shop is Market Spice, so I chose them for all my spice needs and got everything I needed (as well as some vanilla beans and some new tea!)

As small as they are, this represents enough spices to make a dozen corned beefs.  I'm doubtful of that happening soon.

The brine was very simple.  I heated water with brown sugar, salt, and prague powder until it all was incorporated.  Then I took it off the heat and added the spices.  The recipe says differently but I'm following what Alton did on the show.

I let it stew there for about 20 minutes while the the liquid cooled (stirring occassionally.)  Then I added in the 2 pounds of ice.  When I first saw the recipe I thought it called for 2 bags of ice, so that's what I bought.  They are 7 pounds each and so 12 pounds of ice is now sitting in my camping cooler.  Maybe I'll make ice cream...

I stirred until the ice melted and checked that the water had cooled down to below room temperature.  Then I  put the brisket in one of my giant ziplocs and used a teacup to scoop the brine in on top of it before pouring the last of it in.  I squeezed out all of the air that I could (pretty much all of it, actually) and now the whole thing is taking up my entire deli drawer in the refrigerator. 

It's a little hard to see in the pictures, but there's a nice thin layer of brine over the top of the meat.  None of it is pressed up against the bag, so it's all brining.

Well, that's about it for now.  I will be turning the brisket over every night for the next 10 nights.  I'll either cook it on the 10th or 11th night (since it will be a Monday or a Tuesday.)  I'll post occasional updates till then and one for the actual cooking so you know how the story ends.

Audience Participation:  The brisket I got was actually about 6.5 pounds and was too long to fit into the bag.  I cut it down to size and considered stuffing the whole thing in the bag, but the recipe calls for 4 to 5 pounds and I prefer to not mess with that on my first try, so now I've got about 2 pounds of brisket sitting in my fridge.  My default choice would be to make jerky out of it since I love jerky.  I've done it many times before.

Any other suggestions on what to do with it?