St. Patrick’s day is coming up, and we all know that in America that means corned beef. The tradition of corned beef on St. Pat’s day is strictly an Irish-American thing. In Ireland it’s unheard of.
At the root of it; corned beef is simply a pickled beef brisket. I decided that this year I was going to do my own corned beef. So I pulled out Rytek Kutas’s “Great Sausage Recipes and Meat Curing", and looked up corned beef.

Once again, Rytek disappoints. His recipe is not easily adjusted for batch size; I prefer the way that Len Poli does his recipes – with metric weights so you can easily adjust them if you have more or less meat. This will shock some of you that know me and know that I never use a recipe when I cook; I simply adjust all to taste on my current whim (cooking is an art form after all); but in the case of preserving meat, the ratio of preservatives is damn important – too much you get poisoned; too little and you get sick because the meat rotted in the wrong way.
The other shortcoming that Rytek has is his ingredient list is weak.- it mentions something called “Pickling Spice” without defining it, and calls for dextrose. Dextrose, as any home brewer could tell you, is commonly available as corn sugar. It’s flavorless, and easily digestible by bacterials, yeasts, molds, and fungi. Flavorless describes Rytek’s recipes in general; and why in god’s creation would I want to provide spoilage biota with an easy meal?
Now, I’m pretty hard on old Rytek; but his book does provide a foundation to all this, so is a pretty valuable resource nonetheless. (I did eventually find out what “Pickling Spice” is – McCormick spices sells little 1.5oz bottles of it as "McCormick Pickling Spice". It’s cinnamon, allspice, mustard, coriander, bay leaves, ginger, cloves, chili, pepper, mace, cardamom, and sulfite.)
So, giving up on Krytek; I decided to check up on what Alton Brown of The Food Network show “Good Eats” would do to pickle his brisket.
I am a fan of Alton Brown. I love his scientific approach to cooking; he loves to explain why you do something when cooking. This makes us all better cooks. Alton’s recipe though had 2 major problems for me.
His recipe calls for saltpetre, and a 10 day cure.
Saltpeter, in addition to being a great food preservative and lawn fertilizer amongst other things, is a primary ingredient in gunpowder. In this post 9-11 world, the jackboot thugs at homeland security make it a pain in the ass to buy undiluted nitrates of any sort, so in order to preserve your meat, you need to instead buy sodium nitrite diluted by run of the mill salt and dyed pink (universally called prague powder #1). This necessitates figuring out how much prague #1 you need to equal the amount of saltpeter called for in the recipe; then figuring out how much salt is present in the prague powder, and adjusting the salt in the recipe to compensate; and living without the potassium that is normally in saltpetre. Yuck. I wish the fuckwads at homeland security would have better things to do than persecute me for wanting to make sausages!
Now, I can do math, and figure adjust Alton’s pre 9-11 recipe; but what I couldn’t do was maintain a 10 day cure as the prague#1 I ordered did not arrive until today, 8 days before the anniversary of the eviction of snakes from Eire.
Len Poli’s recipe calls for injecting the pickle into the meat and only curing for 5 days. Bingo! I could do this.
I bought my free-range organic brisket from Baron’s and since it was a whopping 8.3lbs I decided to pickle it now, do ½ for St. Pats, and make pastrami by cold smoking the other ½. Since I only had 8 days till St Pats, I decided to do a hybrid Len Poli-Alton Brown recipe. I couldn’t stick to Alton’s and simply inject the meat, as Alton calls for whole spices, which don’t fit in the marinade injector, so I made enough of Len’s pickle to inject, and did the rest as Alton’s to marinade, and threw in some of my own. Here’s what I ended up with:

Any leftover injection I added to the marinade, and placed the whole kit and caboodle in an old enamel roasting pan, covered with saran wrap (all air bubbles removed) and placed the whole shebang in the fridge until the eve before St Pats, when I plan on hacking it in half and putting the big half in a crock pot for the big dinner.

Update: 18-Mar-09
Sliced the flat off the briskit and returned it to the brine for later smoking (can you say Pastrami! YUM!). Doesn’t look like the brine fully penetrated the briskit. Next time remember to cut the fat off, and give it an extra week in the pickle.
Cooked up the point for St. Patricks day with cabbage, potatoes and carrots. It was unsliceable; the meat just fell apart. I think this is a good thing 🙂
Colour was good, but the flavour was missing something. Perhaps it did not pick up enough during the shortened brining process. Will add more spices next time, and as mentioned above; lengthen the brining time.