How To Cook Uncured Corned Beef Brisket?

Create the best corned beef by using a delicious spice crust and slices that are juicy and fork-tender. An Irish tradition especially for St. Patricks Day!.

This recipe for baked corned beef is simple, and the meat is braised until it is perfectly cooked. Choose traditional accompaniments like roasted cabbage wedges, glazed carrots, rosemary baby gold potatoes, and horseradish cream sauce.

This delicious dinner will replace the traditional corned beef meal we make once a year as a family favorite.

Why This Recipe Works

• The meat is given the distinctive flavor of corned beef by curing it with spices, salt, and curing salt.
• The brisket won’t dry out or become tough if cooked for a long time at a temperature of about 180°F (82°C).
• The brisket will be easier to slice into thin, appealing slices if you let it cool overnight.

The typical method for cooking corned beef brisket involves tossing it in a pot with a bunch of cabbage, potatoes, and carrots, bringing it to a boil, and then letting it simmer away until tender.

I really love corned beef. Who wouldn’t love eating a hot dog in the shape of a steak with its salty, spicy, beefy flavor? But shouldn’t such a noble food as corned beef be deserving of the most exacting treatment, the most precise controls to optimize the end results, just as a well-boiled hot dog is so much better than a haphazardly boiled dog?

The cooking and the rub are the two fundamental steps in making corned beef. A combination of spices make up the rub, but more importantly, it also contains salt and nitrites, which give corned beef its distinctive hammy flavor. In an effort to make the best corned beef ever, I’ve spent the last few weeks meticulously studying every step of the curing and cooking process.

In my small apartment, I cooked 38 pounds of beef, which is making the dog go absolutely crazy. Lets see if its been worth the effort, shall we?.

The Corned Beef Rub

First, a bit of history. Although it has a strong connection to Ireland, corned beef has historically had a very low consumption rate there. Which is not to say that they didnt produce it.

The green fields of Ireland were used to graze cattle during the 17th and 18th centuries, producing corned beef that was primarily used to feed British civilians, the navies and armies of the United Kingdom and the United States (due to its long shelf life), as well as for trade with the French. The typical Irishman could not afford the beef they were raising, and instead ate primarily pork and lamb.

The Irish lower class didn’t begin eating a lot of corned beef until they immigrated in large numbers to the United States. The cheap price of beef in the U. S. This consumption was influenced by the Irish’s proximity to Jewish immigrant groups (who were busy making their own salted beef specialty called pastrami).

The Irish still consume very little corned beef in Ireland. Ask them if they have any friends who are natives of Ireland (and no, your Massachusetts friend who dons a green shirt, downs a few Guinnesses, and gets rowdy in Southie once a year does not count). Really. *.

*Check out a more complete history here.

Having said that, the flavor of the product is all that really matters to me. I’ve always been more interested in cooking’s physics and chemistry than in playing with flavors. In contrast to the way sodium chloride interacts with muscle proteins, flavors are a matter of personal preference.

But I made the decision to perfect my spice mixture before getting to the meat of the matter, just like a good little Irish boy eating the oat puffs out of the Lucky Charms* before moving on to the marshmallows. Because of the close ties between Irish and Jewish immigrants, pastrami’s main flavoring ingredients—mustard, black pepper, coriander seed, allspice, and a tiny bit of clove—are also used to flavor corned beef.

*Another thoroughly Irish dish!

Additionally, some powdered ginger that had been dehydrated seemed to work well, as did some fennel seeds and crushed bay leaves. Yawn.

You can see why I find flavors to be too fiddly—a little of this, a little of that, and on and on. The truth is that I chose to use these spices in this proportion because I enjoy their flavor. Use the same ingredients if you believe you will enjoy the flavor of something as much as I do. If not, feel free to substitute other spices if you’d prefer.

The part that cant be changed, however, is the salt.

Why Salt Is Important for Corned Beef

Salt is actually where the term “corned beef” derives from. See how similar the words sound? The word “corn” is the old English term for “kernel.” Any small, hard object, such as a large grain of salt, was meant by it. Because of the salt “corns” that were used to preserve it, corned beef is known as such. But how does salt affect meat?.

*Back then, stores still ended in “pe,” and kernels did not serve as the link between applications and processing centers in modern computers.

Heres what Harold McGee, in his book On Food and Cooking, has to say about salt-cured hams, which aside from basic taxonomy, are extraordinarily similar to corned beef:

Therefore, it follows that a piece of meat will be more opaque and have a closer, denser texture if it has been salted more effectively.

What if I took it to the extreme, not using a brine at all, but simply salting the beef like I would a ham, then sealing it in an airless container to keep the salt tightly in contact with it at all times? I wondered: If you increase the salt concentration of the brining solution, could you more effectively corn your beef?

According to the theory, the salt should initially cause the beef’s juices to escape through the process of osmosis, which is the propensity for liquids to pass through semipermeable barriers from regions of low salt concentration to high salt concentration. When the liquid leaves the beef, the salt on the surface will dissolve, creating a highly concentrated brine.

As a result, the beef would be able to retain more moisture and eventually reabsorb the brine, which should gradually move towards the meat’s center. This brine would also dissolve protein filaments. If everything goes according to plan, the flavorful ingredients from the spices should be able to pull an Arthur Dent* and hitch a ride. And indeed, it works.

If you look at the image above, you can see that the brisket on the left is a deeper red and more opaque than the brisket on the right, which was cured in a bag with a regular brine (also airtight). This is because the brisket on the left was only cured with salt and spices. The dry-cured beef had better flavor penetration and a better texture than the brined beef, which was confirmed by cooking and tasting the two pieces of beef side by side.

Dry-curing it would be.

Why Nitrates Are Used in Cured Meats

Of course, salt aint the only chemical involved with curing.

In order to help preserve meat, people have used saltpeter, also known as nitrate of potash or potassium nitrate (which is made up of a potassium atom attached to a nitrogen atom with three oxygen atoms), for centuries. It was once carefully crafted by soaking hay in old human urine (or, if you preferred, collected from bat guano deposits), and it is one of the main components of gunpowder.

You might find it disgusting, but when added to brine, it has amazing preservative properties.

Certain salt-loving bacteria will convert nitrates into nitrites (a similar molecule with only two oxygen molecules attached instead of three) as meat soaks in a nitrate-rich brine. These nitrites enhance the flavor of meat while also eliminating the bacteria that produced them.

One issue is that this bacterial conversion of nitrates to nitrites is not always predictable, making it challenging to predict how well a particular concentration of saltpeter will function in a brine. Nowadays, since synthetic nitrites are easily accessible, saltpeter is rarely used to preserve meat. You’ll find sodium nitrite in so-called “pink salt,” which is a combination of sodium chloride (table salt) and sodium nitrite that has been colored pink to make it easy to distinguish from regular salt (you don’t want to unintentionally consume too much sodium nitrite).

In order to preserve meat, nitrites firstly impart flavor to the meat. They give hams and corned beef their characteristic tang. Additionally, it prevents the growth of the few bacteria species that can survive in salty environments. Finally, it helps preserve color.

Everyone is aware that the primary muscle pigment myoglobin oxidizes to form metmyoglobin as a result of free iron atoms in the meat, which causes the meat to change color from red to brown. In fact, the reaction between nitrites and meat produces nitric oxide, which binds to iron to stop the conversion of myoglobin into metmyoglobin. This allows beef (or ham) to maintain its deep pink color even after being fully cooked, as shown in the image below.

Interestingly, the pink smoke ring that forms around the edges of barbecued meats results from the exact same reaction. But thats neither here nor there.

The moral of the story is that while you can make corn beef without nitrites, it won’t taste, last, or look the same.

Cooking Corned Beef

How do we cook the darn thing now that we know exactly what corned beef is?

The truth is that brisket is not a particularly tender meat. It has a lot of connective tissue in it, and all of that connective tissue needs to be broken down before it can be chewed and digested easily. This means applying heat.

The fact that there are two primary types of reactions that take place when heat is applied—fast reactions and slow reactions—is one of the most crucial lessons you can learn about cooking meat.

Depending on the temperature, tender meat cuts like a strip steak will go through different physical changes. These changes are fast reactions, and take place almost instantly. As soon as a steak hits 150%C2%B0F, youll know its muscle fibers have contracted enough to squeeze out about 12% of its moisture, and theres no turning back

On the other hand, connective tissue, which is primarily made of collagen, breaks down over a long period of time and is temperature dependent into soft, succulent gelatin. How long? I decided to find out.

I cooked several pieces of the same brisket sous vide at 160°F for varying lengths of time, ranging from just two hours to a full 36 hours. After cooking, I took the sealed bags out of the water and put them in the refrigerator for the night. The following day, I combined all of the bags and put them on plates. Heres what I saw:

As you can see, the liquid that oozed out of the bag became thinner the less I cooked the meat, proving conclusively that as time passes, more and more collagen will break down into gelatin, effectively thickening the cooking liquid. The more time the beef cooked, the more connective tissue was broken down, and the more tender it was, as evidenced by cutting into and tasting each piece. This holds true for all slow-cooked meats, including duck confit and barbecued pork ribs, in addition to corned beef.

Of course, when slow-cooking, temperature can be just as important as, if not more so than, time.

I cooked identical pieces of beef at 160°F, 175°F, 190°F, and 205°F, timing how long it took to fully tenderize the meat at each temperature range to determine precisely how it affects texture and moisture. Heres what I found:

As the temperature drops, it seems that the amount of time needed to tenderize a piece of meat grows exponentially. While the beef took 36 hours to tenderize at 160°F, it was fully tender after 15 hours at 175°F. Your cooking time will be shortened to 3 hours if you raise the temperature to 205°F, which is roughly the temperature of a simmering pot on the stove.

So it stands to reason that boiling the beef until it is tender is the best method of cooking, right?

Not so fast. Take a look at the next graph first.

I plotted the temperature it was cooked at and the amount of moisture the beef lost in this chart. If you recall, a quick response to a rise in temperature is the evaporation of moisture from muscle fibers. That implies that the amount of moisture in the final product is essentially the same whether I boil a piece of beef for three hours or twenty. The only thing that really matters is temperature. at 160%C2%B0F, about 30% of the briskets has gone out the window Bring it up to 190%C2%B0F, and were looking at 48% moisture loss All the way up to 205%C2%B0F, the temperature at which most people cook their beef, and were at a whopping 53% moisture loss!

I therefore really wanted to cook it at a low temperature to retain the most moisture possible. However, when comparing flavors, I thought the slightly drier, flakier beef prepared at 175°F was superior. Just that the corned beef seemed more familiar to me. Further research revealed that for my preferences, meat that was both tender and succulent could be produced by cooking it at 180°F for approximately 10 hours.

Your best option is an immersion circulator if you want to maintain this ideal temperature of 180°F. Your second (far cheaper) option is a slow cooker. When set to “keep warm,” most will maintain a temperature of roughly 170°F to 180°F. Use a thermometer to confirm the temperature of yours, and use the graph above to adjust the cooking time as necessary.

You can also prepare your corned beef in a Dutch oven in a 200°F oven. Simply put the corned brisket in a sizable Dutch oven, cover the pot with water to a few inches above the brisket, and simmer the food over high heat. Place it in the oven, cover it with a lid, and be sure to slightly crack the lid as you remove it from the heat. You can then leave it in the oven for about 10 hours, or until the brisket is completely tender, because this setup will maintain a temperature of about 180°F.

You might be able to put it together on the stove if you don’t have a slow cooker or a water bath. Simply use a lot of water in a huge pot, bring it to 180°F, add your beef, cover it, and turn the heat to the very lowest setting. If necessary, make the necessary adjustments to maintain the pot at about 180°F throughout the entire cooking process. You should be able to leave it there largely unattended until your beef is cooked once you’ve got the heat level just right.

And keep in mind: to make beef flakier, simply cook it for a shorter period of time at a higher temperature. Try a lower temperature for a longer period of time if you prefer it more dense and moist. Got it?.

Nice Slice: The Best Way to Serve

The only problem remaining was the vegetables. 183°F is the magic temperature, which is a few degrees higher than I was cooking my beef at, because the pectin holding together the cell walls of potatoes, carrots, and cabbage is much tougher than the collagen in meat cells. This meant that Id need to cook the vegetables separately.

But one of the best components of a St. Patrick’s Day meal is potatoes cooked in the salty, beefy liquid. Patrick’s Day boiled supper, ain’t it? The answer was quite straightforward, and it served to accomplish two goals at once.

Like trying to gut a live fish with a plastic knife, cutting through a hot, slippery, tender brisket is not a pretty task. Allowing the corned beef to completely cool (while retaining some of its liquid, of course) and then slicing it once it has firmed up again is much simpler.

As a result, I decided that preparing my brisket the day before was the best course of action. After that, all I had to do to prepare food to serve the following day was slice the meat, reheat, and serve it.

Heres the set-up I rigged to do just that:

The potatoes, carrots, and cabbage are cut into thick wedges with the core still attached in the pot below, along with the majority of the corned beef juice. Sliced corned beef is layered in a skillet on top, along with a few ladles of liquid to moisten it. The beef can tenderize while the vegetables gently steam through if the skillet is covered on top. No one at the table needs to know that they weren’t guests at the same party if you serve them all together.

I could now rest assured that, regardless of whether corned beef is Irish, American, Irish-American, British, Caribbean, or anything else, it is unquestionably frickin delicious.

I have 37 pounds of leftovers, does anyone know what to do with them?

Corned Beef Brisket, Potatoes, Cabbage, and Carrots for St. Patrick’s Day

Cure your brisket at home with a combination of curing salt and spices for the best corned beef.

• 1 whole, trimmed beef brisket, flat or point cut, weighing approximately 2250 grams/5 pounds
• Diamond Crystal kosher salt, 100 grams (3 1/2 ounces; roughly 3/4 cup).
• 10 grams/. approximately 1 1/2 teaspoons of pink salt, or 325 ounces, or 7 5 grams/. 25 ounces (about 2 teaspoons) saltpeter .
• 30 grams/1 ounce (about 2 tablespoons) packed brown sugar
• 2 tablespoons whole black peppercorns
• 2 tablespoons yellow mustard seeds
• 2 tablespoons whole coriander seeds
• 1 tablespoon allspice berries
• 6 whole cloves
• 1 tablespoon ground ginger
• 6 bay leaves, roughly torn
• 2 pounds carrots, peeled and roughly chopped
• 2 pounds russet potatoes, peeled and roughly diced
• 6 to 8 wedges from a whole head of white or green cabbage (2 to 3 pounds in total),

• In a small bowl, whisk together salt, pink salt (or saltpeter), and brown sugar eight days before serving. Rub evenly over every surface of brisket. Sprinkle evenly over both sides of the beef the mixture of peppercorns, mustard, coriander, allspice, cloves, ginger, and bay leaves. Gently press the spices into the meat to help them adhere. Beef should be vacuum-sealed or placed in a zipper-lock bag with all the air squeezed out of it. Place in the coldest section of the refrigerator, flipping every day for seven days.
• To prepare in a sous-vide cooker, take the beef out of the bag the day before serving and wash all the spices under cold running water. Pat dry with paper towels. Re-seal in a vacuum bag, then cook for approximately 10 hours at 180°F until tender. Proceed to step 4.
• To prepare in a Dutch oven, take the beef out of the bag the day before serving, and wash all the spices under cold running water. Pat dry with paper towels. Preheat oven to 200°F. Brisket should be put in a big Dutch oven, covered with water by a few inches, and heated to a simmer. Remove from heat, cover with a lid that is slightly ajar, and bake for about 10 hours, or until completely tender. Proceed to step 4.
• Transfer the cooked beef, along with the cooking liquid, to an airtight container. Refrigerate food for at least one night and up to three days.
• The day before: Transfer the cooking liquid, carrots, potatoes, and cabbage to a big saucepan or Dutch oven. Top up with water until vegetables are submerged. In a large skillet, fan out the thinly sliced beef against the grain. Place the skillet on top of the pot, then add 1 cup of the liquid from the pot. Cover skillet. Over high heat, bring the pot to a boil; then, lower the heat to a simmer. Cook for about 45 minutes, or until beef is thoroughly heated and vegetables are completely tender. Serve immediately with hot mustard.

Special Equipment

You can also make this recipe using store-bought corned beef. Just skip to step 2.

Make-Ahead and Storage

Up to a week can pass between cooking and serving corned beef. After being prepared, corned beef can be stored in the refrigerator for about two weeks if properly wrapped.

Nutrition Facts (per serving)
821	Calories
43g	Fat
37g	Carbs
71g	Protein

(Nutrition information is calculated using an ingredient database and should be considered an estimate.)

Nutrition Facts
Servings: 6 to 10
Amount per serving
Calories	821
% Daily Value*
Total Fat 43g	55%
Saturated Fat 17g	84%
Cholesterol 240mg	80%
Sodium 624mg	27%
Total Carbohydrate 37g	13%
Dietary Fiber 8g	30%
Total Sugars 8g
Protein 71g
Vitamin C 59mg	294%
Calcium 164mg	13%
Iron 8mg	42%
Potassium 1541mg	33%
*The % Daily Value (DV) tells you how much a nutrient in a food serving contributes to a daily diet. 2,000 calories a day is used for general nutrition advice.

How To Cook Corned Beef Brisket Like a Professional

FAQ

Is uncured corned beef the same as brisket?

ANSWER: They are both beef, but not the same thing. Fresh beef brisket is like a big roast. Beef brisket is the original source of corned beef, which is then brine-cured. It is the brine-cure that gives corned beef its distinctive flavor, and it also gives it its distinctive color.

Do you need to rinse uncured corned beef?

Always Rinse Corned Beef Before Cooking To get rid of the remaining salt, the first thing you should do is repeatedly rinse the raw meat under cool running water. Even though many recipes don’t call for rinsing the meat, it’s still important to do so.

What is uncured corned beef brisket?

When you see the term “uncured” on a product’s label, you should know that it means that no additional sodium nitrates or nitrites have been added. Many people worry about consuming nitrates or nitrites in cured meats, including hot dogs, ham, and bacon in addition to corned beef.

Is it better to roast or boil corned beef brisket?

Really, the choice of whether to boil or bake corned beef is yours. When executed properly, both techniques result in a juicy, tender corned beef. Traditional recipes call for simmering corned beef in spiced water for about three hours, as in our corned beef and cabbage or glazed corned beef.