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Corning Your Own Beef

Here is a major improvement on the answer I gave to this question yesterday. It turns out that saltpeter--an ingredient used in classic recipes for corned beef and other cured meats--is now almost impossible to find, and isn't used very much anymore anyway. Even if you find it, don't use it. Almost all corned beef now uses sodium nitrite instead, and so should you--sparingly. My main recommendation remains that this is not a good project for the home cook.

Shawn asks:

I'd like to make my own corned beef. I'm not talking about buying a cured corned beef and just cooking it, but starting with uncured brisket and adding the salt, seasonings, and whatever else I need to turn a brisket into corned beef.

Tom sez:

It sounds like you know something about this already, but here's a little more: don't do it. Corning beef takes a week, at least. It involves nitrites and mustard seeds and a few other items you will have no further use for, because I doubt you'll ever want to do it again. It will take up a lot of space in your refrigerator, and when it's done it might have gone south on you. The chances that it will come out with the color and flavor you like are slim, unless you do it often enough to get the hang of it. All this is best left to the pros.

Here's how they would do it. Use either the flat end or the butt end of brisket (for a whole brisket, cut the two parts apart and double the rub quantities below). Jab it all over, deeply, with a kitchen fork about fifty times. Make a mixture of a cup of kosher salt, 1/4 teaspoon of sodium nitrite, and a tablespoon each of mustard seeds, black peppercorns, whole cloves, ground allspice, and crushed bay leaves. Rub that all over the brisket, and put it into a large food storage bag. Press all the air out and seal. Put the brisket into a pan, and put another pan about the same size on top of it. Weigh the top pan down with a couple of large cans of vegetables (or whatever). Put the whole thing in the refrigerator and wait at least a week--two weeks is better. Open the bag, rinse the brisket well in cold water, and smell it. If you detect serious spoilage, don't take a chance on it. (That probably won't happen, but it's possible.) Then either boil it or bake it, according to whatever recipe you'd use if you started with a pre-corned brisket.

Some old recipes call for saltpeter, but that's not only hard to get but recommended against by the USDA and other authorities. Again I tell you: this is a procedure that the average cook should leave alone.

By the way, there's no corn in this, you noticed. The usage comes from a perceived resemblance of the salt and seasonings to wheat grains (which were called "corn" in Old England) when you don't look closely.

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