Beef
How to Make Corned Beef from Scratch
St. Patrick’s Day is just around the corner. Normally, I propose one of my barbecue versions of classic corned beef. My smoked corned beef, for example, or even homemade pastrami. (Why not? The two are closely related).
How to Cook Corned Beef – Braising for Perfect Tenderness
This year, I’m going traditional and that means classic corned beef—no smoke or fire. Simply curing a beef brisket with salt, sugar, Prague power (sodium nitrite) and pickling spices and braising it in the oven. Of course, you can also braise it in a pellet grill or even a charcoal or gas grill set up for indirect grilling, using a technique I call smoke-braising.
You may be surprised to learn than until the mid-20th century, corned beef was virtually unknown in Ireland. Instead, people there celebrated the Feast of St. Patrick with the ubiquitous bacon and cabbage. It was the Irish immigrants to New York at the turn of the last century who make corned beef the St. Patrick’s Day icon it is today. They learned how to “corn” (pickle) a meat cut prized by their Jewish neighbors on Manhattan’s Lower East Side: beef brisket.
Curiously, the term “corned” comes not from the grain we eat on the cob (or used to brew whiskey), but for the medieval word for a large kernel of salt. You could think of corning as brining—with the addition of “pickling spices,” such as bay leaves, peppercorns, mustard seeds, allspice, and ginger.
Here’s a traditional corned beef that’s surprisingly easy to make. You don’t have to wait until St. Patrick’s Day to try them.
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