May 15, 2007

pickled brisket, a.k.a. corned beef

I made my own corned beef for this past shabbos. muse send me an email today that the 18th edition of the Kosher Cooking Carnival is coming up, so I figured I will let you know how to make great corned beef, a.k.a. pickled brisket.

Here is my recipe.

Caveat: My recipes are not exact. I do not follow them to a "t". They are just guidelines. I usually add much more of each ingredient than called for, so caveat emptor. I will add, that it came out amazing.

The only other time I have put up a recipe on this blog, and submitted to KCC, can be seen here. That was my "meat and hummous" recipe. People found it pretty amusing.

So here goes:
ingredients:
  • 1 cow/bull
  • slaughtering knife/chalaf
  • (at least) 1 bag koshering salt
  • lots of water
  • slotted board/table
  • butchering knives
  • ziploc bag
  • 2 cups koshering salt (in addition to bags above)
  • 1 cup brown sugar
  • 1/2 cup pickling spices
  • 2-3 Bay Leaves
  • 10 cloves
  • 1tbs whole peppercorn
  • 1tbs whole Allspice
  • a bunch of garlic cloves
  • 1 tspn of ground mustard
Instructions:
  1. slaughter cow/bull
  2. butcher and kasher cow/bull meat or at minimum the brisket (cut from the chest of the cow)
  3. take 5 pounds of brisket (or more of you want more corned beef) and trim some of fat
  4. take ziploc bag and throw in the pickling ingredients, including, 2c kosher salt, brown sugar, peppercorn, allspice, garlic, bay leaves, cloves, mustard and pickling spices.
  5. Mix it up well
  6. put brisket into ziploc bag, rubbing the spice mix all over the brisket.
  7. squeeze air out of bag and seal
  8. store in cool place (back of fridge works for me), preferably with something heavy (like a brick) on top.
  9. Store for 1.5 - 2 weeks.
  10. every 4 days or so, open bag rotate meat rubbing spices over meat, squeeze out air and reseal.
Mazel tov! You now have a pickled brisket (corned beef) that is completely inedible.
To make it edible: Boil brisket in water on low flame for about 1.5 hours. Repeat this three times, changing water each time.
You now have an edible corned beef.
For extra flavor, mix in separate pot: 2 spoons ketchup, 1 spoon mustard, some vinegar, 1 cup brown sugar. Bring to low boil.
Take a bunch more cloves. Stick them into the meat in various places.
Pour mixture over brisket. Stick brisket in oven and bake for 10 minutes covered and ten minutes uncovered at a normal temperature (whatever temp you normally bake things at - I have no idea what temp that is).
Remove cloves stuck into meat.
Dig in!

15 comments:

  1. i LOVE corned beef. i used to make it, but have not done so ina while. i don't get so fancy, though. how does the meat stay in the fridge for 1.5 to 2 weeks without spoiling?

    of course we all know that tonuge, and not corned beef, is the food of holies.
    http://agmk.blogspot.com/2006/11/rashi-condiments-and-sex.html

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  2. i used to say that i could live on corned beef alone

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  3. Yum!

    Chaval that I never got to enjoy your meat and hummus dish or the corned beef. I'll have to try making the former on my own.

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  4. it does not spoil because it is pickling. also it is in a sealed ziploc bag with (almost) no air....

    I am not a big fan of tongue.

    tns - I don't make these things too often, but every now and then I am in the mood...

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  5. Maybe you could use the promise of some corned beef, I dunno, for an incentive for people who are always running late in the morning....

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  6. thanks to Yoni's request I will now add the unfortunate conclusion of this weeks corned beef. We had a great dinner. I then went to my daf yomi shiur. I came home and my wife told me that my 3 year old daughter had been climbing in the fridge to get something. She knocked out the corned beef in its pyrex dish which shattered all over the floor deeming the corned beef inedible (I could have tried picking out the glass had I been home when it happened....)

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  7. hey goofball,

    ma has a great recipe for cb that she's made for us for years. get hers. of course the only shechting involved was us, but that's a dif story....

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  8. B"H Dumb question time.... From which part of the animal does the "brisket" come?

    And, no, the shehting part didn't phase me.

    I live in Tapu'ah. Someone's always slaughtering a goat here and there, usually right outside my house....

    How lucky for me...

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  9. shaya - you goofball. I asked her for it a long time ago. You know what her recipe is? Buy a pickled brisket from Hungarian and then make the sauce to put on top of it....

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  10. what can I say, she's gotten a little lazier over the years....you know with her birthday yesterday and all she finally had to cross the 30 year old number - she can't be 29 anymore!

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  11. ben-yehuda, as I wrote it is from the chest/belly of the cow...

    shaya - she never pickled it herself. she always bought it pickled and then cooked it.. I asked her...

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  12. I wonder if the old tyme recipe books of yore started out instructions with:
    Slaughter cow/bull

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  13. wow this looks great and relatively easy. my husband loves corned beef and Id love to make it for him! I havnt seen 'pickling spice' here in Jerusalem. The spice guy I buy from said he'd make it for me if I get him the ingredients. can you help me out with that? and by the way- your mom sounds like a smart woman!

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  14. the jar of pickling spice I have doesnt say what is in it. To me I can recognize the allspice, the ground up bay leaves, the mustard seed, the pieces of chili pepper. There is something else there though, at least one mor eitem maybe two, that I am not sure what it is.

    maybe type into google "what is in pickling spice"

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