Homemade Corned Beef - Simply Recipes

Why Make This

• This homemade corned beef is simple to cure using brisket, salt, pickling spices, and time.
• Homemade versions taste better and fresher than any store-bought corned beef.
• You can customize the flavor with your own blend of pickling spices.

Vibrant pink, salty, and spicy, corned beef is always a welcome meal in our home, whether in a boiled dinner, with cabbage, or in a sandwich with Swiss cheese and sauerkraut. Who knew it was so easy to make?

Corned beef is essentially beef cured in a salt brine, with some pickling spices for added flavor. It gets its name "corn" from an old English word for grain, or small pieces of hard things the size of grain, such as salt.

How Is Corned Beef Made?

Over the years, many of my friends have encouraged me to cure my own corned beef, insisting that it wasn't hard to do, and well worth the effort. After finally getting around to it, I'm happy to report that my friends were right! It really is easy; it just takes about 5 days to cure.

Here's what to do:

1. Make a salty curing brine with pickling spices like mustard seed, allspice berries, coriander seeds, and peppercorns.
2. Marinate a beef brisket in the brine, for 5 to 7 days.
3. Simmer the brined and drained brisket in water with more pickling spices for several hours until tender.

How to Season Your Corned Beef

Because you get to choose what pickling spices to use, you can make your own distinctively flavored corned beef. You know how BBQ masters have their own favorite homemade dry rubs? It's sort of like that.

Pretty much every packaged corned beef brisket I've bought tastes about the same. The one I home cured? Wonderful and different.

While I researched several online sources for curing your own corned beef, as well as interrogating my colleague Hank, the source I referred to the most was Michael Ruhlman's brilliant Charcuterie: The Craft of Salting, Smoking, and Curing (high recommend). You can also see his instructions on Leite's Culinaria.

I played around a bit with the spice mix, and kept the garlic out of the brine, but other than that, pretty much followed Michael's method.

What Makes Corned Beef Pink?

Corned beef gets its vibrant pink color from the use of sodium nitrite, a chemical compound that also adds flavor and helps inhibit bacterial growth. Sodium nitrite is sold for the purposes of curing meat in a form called "pink salt." Since sodium nitrite is toxic in concentrated amounts, it is dyed pink so that we don't mistake it for table salt. Note that curing pink salt is NOT Himalayan pink salt.

You can use pink salt for this recipe or not. I've corned beef with and without pink salt. Both work. The curing salt adds a little more flavor and will help preserve the beef better if you don't cook it right away after curing.

There is some controversy over the use of sodium nitrite in curing meats, as the frequent consumption of cured meats (bacon, ham, pancetta, corned beef) is linked to an increased risk of certain types of cancer. I eat cured meat maybe once a month, so I'm not worried for myself, but it helps to know about the risks and the current research.

To achieve a pink color without the use of curing salt, some people add a beet or two to the boiling water when it comes time to cook the roast. I haven't tried that yet, but if you do, please let us know how it works out for you!

Use Your Corned Beef in These Recipes

• Corned Beef and Cabbage
• Corned Beef Hash
• New England Boiled Dinner
• Red Flannel Hash
• Reuben Sandwich