In recent years, we found a few local shops that prepare their own corned beef and began buying locally prepared corned beef rather than mass produced.  But this year we ventured one step further and made our own corned beef.  We were inspired by the recipe in the March issue of Bon Appétit by Bruce Aidells.  In theory, making your own corned beef simply requires brining beef brisket with special spices for about a week, occasional stirring, and then cooking it as you would purchased corned beef.  Of course things don’t always go so smoothly.  In this case, once I got all of the ingredients the actual making of the corned beef really wasn’t much effort but getting those ingredients was a bit of an adventure. 

Getting the ingredients

Corned beef has a distinct color that is a result of a special addition to the brine:  Insta Cure No. 1.  This is optional but the thought of eating grey corned beef didn’t sound too appealing so I decided to use it.  The recipe provided a web source but to make the corned beef I only needed a fraction of the amount they sold.  Since I knew a local butcher that made their own corned beef (and sausages) I decided to get it locally.  At the butcher shop, I innocently asked for “Insta Cure Number 1”.  The owner of the butcher shop immediately came over and started asking me why I wanted it.  At first I thought he just wanted to make sure I got the right stuff but then he kept asking questions such as “how much do you need?”,  “how much beef are you using?”, “what other ingredients go in the recipe?” and on and on.  He was very serious when asking these questions and I was a bit intimidated!  But all I wanted to do was make corned beef and apparently that came through because at some point he said “Sure I can sell you an ounce of that” and he had one of his assistants get it for me. 

I had passed his test.  But what was the test for?  Smiling and friendly now, he explained that Insta Cure Number 1 is made form Sodium Nitrate which can be used for other sinister purposes not related to cooking….  With that explained the butcher was friendly to me and started giving me tips on making the corned beef.  In addition to suggesting a couple of different beef cuts, he advised that I poke the meat with a skewer so that the brine penetrates the meat better.  While I decided to use brisket as the recipe suggested I did follow his suggestion and had some fun poking holes in the meat before brining it.

Once I had the Insta Cure, the next item I needed was “pickling spices”.  These are simple enough to buy at the store so I didn’t have problems, but it seems really odd to me that the recipe simply called for generic pickling spices.  The spices are an integral part of corned beef and it would seem that a specific, finely tuned, blend of spices would be listed rather than generic pickling spices.   Since this was our first time making corned beef I decided to stick with the recipe and bought generic pickling spices, but if we make this again I’d like to blend our own.

Armed with our Insta Cure, pickling spices, a whopping 7 pounds of brisket and other assorted ingredients, including beer, we finally got down to creating the brine.  This really was very easy to do and only took a short while including the additional step of poking holes in the meat.  Once placed in the brine, the brisket simply sat in the fridge for 8 days. The recipe says to stir it after 4 days but we also rotated the brisket every other day because we had two pieces rather than just one.

Let the cooking begin

My expectations were that the actual cooking would be very similar to our traditional process for corned beef.  This recipe had some differences from our traditional recipe though so the prep work was a bit different.  In addition to the traditional carrots and potatoes the recipe included turnips and parsnips.  These are vegetables we’ve been trying to use more in our cooking so this seemed a great addition.  Also, the recipe makes a lot of food and since we had two pieces of brisket I split the cooking into two nights.  This meant that I could fit everything in one pan while cooking and the added bonus was that we had fresh corned beef two nights…

Feasting

As much as we enjoy corned beef, seven pounds is a lot so we bravely invited friends over to enjoy the meal with us.  For the full feast we also made homemade corn muffins which are another part of our corned beef tradition.  And since we had guests I got to make dessert – a delicious carrot cake from Dorie Greenspan's Baking from My Home to Yours. 

Inviting guests over for a previously untried recipe can be dangerous.  Especially when making something like your own brined corned beef.  Nevertheless, the result was great from sight to flavor.  The Insta Cure did its job well and the corned beef was the perfect color of pinkish red.  As for flavor, yup it definitely tasted like corned beef.  Did it taste better than the butcher prepared corned beef?  Honestly, I’m not sure.  Husband thought it was a bit salty but overall I think it was very similar.  Still, we’re looking forward to brining our own again next year.  Why?  It was fun and even if it didn’t taste recognizably better than purchased just the knowing that we made it ourselves made the effort (which really was pretty minimal) well worth it!

And if anyone has a special pickling spice blend let me know for next year….

Day One

This recipe is not quite as elaborate as the first recipe – it only took 2 days to prepare not 3.  As with last time, day one began with shopping, but the shopping was less difficult as we only needed to buy a rack of lamb and a few vegetables.  Everything else, including the beans we already had on hand.  Once we were home from shopping the only task for the day was to cut the meat from the rack of lamb and assemble it into a plastic wrapped log with a few herbs.  In other words, this was mostly a task for Husband since I don’t particularly care for butchering meat.   The process was quick and in no time at all he was wrapping the meat into the plastic wrap log.  Once the meat was wrapped in the plastic wrap, the recipe then required the assembled log to sit overnight in the fridge to marinate.  The reason for this was not obvious since the meat only had a couple of herbs and garlic wrapped with it, but it did give us a chance to break-up the cooking time so that was good.

Although Husband prepared the meat quickly he did run into a rather big problem.  The recipe calls for 2 1-pound racks of lamb that are supposed to yield 8 - 10 ounces of lamb meat each.  But we only got 10 ounces total out of our racks of lamb which meant we only had about half of the meat that the recipe called for.  Sure we could have gone out for more, but we decided this would simply mean we’d have extra sauce to use another time so we proceeded with the recipe using only half of the meat.  Unlike the Braised Short Ribs that lasted us four glorious nights this meal would only last us one. 

Day Two

Day two was split into two tasks.  The first was to make the bean and vegetable portion of the meal and the second was to cook the meat.  Both were relatively easy but the beans did take several hours to cook.  The beans cooked in a large pot that contained the leftover rack of lamb bones, some vegetables and herbs.  The bones and herbs were wrapped with cheesecloth to create rather large bouquet garnis.  The resulting bean mixture was then strained.  The cheesecloth contents were tossed and the beans transformed into a dip.  The sauce was served with the lamb. 

Sounds easy but we did run into a couple of snags – which we overcame.  First up was assembling the bouquet garnis.  Easy except that the first time we wrapped them we forgot a key ingredient – garlic.  Fortunately I caught this because I re-read the recipe before we proceeded.  Second was that the recipe called for sprigs of rosemary and thyme.  While Michel Richard defined how many sprigs he did not define the size of a sprig. Not sure about you but ‘sprig’ isn’t a real exact quantity measurement for me.  Based on the picture in the book we approximated how much Michel Richard really meant when he said sprig.  I think we did ok with the thyme but Husband felt we had too much rosemary in the final result.  We used rosemary from our garden, so perhaps it was stronger than what Michel Richard used?

Mid-Day Chef Snack

One nice thing about this recipe is that it produces the bean dip earlier in the day before the whole meal is ready – or at least that is how we timed it.  This gave us a wonderful mid-day snack of bean dip on some pita chips.  The bean dip was absolutely delicious! It had just a very slight flavor of the lamb as well as flavorings from the various herbs used.   Of course it is a rather elaborate, not to mention expensive, way to prepare bean dip.  Sadly, I don’t think we’ll be having it again anytime soon. Aside from the bean dip, there were the lamb bones with bits of lamb meat that came out of the bouquet garnis. Depending on what you like to eat, this is also a wonderful mid-day chef snack!

Measure once, twice or as many times as it takes

The last part of the meal involved poaching the lamb by slowly heating the meat in a pot of water at 140 degrees.  We’ve never poached meat like this so it was a bit interesting to do, but overall, it was pretty easy except for some minor equipment problems.   Since 140 degrees isn’t very hot, we used quite a bit of ice throughout the process to keep the water at the right temperature.  After the specified time we stuck our meat thermometer into the lamb to measure the temperature which was only about 100 degrees.  Hmmm.  OK back in the pot it went for another 20 minutes.  Then we checked again – ok now its 105.  At what point do you decide something is wrong?  We made the call then because our side dishes were ready and we were hungry. 

Eating undercooked lamb wasn’t an option, but questioning why it wasn’t cooking was.  Even though the thermometer we were using was brand new (or perhaps it was because it was brand new) we decided to verify its measuring accuracy. We have an old glass meat thermometer which we prefer not to use unless we must (mercury, glass and meat – not a great combination right?), but in this case it seemed reasonable to check out the temperature with it.  The glass thermometer read 140 – hmmm?  One more test – what temperature was the water with the two different meat thermometers?  Ah ha! The new thermometer thought the water was 105 whereas the old glass/mercury standby said 140 just like the candy thermometer said.  Great, dinner was ready!

The Result

The result?  Delicious! If you're looking for something other than a traditional rack of lamb or lamb chop this is it. We served the lamb with some simple mashed potatoes and braised leeks.  We choose braised leeks to use the leeks leftover from the lamb recipe that only used one leek green.  But honestly, the leeks were amazing and so easy to make that they are now a new favorite that I can’t wait to make again.  Overall, this Happy Meal wasn’t quite as great as the braised short ribs, but then again lamb isn’t my favorite meat.  Still it was awesome and a recipe I’d gladly make for special guests in the future.

And next we'll tackle... 

Next month we’re planning on making some mushroom centric Happy in the Kitchen dishes for a change from the meat centric ones we’ve tried so far…. Can’t wait to taste how they turn out!

Day 1

First up was shopping.  We had to get slab bacon, which we knew was carried at a local butcher shop and bone-in short ribs which we assumed the same shop would have.  We were wrong about the short-ribs and we quickly feared that this little adventure had just taken a nasty turn.  Fortunately, Husband had a thought - let’s try Andronico’s.  Andronico’s is a wonderful grocery store but not very close to our house.  In this case, however, since we were already out and about we headed up to Andronico's.  As soon as we got to the store we immediately went to the meat counter to see what they had and to our amazement they not only had  bone-in short ribs but they had the European style cut that the recipe suggested we use.  With our fears of failure gone, we then searched for everything else we needed and happily found that Andronico’s had it all.  As a result we’ve assigned Andronico’s as the official Happy in the Kitchen grocer!

Day 2 

We began cooking, or more appropriately preparing, since we always follow mise en place.  The prep work for the short ribs went fairly quickly and in no time at all the large, very full, enamel cast iron pot was in the oven cooking.  We only ran into one minor problem during this stage: how to fit everything in the pot and in  what order to place them.  This might seem trivial and was something Michel Richard apparently didn’t think worthy of explaining.  The recipe stated that you add the seared short ribs to a large enamel casserole pot that contains some vegetables.  At some unspecified point, we were also to add two bouquet garnis, one of which was a rather bulky construction using leek leaves.   While we had verified the ribs would fit in our pot before starting, we really didn’t have much extra room and didn't consider everything else that needed to go in. After we got all the ribs in and topped them with the liquids, we realized we hadn’t put in either bouquest garni.  The first, wrapped in cheese cloth, was easy to slide in but the leek encasement of herbs was a problem since we thought it should be submerged for better flavor.  Husband was trying to arrange everything with the tongs but not succeeding so I knew it was time to take over.  “Sometimes you just have to use your hands” I could hear in my head.  Since I’ve never heard Michel Richard speak I’m pretty sure it wasn’t him but my mom yelling at me to use my hands!  Wherever the thought came from it worked and a minute later we had everything arranged and the pot in the oven.  Three and half hours later our cooking for day two was done.

Day 3

The last day was primarily Husband work - that is, removal of the bones from the meat sauce.  I put the final touches on the sauce, which in addition to the two bottles of Syrah added the day before also contained a hefty portion of port.  About an hour and a half later the ribs were ready for their final cooking.  The aromas from the oven were amazing and we could hardly wait to try out our creation.  That night we served the meat over wide parpadelle pasta along with lots of bread to soak up the absolutely delicious sauce. 

The Result

Foodhunter over at The Food Hunter’s Guide to Cuisine had several unused portions leftover from her Thanksgiving meal - sausage and mushrooms from the stuffing along with parmesan and mozzarella from a lasagna. The transformation?  Pizza! Which incidentally is one of my favorite ways to use leftovers.  Foodhunter's pizza looks really good.