Corned Beef

Fugue State



I know. You were thinking if you hung around me long enough I'd eventually publish all the recipes — subject to my adaptations — originally published in Charcuterie: The Craft of Salting, Smoking, and Curing by Brian Polcyn and Michael Ruhlman. In fact, you may be right. But it will take me years to do so and I may not publish them in the order that interests you and besides, I only publish my adaptations or examples in a review. Relying on me is a sucker bet.

This week I made the Italian Sausage recipe and was disappointed. The learning curve on sausage is not what I hoped and is going to take longer than I wished. I'm reminded of learning to make soufflés 25 years ago after a five-year effort to produce something that looked as good as it tasted. I'm reminded not because making soufflés is anything like making sausage, but because my difficulty in each case is a fundamental lack of understanding.

With soufflés my somewhat obsessive/compulsive personality led me to mix all of the

The big thing here is corned beef and cabbage. In Ireland, you'd have to go looking for it. It's not served on St. Patrick's.

air out of the whites I had so carefully beaten air into when I combined them with the sauce. I learned my lesson. In fact I learned a deeper lesson about not obsessing so much on the rules and developing a deeper understanding of what is going on in a recipe — chemically, mechanically, and, even, philosophically.

With sausage I immediately recognized my problem and the solution; Make more sausage. Although I was disappointed in the Italian sausage I made from Charcuterie, you may not be. The recipe may be closer to what you have in mind than it was to what I had in mind. That's common in recipes and the solution is knowing your ingredients and how to tweak them.

This week I also corned a beef due to either an alarming inability to understand a calendar or because Microsoft Outlook was lying to me, or both. The fact is I spent most of the week before last thinking it was last week and so I ended up making corned beef a week early for next week. But Outlook did (and does) lie and tells me that this year St. Patrick's Day is on Sunday the 18th of March. I'm not entirely to blame.

I got the recipe from Charcuterie and last night, after a week of curing the brisket, I made corned beef and cabbage. This was seriously good stuff, even though I screwed up and cooked the beef in the brine (resulting from too many dishes going on at once and poor production notes to myself). The final dish was too salty, nevertheless, the flavors were marvelous and far better than any corned beef I've ever bought.

Best of all, the hardest part of corning your own beef brisket really is remembering to start a week early — or two weeks early if you're temporally challenged. Like me. Sigh.

Technorati: Food | essay | charcuterie | corned beef