SG Archive:Corned Beef and Cabbage

A Day without Sunshine



The sun didn't come up yesterday. Or, if it did, I didn't see it. The weather was darkly overcast — the sky a rag of gray flannel stretching from barren treetop to dreary hillside. The wind was cold and gusting, hurling flourishes of rain and ice. It was the epitome of an East Tennessee January day with no color to provide visual warmth or snow to add romance. It was just plain cold and nasty.

There's only one way to deal with a day like that — cook. And I knew just what I wanted.

One of these days I'm going to think of having corned beef long enough in advance to try corning my own brisket. But not this day. A quick trip to the store garnered a three pound packaged corned beef, some potatoes, turnips, carrots, and cabbage.

It was the epitome of an East Tennessee January day with no color to provide visual warmth or snow to add romance.

Back at the house I made a mug of cocoa, rinsed the brisket, and dumped it in my Dutch oven with assorted pickling spices and beer. It went on the stove until it simmered and then into the oven to slowly braise though the afternoon. Filling the house with a thick blanket of savory scent to ward heart and soul against the whisperings of wind and sleet.

Corned Beef and Cabbage
Serves 6 - 8.

1 3 - 4 lb corned beef brisket — trimmed of visible fat
1 bottle of beer
2 tsp mustard seed
2 tsp coriander seed
1 tsp black peppercorns
1 tsp dill seed
1 tsp whole allspice
1 tsp juniper berries
1 bay leaf
3 carrots — peeled and cut into 1" lengths
2 lg. onions — cut into quarters
1/2 head cabbage — cut into quarters
3 lg. turnips — quartered
3 lg. waxy potatoes — cut in half

Heat oven to 325F.

Rinse corned beef and place in a large dutch oven. Add beer, 1 carrot, 1 onion, and all spices. Add enough water to barely cover brisket. Place over medium heat and bring to a vigorous simmer. Cover and place on lower-middle rack in oven.

Cook 1 hour, turn brisket over, and add enough additional water (if needed) to bring level half-way up meat. Repeat 1 hour later.

After 3 hours, remove from oven and remove brisket from broth and set on a plate. Strain out carrots and onions and discard. Add all remaining vegetables, place on stove over medium-low heat, cover, and cook for half an hour or until vegetables are fork tender. Remove from heat.

Slice brisket across the grain and add it back to vegetable mixture to warm up.

I like to serve this with a collection of mustards: Dijon, Polish, honey-mustard, whatever. Then I'll smear one slice of meat with Dijon, another with honey-mustard, and a potato with Polish. The various mustards give each bite a unique flavor.

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Feeling Cheesy

Feeling Cheesy



Cheese is one of my favorite foods. I can't get out of the local cheese store without spending $25 - $30, and that's snacking cheese. Just for the hell of it I did a count on SG and lost track at 45 recipes that include cheese. Sometimes the cheese is a main ingredient as in Welsh Rabbit, at other times it's a secondary ingredients as in Potato/Carrot Gratin. But whatever its role, cheese appears in appetizers, main dishes, breakfasts, and desserts. In this collection of recipes cheese is a key ingredient if not the main ingredient.

Peppers Stuffed with Feta: This recipe is one of my workhorses. They're good hot, room-temp, and even cold. They can be made a day in advance then baked just before serving. They're bright and colorful, making a great presentation. Depending on what you're serving them with, you can swap goat cheese for the feta to cut down on the saltiness and add more tartness. And changing up the herbs is always fair game.

Cheese Quick Bread: This is perhaps my favorite soup bread. It goes with all kinds of soups from Ciopino to Senate Bean Soup to Tomato Bisque to… well, it really goes with everything. And while it's not a last minute affair (it does need to cook for almost and hour and cool for nearly as long) it's faster than a yeast bread. It also makes great toast for breakfast and if you fry a couple of eggs over easy and slide them on then you're going to find mythological figures dropping in for breakfast.

Welsh Rabbit: I've loved Welsh Rabbit since I first had it at Chowning's Tavern in Colonial Williamsburg at age 10. I tried Chowning's rabbit again when was I there back in 2000 and it was exactly as I remembered for 30 years before. And delicious, but since then I've developed my own recipe and I like it better. Mine is a bit thicker even though it doesn't include either corn starch or eggs and it can go wrong. But it's pure cheesy goodness.

Veal with Feta Sauce - Rarified Circles: A few years back I did several cooking shows on local TV. I never got any business out of the effort - and it was an effort - so I haven't repeated it. It wasn't as though the TV station was going to pay me and without a sponsor it was a freebie. In fact, I had to buy the food and the people at the station ate it. The last show I did was a veal dish and I had veal cutlets left over, so when I got home I came up with this dish.

Cheshire Quiche: A friend of mine, Q Correll, developed this recipe. Onions, bacon, eggs, cream, and cheese is about as standard as you can get — except the cheese, good English Cheshire, produces an extraordinarily light quiche. I've no idea why. Q has no idea why. Nobody I've ever talked to has any idea why. But instead of the usual somewhat heavy custard one finds in most quiches this one almost floats through your mouth and down your gullet

Potato/Carrot Gratin: Orange and white are the colors of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville's home team. Personally I detest football and as a rule avoid anything orange and white because I don't want people getting the wrong idea. But this is so good with its layers of potatoes, carrots, herbs, and gruyere that I make an exception. You can make up the gratin a day in advance and refrigerate it, then pull it out and cook it the next day so it's a great party dish.

Strawberry Cheese: I came up with this recipe years ago for a Paper Chef contest entry. It features mascarpone and ricotta, lightly sweetened. This is served in an almond tuile and topped with a coarse strawberry puree flavored with Amaretto. Very elegant, very good and, except for the tuiles, very easy.

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Tip: Mise en Place

When the Food Network first started I was addicted to it. Way back then it was a serious cooking channel with real chefs demonstrating real techniques. I even learned a few things — one of them being the importance of mise en place.

Mise en place (pronounced "meez on ploss" often simply called "meez" in American restaurants) is a French term meaning, "putting in place," and it refers to having all your ingredients lined up and waiting to be used.

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Wordless Wednesday

Recipe here...

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Corning Your Own Beef

Be Gorrah!



Corning beef has a long, if not particularly savory, history as a means of preserving meat. You can certainly just salt and dry beef much as hams are cured, but soaking the meat (brining it) in a salt solution became popular during the hay-day of the British Navy when it became a staple on ships. According to Salt: A World History (by Mark Kurlansky) the Irish became particularly known for their beef's longevity and quality. British, German, and French corned beef was regarded as being generally inferior and in fact the British product was called "salt junk" by sailors.. By the way, the "corn" referred to in corning is a reference to the kernels — corns — of salt used in making it.

The standard cut of meat for corning is the brisket, which is a tough muscle with a layer of fat down the center and over the top. Salt breaks down muscle fibers so corning it in a brine that will seep into the meat it a good start on tenderizing it. And salt, through the process of osmosis, also carries the brine's spices into the meat. The brisket is also particularly suitable to the long, slow stewing or braising that is the usual cooking technique.

The Irish became particularly known for their beef's longevity and quality. British, German, and French corned beef was regarded as being generally inferior.

I typically corn at least one brisket a year. I get a small (3 - 3.5 pound) cut and even though that's a lot of meat for one person, I don't mind the leftovers in the least — try corning your own beef for the best reuben you've ever eaten. However, I have this site on Cooking for Two that I manage and although there are lots of foods that are better leftover (corned beef among them) I at least attempt to pay lip service to not cooking enough food to feed four for a week. So I thought about how I might corn a smaller beef.

Buying a brisket and just corning half of it while freezing the rest for another day occurred to me, but right now my freezer is packed so I considered similar cuts of meat and immediately thought of flank steak. Although it comes from the opposite end of the cow, it's also from the belly and shares brisket's long, stringy loosely-spaced muscle fibers. I gave it a try.

It worked beautifully.

Flank steak is long and flat, without the bulk of brisket, so I rolled and tied the steak to produce a piece of meat more similar in shape to a bulky brisket. You can use a commercial pickling spice for flavoring, I always prefer making my own based on a recipe published in Charcuterie by Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn. Note that if you use the flank steak you still need to slice it across the grain which means slicing with the roll, not across it.

If you have the urge to try corning a beef but don't want to take on a big brisket, this is a great option.

You can find the recipe here and my recipe for corned beef and cabbage here.

By the way, I used to cook corned beef in a big pot on the stove top until a Jewish friend suggested using a Dutch oven in the oven instead. The difference was striking. This was many years ago and I don’t recall the specifics but I do remember that not only was the dish more evenly cooked but the flavors were more mellow. These days I use my 6.5 quart Le Crueset Dutch (or French) oven in the oven. Once hot, the cast iron delivers very uniform and gentle heat throughout the cooking process. I now cook all braises and stews in cast iron in the oven.

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SG Archives:Polenta with Two Ragus

What's in a Name?



Seriously Good is kind of an odd name for a blog. It occurs to me it may sound boastful, as though I'm claiming everything posted here is worthy of culinary note in some way. But the truth is that the name refers more to a search for food that is seriously good than an assertion that every recipe included here is due that accolade.

I started using the phrase "seriously good" to refer to those recipes I occasionally ran across or created that I thought were, well, seriously good. A meal that is seriously good demands second helpings, perhaps even thirds. It's something so good you don't want to stop eating it. I sometimes call this "food that hurts" — a reference to the way something sweet can make your teeth ache or something tart make your jaws ache or eating too much can make your belly ache.

I started using the phrase "seriously good" to refer to those recipes I occasionally ran across or created that I thought were, well, seriously good.

I had a friend who described such food as, "so good you want to rub it in your hair." It's food that elicits unconscious moans and sighs. It's extreme food. Not by being outr&ecute;, but by suffusing your sense of taste and smell, feel and sight.

Last night I had such a meal. It looked juicy and appetizing, it smelled marvelous, and the flavors and tastes combined in such a way that it seemed more than the mere sum of it's ingredients. It's a recipe that's been gestating in the back of my head for some time and yesterday it finally hatched.

Polenta with Two Ragus
Serves 6.

1 1/2 c Ragu Bolognese
6 oz provolone — sliced 1/8" thick
6 oz mozzarella — sliced 1/8" thick
Polenta:
2 1/4 c stone ground corn meal
4 c water
1 tsp salt
1/2 c shredded Parmigiano
1/2 tsp white pepper
2 tbsp butter
Mushroom Ragu:
1/2 lb button mushrooms — sliced
1/2 lb sm. Portobello mushrooms — sliced
1/2 lb shitakes —sliced
1 tsp salt
2 tbsp olive oil
2 tbsp butter
1 tsp thyme
1tsp white pepper (chosen for it's mild taste)
1/2 c red wine

Make Ragu Bolognese.

Polenta:
While Bolognese is cooking, dissolve salt in water in a pot. Whisk in corn meal and place over medium heat. Cooking, whisking nearly constantly, until polenta begins to thicken. Switch to a wooden spoon and continue stirring until mixture is thick. Remove from heat and stir in Parmigiano, pepper, and 2 tablespoons butter until melted. Allow to cool slightly.

Grease an 8 x 10 casserole dish with remaining 1 tablespoon butter. Spread half of polenta in bottom of casserole. Place a layer of foil over polenta, spray with baking spray, and spread remaining polenta on parchment paper. Refrigerate for at least 2 hours.

Mushroom Ragu:
Place a large, non-stick skillet over medium heat and add mushrooms and sprinkle with salt. Cook stirring frequently, until mushrooms begin to give up their liquid. Drizzle with olive oil and add thyme, and pepper. Continue cooking until mushrooms begin browning. Add wine and cook until most of the wine has evaporated.

Heat oven to 400F.

Carefully remove top layer of polenta and set aside. Spread mushroom ragu over botton layer. Layer sliced provolone over mushrooms. Carefully remove parchment paper from polenta and place polenta on top of current layers. Spread Bolognese over polenta and then layer with mozzarella. Bake until mozzarella browns — about 30 minutes.

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