Easily Make Your Own Corned Beef at Home

By Bernadette Guadiz

Corned beef is an old time favorite food which can be easily purchased at your nearby grocery store. In case you didn't know, corned beef used to be a homemade recipe. It was only until the commercial products began showing up that the old time recipe of homemade corned beef began to fade. The lack of time and the search for convenient living may have contributed to the commercially prepared corned beef's popularity.However, making your own corned beef at home is so much better than those ready-to-eat alternatives. Why? It is much cheaper, tastier, and healthier because of the preservative-free preparation. If you are picky about the foods you provide for your family, this is a healthier alternative as compared to those which can be bought from the supermarket.

What Do You Need

There are a variety beef cuts and even pork cuts you can use for your corned beef. You can choose from brisket, round roast, boneless chuck roast, eye of round, and a few others more except for the steak cuts. If you wanted to serve a unique kind of corned beef, why not try the tongue parts of beef, pork, and lamb. The prepared recipe will still taste as good but the difference is in its texture and appearance.

The initial step in curing the choice meat cuts includes soaking it in brine, a salt curing mixture similar to the marinade. In the brine, you can actually use your preferred spices such as black pepper, thyme, paprika, bay leaf, rutabaga, onions, carrots, garlic, allspice berries, sage, and other spices you'd like to include.

How Is It Done

The choicest cuts of meat should only have a few traces of fat in it or you can just trim it all away if you wanted a healthier corned beef served for the whole family. The corning process can be done in several ways but I highly recommend using zip-lock bags or vacuum containers for this.

I also recommend using ten to twelve pounds of meat so that you have an ample supply of corned beef available anytime you need one. In a roasting pan filled with forty-five cups of water, mix in all the spices you wish to add. You can take care of the proportions of the spices, the more you add, the more flavorful your corned beef becomes. Don't forget to add about one and a half cups of non-iodized rock sea salt and about three tablespoons of brown sugar into the mixture.

You can now immerse the meat cuts into the brine mixture, carefully rubbing the brine into each meat. After that, equally divide the meat cuts into each zip-lock bags or vacuum containers and then pour the brine mixture into each bag or container. You should remove as much air as possible so that the corning process is effective.

Place all the bags or containers in a large bowl and then put about ten pounds of weight over them. You can use plates or canned goods to weigh them down and then put the large bowl at the bottom part of the refrigerator. Check the bags after six hours and gently massage the bags to allow the brine to work into the crevices of the meat. Return the weight on top and put them back into the refrigerator.

You should cure the meat for about two weeks. Three weeks of curing will make the corned beef even more flavorful. But you should massage the meat daily and turn the bags onto another side for balanced curing. Also, do not forget to place the weight on top and return the large bowl containing the bags into the refrigerator.

After two weeks, you can open one of the bags and pour its contents into a bowl filled with cold fresh water. You have to soak the meat into several changes of water to remove any excess salt from the meat. The average soaking process can be done in about twenty four hours.

When you cook it, don't be surprised if the corned beef doesn't look like the artificially prepared ones because your homemade corned beef don't have the carcinogenic food coloring. It will turn into grayish-brown corned beef after it is cooked but it will taste as good as or even much better than the commercial products.

The article Easily Make Your Own Corned Beef at Home was Submitted by Bernadette Guadiz through Articles.GetACoder.com network. Here's the additional information: Bernadette Guadiz is an expert writer that has been in the online writing industry for several years. She specializes in SEO and keyword-rich articles for website content, blogs, and even forum postings. Should you wish to hire her services, you can contact her through a safe outsourcing website via http://www.rentacoder.com/RentACoder/SoftwareCoders/showBioInfo.asp?lngAuthorId=6956948