You Gotta Sous Vide Your Corned Beef
St. Patrick’s Day just isn’t like St. Patrick’s Day without corned beef, cabbage, and lots of beer and / or whiskey. I didn’t feel like whiskey – we’ve done it before – but the super wet, slow and slow cook method seemed perfect for a cured, salty piece of meat.
As you probably already know, “corned beef” in corn beef has nothing to do with yellow grains – it’s just another word for curing or pickling. “Pickled beef” doesn’t have the same flavor, so we’ll stick with corn.
To get an idea of exactly what effect my Anova will have on our pickled brisket, I bought three cow slices: two that were prepackaged and already cured, and one unprocessed brisket (flat portion) for home curing.
Using the Meathead Goldwyn cure recipe , I whisk a mixture of salt, Prague powder (sodium nitrate), brown sugar, pickled spices, and garlic. Then I realized that the only container I had big enough to accommodate such a situation was a grocery drawer, so I moved my very impressive collection of fruits and vegetables (three clementines and one sad head of romaine) to the shelf. Then I thoroughly washed the box with the hottest and most soapy water, rinsed thoroughly and filled it with meat and sweet-salt water.
Then I covered the box with plastic wrap, stuffed it, and left it there to live without rent for a week. After seven days, I removed the meat, blotted it dry and rubbed it with a mixture of herbs and spices.
To make the mixture, I (mostly) followed the recipe for mashing ChefSteps from this piece , but I didn’t have coriander (I used cumin) and lacked black pepper, so 85 grams became “as much as I have in this jar … The “dill seed” also became “dill straight up” because I had the dill straight up and wanted to use it.
Anyway. I rubbed this beef with my unique spice blend and then sealed it in a vacuum bag. Then I took one of the store-bought beef, sprinkled it on the spice bag, and sealed it in my own vacuum bag. While doing this, I noticed that the store bought sample had a slimy, gelatinous sensation that scared me. (It just didn’t look like meat .) This was likely due to the fact that it was treated with papain , a softening enzyme that has all sorts of flavorful uses. Both beefs went to a 145-degree bath, in which they stayed for a total of 48 hours.
About seven hours before the sous vide expiration date, I took another store-bought corned beef and threw it into the multicooker along with half a glass of water and a packet of spices as directed . (Did I trust these instructions? No, but that corned beef was more of a control than anything else.) Once everyone had sat in their cooking vessels for the required amount of time, we were ready to try.
I started by comparing the two pre-packaged pieces. As you can see in the photo above, the beef cooked in the multicooker has shrunk and took on the shape of a claw. It was also quite dry and not very aromatic.
However, the texture of the sous-vide sample was so delicate that it almost self-destructed and began to fall apart when moved from the bag to the cutting board.
The meat was very plump – almost too plump – and it tasted like store-bought corned beef, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. I say it was as good as it gets at a cheap corned beef grocery store, although you could cut it down to 36 hours if you want the slices to hold their shape a little better.
I weighed each piece of meat before and after cooking and was surprised to find that they had lost quite a comparable amount of weight (about two pounds).
Then I turned my attention to the beef that I had cured myself.
While this one didn’t fall apart like a papain-soaked brisket, it was still tender and juicy, and had a better, slightly sweeter, more meaty flavor, thanks to matching Meathead and ChefStep recipes. This beef, instead of falling apart when looking in its direction, looked more like a tender steak soup if this steak was marinated. Its only drawback was the small grayish strips of not quite hardened beef, which had nothing to do with a sous-vide circulator, and they could be solved by spending just a couple of days in a salt bath.
Whether you are buying a pre-cured brisket or corn slice, the immersion circulation pump is your friend. Store-bought beef that has been treated with softeners (such as papain) is cooked at 145 ℉ for 36 hours. If you cook beef yourself, increase the cooking time to 48 hours. Not so long? Don’t worry: if you’re using store-bought corned beef, you can increase the temperature to 180 ℉ and decrease the time to 10 hours. (I have not tested this cooking time and temperature with homemade corned beef, but you can always try 10 and longer if needed.) The beef will have a slightly different, more “stew” texture, but it will still be tender. juicy, and most importantly – salty.
This story was originally published in March 2017. It was updated on March 16, 2021 to reflect the current Lifehacker style rules.