Corned Beef

The BEST Corned Beef!                                                                                                   

Make Your Own

St. Patrick’s Day is one of my favorite days. But I’ll make my own Corned Beef; or I’ll do without, thank you.

Whether you buy your beef already commercially corned, or better still, make your own, I think you’ll be very surprised at the full flavor you’ll get if cooked as described below. Of all the methods I’ve tried for corned beef, the Oven Bag is far and away simply the best. I’ve boiled it, baked it, smoked it, slow cooked it, steamed it and roasted it. Nothing compares with the Oven Bag for the ultimate, real flavor of corned beef

Whether you make or buy your corned beef, put a tablespoon of flour in the bottom of an Oven Bag, insert the Corned Beef, seal the bag and put it in a pan. It goes then into a pre-heated 325 F. oven for 4 hours. We steam the cabbage and carrots, and bake the potatoes, mostly, but that’s a matter of personal choice—bake, roast or boil ‘em as you choose.

If you want to make your own corned beef, be warned—you’ll never again be happy with any that’s been commercially made.

To obtain the traditional color and stop bacterial growth, you’ll need sodium nitrite. There’s loads of misinformation and hysteria in some circles about sodium nitrite and sodium nitrate. I’ve even seen lofty articles by lofty PhD’s, who didn’t seem to know the difference between the two. Like anything else on this planet, overused, misused and abused, both sodium nitrite and sodium nitrate are poison. Correctly used, they’ve saved far more lives than have been damaged by their abuse.

You can order “Insta Cure #1” (Sausage Maker’s Trade Mark name for their curing salt) from www.sausagemaker.com, in small quantities. If you do, follow the exact instructions: 1 teaspoon per 5 lbs. of meat. If you use some other brand of curing salt, it may call for some other measurement. The Insta Cure #1 is 3% sodium nitrite and 97% salt, which should give you an idea of its potency. It’s died pink, so that there’s no danger of confusing it with any other seasoning. Sodium nitrite is what gives corned beef and cured sausages their distinctive reddish color. Sodium nitrate is used only in meats that aren’t intended to be cooked.

Recipe:

·  1 teaspoon Insta Cure#1 (or the required amount for 5 lbs. of meat of whatever curing salt you’re using.      

·  2.5  Tablespoons Kosher or Pickling Salt

·  2 Tablespoons brown sugar                                                                                                                                

·  3 Tbs. Pickling Spices

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   Mix the above ingredients in a glass, ceramic, food grade plastic, or stainless steel bowl, with 1 quart of water. Add the 5 lb. boneless chuck roast, and ensure the water covers the roast. You can weight the meat down if necessary, as it will tend to rise to the surface. If necessary, add enough more water to cover the meat. Cover and refrigerate for 5-6 days, and either cook it or freeze it.  Pickling spices are another “make my own” thing. There are loads of recipes, and I vary mine depending on what I have on hand. Generally, they all contain:

Pickling Spices: This is one recipe, among dozens:

·         2 Cinnamon sticks, coarsely crushed 

·         1 Tbs. mustard seeds

·         1 tsp. whole cloves

·         1 tsp. whole allspice

·         1 tsp. whole juniper berries

·         1 tsp. mace-either crumbled or powder

·         1 tsp. dill or fennel seeds

·         3-4 bay leaves

·         1 tsp. dry ginger, or a small piece of fresh ginger

·         1 tsp. dried red pepper flakes

This makes a little more than needed for the 5 lb. chuck roast, so you might want to double it. Put any leftover in an air tight glass jar, seal it tightly and put it in the freezer for later use.

If you do a larger roast, adjust the seasonings along the guidelines above. I’m in the habit of making 7-8 lb. hunks of corned beef. I buy a whole boneless chuck, weighing 25-40 lbs. for making corned beef, but that’s another story we needn’t get into.

"Fresh Turkey?"

Americans bought about 50,000,000 Turkeys last week and will purchase almost that many again for Christmas.

 

Do we suppose fifty million turkeys were processed at the processing plant last week?

 

Do we suppose that turkey growers have processing plants capable of handling fifty million turkeys in a week? 

 

Do we imagine hundreds of experienced turkey processors waiting in the coffee break room until a week or two before Thanksgiving and Christmas?

 

It can't happen like that. I'm afraid the "Fresh Turkey" people pay 2 or 3 times more than for a frozen turkey, and those turkeys had to be processed by the beginning of last September.

 

Most of the turkeys bought for Thanksgiving and Christmas will be frozen, having been processed many months ago. They were processed, vacuum sealed in plastic wrap, dipped in liquid nitrogen (-321 degrees F.), and kept frozen. The cell walls of anything frozen that fast simply don't have time to break. The breaking of the cell walls of meat in the normal freezing process is what causes the juice to run from meats in the thawing process, more so than fresh meat.

 

Marketing programs have convinced some people that "fresh" turkey is better than frozen. And why not? If you can convince people to pay twice as much for your less "fresh" product, why not?

 

The bird on my Thanksgiving table will have been processed last June or July, immediately dipped in a -321 F. bath, and kept frozen until now. I'll pay about 1/2 or 1/3 as much as a "fresh" turkey that was processed in August or September and has been kept "fresh" for the last 2 or 3 months.

How Fascinating!
The FDA has finally determined what meat men--no, not the "Meat Specialist" behind today's meat counter, but what those few remaining of us who know a pork chop from a lamb chop have known for at least 60 years: There's no need to cook today's pork past 145 F.
Actually, 138 F. kills anything you could possibly get from pork but the extra 7 degrees is a good safety margin. I want my pork cooked through, but not dried out. Cooking it to over about 150-55 will pretty much ensure that today's extremely lean pork will be dry and tasteless.
At Costco the other day, my favorite place to buy beef, I noticed the big red warning label on each package of ground beef: "Cook thoroughly to 160 F."
Why is that? What about "Steak Tartar," a Rare Steak or a Med. Rare, Standing Rib Roast? What about a juicy Hamburger, instead of a hockey puck on a Sesame Seed Bun?
Read the label: Product of New Zealand, Peru, Argentina, Canada and the US (or some similar list of 5 countries), Manufactured in the US. "Manufactured"?
Why the big red "warning" label telling you to cook it to 160 F.?
It's because there's a good chance that some of that assembled array of beef trimmings carries the deadliest e-coli strain; the one that doesn't die until it reaches 160 F.
Where does that e-coli bacteria strain come from? It's in the cow's digestive tract, just before it evacuates.
It's been safe to eat Medium Rare pork for almost 100 years in the US; but today's store bought ground beef can kill you or maim you for life if you don't cook it to at least 160 F.
Is that a society turned upside down? Or what?

Country Style Spare Ribs

Some years ago, "Country Style Spare Ribs" were taken only from the rib end of the pork loin. That end of the pork loin was attached to the Shoulder Butt, and contains much of the shoulder blade.

The beef equivalent of the rib-end of the pork loin is the large end of the beef rib, where it was attached to the Blade Cut Chuck Roast.

There is more bone and fat per lb. of meat on those rib-end cuts, but the marbling-subsequently the flavor, is superior to any other cut, in my opinion.

The so-called "Country Style Spare-Ribs" from that end of the pork loin was a marketing effort to sell the bony pork chops. We had to sell them for less per lb., so that people would buy them. If we cut that end of pork loin down the middle, sawed through the bones, displayed them nicely in a meat tray and called them "Country Style Spare Ribs," they sold more quickly and at a higher price than we could get for the rib-end pork chops.

We rarely see the rib-end of the pork loin in the counter any more. Mostly what we see called "Country Style Spare Ribs" today is not from rib, and not even from the rib end of the pork loin. Today, "Country Style Spare Ribs" are made from the fattest and hardest part of the pig to sell--the "Pork Shoulder Butt," a.k.a. "Boston Butt."

Yesterday I bought a 6 lb. package of "Country Style Spare Ribs" on sale for $1.27 lb. I often buy them when they're on sale to use in making various sausages. The shoulder butt has the ideal fat content for perfect sausage, be it Breakfast Sausage, Polish Sausage, Bratwurst, or almost any other.

As usual, I wondered who or what had hacked up what had been a perfectly good shoulder butt. And why? Honestly, every package that I've bought has been simply a randomly hacked up Shoulder Butt.

You can't get much further away from the "Ribs" of an animal than the butt of the shoulder, which is adjacent to the neck of the beast. But they sell the shoulder butt under the guise of "Ribs" that way. By whatever name they call it, if the price is right, I'm buying. I cut the package that I bought into pieces about 2 inches by 2 inches, marinated it all in a Teriyaki sauce that I had made, grilled them over charcoal, and they received rave reviews from my guests.

I'm not complaining about the price. I just wish the "Meat Experts" knew how to handle the plastic wrapped package they take out of the cardboard box.

Or maybe I don't! If they knew, the price might be higher!

Having read this, I assure you that you now know more about it than the "Meat Expert" behind the counter.

Hot Wings

Most restaurant menus have them in the “Appetizer” section. They’re very popular. For a while, they also featured “Boneless'' Hot Wings for the same price. They weren’t boneless wings at all; they were strips of chicken breast. Now they mostly call that "Chicken Tenders"; perhaps a more honest moniker than "Boneless Wings"?

As we occasionally like “Hot Wings,” or "Buffalo Wings," I sometimes buy the 10 lb. bag when they’re on sale for $1.69 per lb.

Currently, chicken wings usually sell for around $3.79, and up, per lb. Chicken breasts usually sells for about $2.79 per lb., or about 1/3 less than wings. You can often buy “boneless, skinless chicken breast” on sale for about $1.99.

Today I finally did what I’ve wanted to do for a long time—I did a “test” on a lb. of chicken wings with my gram scale.

Five of the wings weighed exactly 16 ounces. They were on sale for $1.99. Of course that was an unknown brand and the regular premium brand was the usual $3.79 for wings.

Here’s what you get in 16 ounces of chicken wings:

• 7 ounces of bones
• 3.5 ounces of fat and skin
• 5.5 ounces of meat

That means that in buying the $1.99 per lb. of wings, I paid $5.85 per lb. for the skinless, fat-less, boneless chicken wing meat.

If you pay $3.98 lb. for your wings, the meat will cost you $11.70 per lb.

The 3.5 ounces of skin and fat doesn’t sound so bad, until you consider that it’s equal to a ¼ lb. stick of butter, minus just enough to butter your toast.

Rule of thumb: About 1/3 of the weight of wings is boneless, fat-less, skinless meat, meaning you're paying 3 times the price per lb. of wings for the meat alone.

I'll consider my options a little more thoughtfully next time I get a hankering for "Hot Wings."

Meat Tip of the Week
13 September 2010


Anyone who read the NY Times article of October 4, 2009, entitled "E. Coli Path Shows Beef Inspection Flaws", probably hasn't bought or eaten much ground beef or hamburgers since then. And that's too bad, because most of us love a great hamburger now and then.

It's easy to make ground beef safely, if you have a way to grind your own. You can buy a chuck roast, bone-in or boneless, or some portion of beef round if you want it completely fat free.

Simply unwrap the beef, rinse it under cold water to remove most of any surface bacteria that might be there, cut it into strips and refrigerate it for a few hours or overnight. Of course, if you get a bone-in roast, you have to remove them, but that's not very intimidating for anyone who cooks. Most food processors have an attachment for grinding and that is all you need. You can also buy an excellent stainless steel grinder for about $100 that should last a lifetime.

Once it's been ground through the medium grinding plate, you can grind it again through the fine plate, if you like. I never do that. I like it just coarsely ground; and nobody has ever even noticed that it wasn't finely ground-they just rave about how it's incredibly good stuff.

However you like it, the next thing to do is dissolve about a half teaspoon of salt per pound of meat in 1/4 cup of ice cold water per 2 lbs. of meat. Pour the salty ice water evenly over the ground beef, thoroughly mix it with a long handled fork or spoon and refrigerate for at least a half an hour. When you make patties, you'll find they form up rather easily. That's because the salt has broken down enough of the cell walls that the meat adheres to itself better.

What's the advantage of grinding your own? You know: it's clean; it's been under refrigeration constantly since you bought it and any bacteria that might have been on the meat were on the surface only. The difference is that after the meat has been ground, it has an infinate number of surfaces for bacteria to multiply on. In one large piece, the meat has only a relatively small surface area for breeding bacteria. Bacteria don't multiply at temperatures below 40 F. If you've kept your beef below that, (most refrigerators are set at 38 F) taken it out of the package and rinsed off the surface as soon as you got it home, you have almost no chance of ever making anyone sick. In 52 years, I've yet to make anyone sick through my mishandling of meat and if you follow the above, you won't either.

Meat Tip of the Week
16 August 2010

"Oh, honey, that's waaaay too much food!"

I always hear that when I'm cooking for company. If we're having 4 guests, I cook for 10; if we're having 8, I cook for 15-20. I simply won't have anyone at my table not getting all they want. We always have loads of leftovers.

What could be more un-appetizing than re-heated meat? It depends on how you re-heat it.

The next time you have left-over beef, pork or chicken, try putting it in a steamer basket and steaming it for a few minutes, just until it's heated through. Whether it's left-over barbecued spare ribs, beef roast, pork roast or your half eaten steak, you'll be happily surprised at how the full, untainted original flavor is fully restored, if not further enhanced.

We've been tempted to actually barbecue spare-ribs the day before we intend to serve them. The full flavor is even more intensified the next day. Steamed, spare ribs are more tender, and we always think they're better a day or two later than when they first came off the grill.

Give it a try the next time you have left-over meat. You're going to like it!