Corned Beef Brisket

Thanks to a Labor Day sale, we were able to find beef brisket on sale for $1.49/lb.  Most years we can find it for .99/lb over the summer...but this is not most years.  With the harsh winter of 2010, spring flooding in Montana this year, the worst drought in Texas history, and now wildfires....beef prices are at a premium.  The market is flooded with folks from Texas either selling off their herds or doing serious culling.  If conditions improve, it will still take 2 years for the beef market to get back to where it is now.  I figured this would be my last shot at doing corned beef brisket this year without spending a fortune.

I have always used Tender Quick in the past for curing the brisket, but it is getting more expensive as well.  I hit on a sale for pink curing salt....aka insta cure #1.....aka prague powder #1.....and bought all the store had.  As much meat curing as we do, it was well worth buying!  Needless to say, I had to adapt my recipe....and this is what I've developed for these lovely briskets.....

The first step is to trim excess fat from them.  The key word here is excess.....not all.  Trimming all the fat would mean a dry end product...and that's not what you want to do to a perfectly good brisket.  I save all my trimmings, bag & date them, then freeze for making sausage later in the year.  That beef fat will come in mighty handing when we make lamb sausage.  Lamb fat is too soft to grind well, doesn't hold up as well, and without fat all you have is ground meat...not succulent sausage.

Next the meat is returned to the fridge while I get the brine ready. 

Kosher salt is the second ingredient.  You can use any pure salt....I like Kosher the best.

As for the other ingredients....you will need water, brown sugar, cloves, and pickling spices.  I buy my spices in bulk at San Francisco Herb.  They have a nice pickling spice blend....but I always add extra cloves....their blend just doesn't have enough for our tastes.

Once the meat is trimmed, it must be weighed.  You cannot figure out how much cure you need without knowing how much meat you have.  Curing salt is used at a rate of 2 tsps/10#.  Dissolve the curing salt, the kosher salt in 4 quarts of water.  Once all the salt has dissolved, add the spices, cloves, and brown sugar to the mix.  Let it sit until cool.

Meanwhile sanitize your brining container.  Any non-metal food grade container will do.  For the first day, I use an ice chest.  Since I have already cut my briskets into whole cooking portions....the ice chest is ideal for submerging them into the brine for the first day of cure. 

Also, here's where the recipe can be a bit tricky.  You have to keep track of how much water you use and will need to add to the concentrated brine.  I add an 8# bag of ice to the cooler (which is about a gallon of water), then the brine mixture to that, and the remaining water.  Be sure to stir it all quite well before adding the meat.

By using the ice, there's no need to refrigerate it that first day.  Once it's all mixed, add the briskets to the brine...weigh them down with a heavy plate (or you can use zippy bags of ice but be sure they don't leak and dilute your brine).

These will need 4 or 5 days since I am not brining them whole.  I'll update the process as I go....

In the meantime, here's the recipe that I'm using....

32# Brisket

96 cups water

4 cups Kosher Salt

3 cups Pickling Spices

1 cup whole cloves

3 cups Brown Sugar

6 1/4 tsp curing salt