See also:
Preparing the dry-cured corned beef and curing the meat
The dry-cured corned beef after curing
I decided to follow my friend Paul’s instructions for cooking the corned beef. He said to braise it slowly in chicken stock; I hadn’t any defrosted and so used water with the meat sat on a sliced onion.
I tasted the liquid after about 30 minutes of cooking at 140°C to see if it was salty. I would have changed the water had it have been but in this case, it wasn’t. The meat took about 4½ hours to be tender when probed. Its internal temperature was way up to 100°C at this stage.
I left it in the liquid for a good half-hour to rest; it was covered during this time.
It was very nice. It’s not a strongly spiced as I thought it may be nor is it as salty as I feared it may be, both good things. We ate it with the Irish potato and cabbage dish called colcannon and some boiled carrots. If it’s as good cold as it is hot, it will be a regular.
The recipe is:
To every 1kg of brisket or silverside of beef use:
22gm salt
15gm Soft brown sugar
2.4gm Cure #1
0.18gm Saltpetre (Optional)
1.2gm Black pepper
1gm Coriander seeds
1gm Mustard seeds
6 Juniper berries
2 Bay leaves
2 Allspice berries
1 Clove
Cure #2 can replace Cure #1 and Saltpetre – use the same amount as you would have used of Cure #1.
To make Paul’s original recipe use 4 juniper berries (instead of 6) and 4 Allspice berries (Instead of 2) per kilogram of meat. All the other ingredients remain the same.
Crush the spices in a pestle and mortar or similar. Mix the cure ingredients together well and then rub them into the meat. Vacuum pack under light pressure or seal in a food grade bag for 20 days.
Rinse and then cook by braising it slowly as above.
To make things easier here’s a cure calculator:
this is really handy
could you also show the actual percentages the calculator is working with?
Dividing the amounts by 10 will give the percentages as the figures quoted are per kg.
What joint of beef is best .brisket .silver side.?
Either is great. They are the two classic cuts for salt beef.
Hi I can only get 0.6% curing salt is there a conversion from 6.25% to 0.6% thanks
You’ll need to use that curing salt to replace the cure and all of the salt for this recipe. Use the calculator provided to find the cure and salt amount and then replace these with your curing salt. For other projects the universal cure calculator and the bacon calculator allow you to specify the level of nitrite in your curing salt. Hope this helps.
Hi Phil,
I’m thinking of using the basic cure elements of this recipe to do a silverside pastrami but omitting the saltpetre. The recommended cure time of 20 days is longer than I thought – I was just planning to use the 2 days per inch +2. Would this be long enough or do I need to do the 20 days? TIA
The longer cure is to allow the bacteria in the meat plenty of time to convert the nitrate to nitrite. If you are just using cure #1 on its own a shorter cure time may suffice. I always allow a little longer for beef though as I find it takes longer to cure than pork. Hope this helps
Happy New Year and thanks for the response. I’m planning to use only #1 but will give it a bit longer than initially planned. I did a silverside pastrami a couple of years ago and it turned out great but I can’t find my notes!