Recently I had purchased a corned beef from Sam's Club and made pastrami. I loved the result, and wanted to try starting from scratch.
Here is the brisket I picked up from my butcher.
Looks good!
Towards one end there was a bit of a fat cap that needed trimming.
I wanted to leave a little bit of fat, so here is where I left it after trimming.
I used Pop's brine found here http://www.smokingmeatforums.com/a/pops-wet-curing-brine and used one gallon of brine. So I measured out the Cure #1 first.
Then the sugar....
Then the salt....
My local spice shop sells a pre-made corned beef spice mix, so I figured I would give it a shot. It had salt in it already, so I made sure to back off just a little on the amount of salt that went into the brine.
I was going to boil the brine mixture to properly dissolve the salt and sugar, as well as "wake up" the other spices. But, I was also impatient and didn't want to wait for this to come back down to room temperature. So I decided to do the boil with only a half gallon of water, and dump that into half of a gallon of ice to quickly cool it down. I started by taring the weight of my brining bucket.
Here is the half gallon of water coming to a boil with the brining mixture.
Water is about 8 pounds per gallon, so I measured out about 4 pounds of ice.
That looked like this.
When the boil was complete, I I dumped it into the ice, and stirred until the ice was melted. Using this method, the brine was ready for the meat after the boil in less than two minutes.
In went the brisket!
To keep the brisket submerged, I filled a gallon-sized Ziploc bag with water.
This was placed in the bucket, and after being covered with several layers of plastic wrap it went into the fridge for 10 days.
Ten days later I took it out of the brine.
I removed a couple of slices for a fry test, and was worried that it didn't look terribly pink from being corned.
Nevermind...it turned plenty pink. And awesome.
It was right on the edge of being too salty for my liking, so I gave it a quick soak for a few hours to draw out the saltiness.
The mustard went on to help the rub adhere.
The same spice shop that sold me the corned beef mixture also had a pastrami rub, so I went with that as well.
A liberal coating was applied while on the baking sheet and I had plastic wrap ready to go next to it.
The corned beef was then flipped over on to the plastic wrap and the rub was applied to that side as well.
This was wrapped up in plastic for an overnight rest in the fridge.
I smoked it at 225 degrees until it hit 195 (I was aiming for 200, but needed the smoker at that point at a different temperature for something else and figured "close enough").
I wrapped it in foil, towels, and a cooler for a few hours. This shot looks a little dry, but it really wasn't. It was awesome!
Sorry I don't have more final product shots, but I was hosting a BBQ and this was devoured in minutes.
Here is the brisket I picked up from my butcher.
Looks good!
Towards one end there was a bit of a fat cap that needed trimming.
I wanted to leave a little bit of fat, so here is where I left it after trimming.
I used Pop's brine found here http://www.smokingmeatforums.com/a/pops-wet-curing-brine and used one gallon of brine. So I measured out the Cure #1 first.
Then the sugar....
Then the salt....
My local spice shop sells a pre-made corned beef spice mix, so I figured I would give it a shot. It had salt in it already, so I made sure to back off just a little on the amount of salt that went into the brine.
I was going to boil the brine mixture to properly dissolve the salt and sugar, as well as "wake up" the other spices. But, I was also impatient and didn't want to wait for this to come back down to room temperature. So I decided to do the boil with only a half gallon of water, and dump that into half of a gallon of ice to quickly cool it down. I started by taring the weight of my brining bucket.
Here is the half gallon of water coming to a boil with the brining mixture.
Water is about 8 pounds per gallon, so I measured out about 4 pounds of ice.
That looked like this.
When the boil was complete, I I dumped it into the ice, and stirred until the ice was melted. Using this method, the brine was ready for the meat after the boil in less than two minutes.
In went the brisket!
To keep the brisket submerged, I filled a gallon-sized Ziploc bag with water.
This was placed in the bucket, and after being covered with several layers of plastic wrap it went into the fridge for 10 days.
Ten days later I took it out of the brine.
I removed a couple of slices for a fry test, and was worried that it didn't look terribly pink from being corned.
Nevermind...it turned plenty pink. And awesome.
It was right on the edge of being too salty for my liking, so I gave it a quick soak for a few hours to draw out the saltiness.
The mustard went on to help the rub adhere.
The same spice shop that sold me the corned beef mixture also had a pastrami rub, so I went with that as well.
A liberal coating was applied while on the baking sheet and I had plastic wrap ready to go next to it.
The corned beef was then flipped over on to the plastic wrap and the rub was applied to that side as well.
This was wrapped up in plastic for an overnight rest in the fridge.
I smoked it at 225 degrees until it hit 195 (I was aiming for 200, but needed the smoker at that point at a different temperature for something else and figured "close enough").
I wrapped it in foil, towels, and a cooler for a few hours. This shot looks a little dry, but it really wasn't. It was awesome!
Sorry I don't have more final product shots, but I was hosting a BBQ and this was devoured in minutes.
