It’s a New England thing
By John Fladd
According to James Malik, the first thing you need to know about corned beef is that it’s not particularly Irish.
“[Corning beef] was a traditional means of preservation,” he said. “We associate it with St. Patrick’s Day here. It is an Irish-American thing, an Irish New England thing. But corned beef is not what’s traditionally eaten on St. Patrick’s Day in Ireland. This is very much Irish-American and very, very popular here in New England. It’s a boiled dinner, usually served with cabbage, carrots, rutabaga and onion.”
Malik, who describes himself as “an old-school butcher,” has been working with premium meat for more than 21 years. He is one of the managers and butchers at Wicked Good Butchah in Bedford. And he takes his corned beef very seriously.
“So corned beef, typically,” he said, “when we’re talking about corned beef for a boiled dinner, it is a brisket, and it is corned or brined in a salt solution. Now there’s two styles. There’s the famous red style that everybody gets in the grocery store. And then there’s the gray style, which is a very traditional New England style — the real corned beef. The difference is they’re both brined in a salt water solution, but the gray has just salt and water, where the red uses sodium nitrate or something called Instacure No. 1, which contains sodium nitrate. It keeps the red color on the external layer of the meat as well as the interior. But the gray is the traditional New England style. That’s what we do here in-house.”
One reason why corned beef is associated with Irish and Jewish immigrants is that it usually is made with brisket, a very tough and therefore traditionally inexpensive cut of beef. How tender or tough a cut of meat is is largely determined by how much work those muscles had to do during an animal’s lifetime. More exercise results in more connective tissue, which has to be broken down with long, slow cooking.
“The brisket is from the chest,” said Rick Lemay from Lemay & Sons in Goffstown, a beef processing house and butcher shop. “It’s right front-and-center. It’s what we call the front plate, and right behind that ends up being your short ribs.” He said that corned short ribs are delicious. “You don’t hear about it very often,” he said, “but it’s a pretty neat item. I’ve actually tried it with a chuck roast too.The corning process really is just a curing method.”
Because a brisket has so much connective tissue holding it together, the corning process involves soaking it in brine for anywhere from 10 to 21 days.
“We take the full 21 days,” James Malik said. “After that 21 days, we then take out the briskets from that brining solution and then we soak them for 24 hours in clean cold water to draw out any excess salt. And you’re still left with a wonderfully brined piece of meat that has that nice traditional corned beef flavor. The biggest step in all this is when you’re brining. To know that your salt solution is the correct amount of salt, you put a potato in your bucket, and when the potato floats, you have the correct amount of salt to begin brining your corned beef.”
Jay Beland is in charge of brining the corned beef at Lemay and Sons. He adds spices to the salt in his brining solution. “For a 10- to 15-pound brisket,” he said, “I’ll use two gallons of water, two tablespoons of pink curing salt, and a cup of whole black peppercorns.” He adds an additonal cup of cracked — but not powdered — peppercorns, two cups of coriander seeds — one whole and one cracked, and the same with yellow mustard seeds, and a cup of pickling spice. “That’s my water,” he said. “That is my brine.
Beland brines his brisket for about 10 days, then smokes it at 225 degrees, until it reaches an internal temperature of 180 degrees. James Malik, on the other hand, is a great believer in braising his corned beef.
“When people hear ‘boiled dinner’,” Malik said, “their first thought is to go ahead and put it in a pot of water and boil the ever-loving Jesus out of it. I would tell you that the best way to do this is to do more of like a braise in the oven. Believe it or not, you can dry it out by over-boiling it for too long. I put it in my big lobster pot and I time it out. You’ll find you get a much better piece of meat that way, much more enjoyable.”
Featured photo: Courtesy photo.
