We are now entering breakfast week and during this week one of the meats we are making is Corned Beef. The first step for preparing our piece of meet is Brine Curing it. We do do by immersing it in a water mixture with 2 parts salt, 1 part sugar, spices, herbs. The meat will then end up having about 60% moisture and 7% salt by weight. The reason why at times we choose to Brine Cure our meat instead of Dry Cure is because the proportion of cure that penetrates the meat is smaller and more even compared to a Dry Cure. It also takes a longer time for the product to be cured, so you can partially cure your product more easily, which is what we did. We partially Brine Cured our tough piece of meat for a few days in the cooler and finished it by a slow, moist cooking method.
PS: "Corn" in Corned Beef, coming from the English word for grains including Salt grains.
The first step to working with meat is smelling it and making sure it does not smell like much. If it does smell, it should have a very light smell of fresh meat.
Hint: When working with your piece of meat, always keep it on top of a baking sheet, this way you will not risk that any any of it's juices drip to undesirable places and "cross contaminates" other products or surfaces. One very useful hint that was thought to me is to always keep my cutting board firm inside my baking sheet when I am cutting meats so that the juices stay inside the sheet.
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