Go to the Recipe: Not Your Nana’s Corned Beef and Cabbage
cooking the cb in the bag it comes in,is it going to be too salty?also even if brine your own would that also be salty?if so how about an overnight soak in water.
Yeah really curious about this cooking store bought corned beef in the bag it came in.
yum.
i have 2 snake river farms c.b. rounds approx. 3 lbs. each from costco.what temp. and time would you recommend?i did 2 in my usual recipe in crockpot, i felt they were overcooked as they were a little soft.8 hrs. on low.what do you think since they are not brisket.i would really like to try sous vide.thx
154 °F / 68 °C for 24-hour cook. OR 48 hours at 140 °F / 60 °C Should work. Knowing SRF price, if you are nervous, do one from scratch (I've done beef tongue which is great) with a lesser cut. The temp control during cook is important.
As long as using SV, you're probably fine. If nervous about it, place it your own SV bag and cook as directed.
Just got your email for this recipe. Went from hugely excited to very disappointed when I saw one of the ingredients was "9-day brined brisket." You posted this recipe 6 days before St. Patty's Day!!! We aren't psychic, you guys. Thanks for the tongue tease.
Imagine me, with both Irish and Italian ancestry. The 17th of course to St. Patrick who btw wasn't so Irish but the following day is the Festa di San Giuseppe.
Sorry for the confusion Thom, I highly recommend going to your butcher and picking up pre brined corned beef. If you have the right equipment you can turn this around in 24 hours. That is how we shot everything for this recipe.
Hey Les, I do not recommend cooking the cb in the bag it comes in, I tried it. The reason why don't vouch for it is when the meat cooks the muscles start to tighten and change shape resulting in the bag to pop open. Sure it can work at times but I would hate to have someones bag open in the middle of the night. If you are worried about it being to salty I would recommend a soak to be safe. I hope this is helpful.
I wouldn't recommend using the store's vacuum bag for sous vide as they almost always use the cheaper non-heat-safe vacuum bags. Why take a chance?
I am planning on making the brisket from scratch. Is there a suggestion on how to brine the CB in a vacuum sealed bag? How much water would you suggest? The brisket is about 7 lbs. Thanks ChefsSteps!!
Do you have any evidence to back this up? I ask this because there is loads of evidence to the contrary out there, including the FDA and the IOPP. ChefSteps has also posted the findings of their own research.
https://www.chefsteps.com/activities/a-complete-guide-to-sous-vide-packaging-safety-sustainability-and-sourcing
https://www.chefsteps.com/forum/posts/safety-of-plastics-used-in-sous-vide-cooking-2
Granted, you have to make the choice about what you want to do with your own body, but all food grade plastics, even the ones from the store, are required to meet certain requirements to be considered food grade. This included the leeching of chemicals into the food. Granted, all plastics, including food grade plastics, will eventually start to leech components, but that is after they've been heated considerable (well past their melting point).
As for your question "Why take a chance?" because there is enough research that has been done into the subject which you seem to be concerned with puts to rest rational concern.
If you use the original store bag, the dry rub would seem to become irrelevant?
I think that I may have to throw my 2 cents worth of experience into this. Brian, you are right. Anything that comes into contact with food has to meet certain guidelines and the plastic bags used to vacuum seal food, meet those guidelines. But! and this is a big but. About 5 years ago when I got into sous vide cooking, I bought a frozen, boneless, butterflied leg of New Zealand lamb that had been vacuum packaged. I had already done my research that the plastic was safe, so I did a 24 hour cook. You can imagine my surprise when I took the bag out of the waterbath only to find that it had swelled up like a football. The plastic used to make the bag was semi-permeable to water and acted like dialysis tubing and by osmosis water had passed through the plastic. The heat may have assisted this. Since then, I no longer cook food in the original packaging. BTW, we still ate the lamb. The water in the waterbath was clean so no real harm done other than the flavor may have been diluted a bit.
Guys, corned beef is fantastic stuff (seriously, damn it's good) -- but please don't say corned beef and cabbage is an Irish dish. It's as Irish as Chicken Tikka Masala is Indian. It never existed here as a dish, ever. It's a purely New York thing -- in fact, it never even made it back across the Atlantic. We just don't see it as a dish here, ever (and it tends to get pointed to and laughed at by less polite people in a stuck-a-feather-in-his-cap-and-called-it-macaroni sort of way). But hey, at least you didn't call it "Saint Patty's Day", thank feck. I don't know where that little habit sprang from, but nobody over here in Ireland has ever called it "Patty's Day". It's either St.Patricks Day or more colloquially, Paddy's Day (Patrick shortens to Pat or Paddy here, but never Patty).
A few years ago, shortly after I got my first circulator, I cooked a pre-brined corned beef (Wellshire Farms), by taking it out of store bag, rinsing, and placing it (in smaller chunks) in my own bag, dry. 48 hours later, it came out almost inedibly salty. I had to pair it with completely unseasoned mashed potatoes (the horror!) in order to eat it. The other problem is that Wellshire Farms puts a ton of coriander and dried bay leaf on to their briskets that you definitely don't want stuck to the brisket as you try to eat it. The next year when I cooked their brisket using the normal stovetop cooking method, all the spices came off, but this did not happen sous-vide. I think the best solution if you're buying pre-brined, depending on your brisket, is to let it soak in tub of water overnight to diffuse the salt and loosen the surface spices. YMMV, naturally. Your version looks amazing as always, ChefSteps!
There is much to love about Chef Steps but the ingredients conversion feature is silly. It doesn't help me to see that I need 0.04oz black peppercorns.
Why not? It's converting it into the British standard (amusingly enough, no longer used by Britain). If you were expecting it to be converted into a volumetric measurement, ChefSteps had make a few videos as to why They avoid these types of measurement.
It seems as though you missed the following part of their opening explanation:
"But first, let’s talk about corned beef. The meat your granny served after Sunday mass has nothing to do with the British corned beef of yore, which was named for the grain-sized salt crystals that cured it. According to Smithsonian magazine, this nasty bit of business was never popular on the Emerald Isle. The Irish preferred their cabbage paired with bacon, which, if you’ve ever been to Ireland, makes perfect sense. Irish bacon is delicious.
When they began immigrating to America, however, the Irish discovered the delights of the neighborhood Jewish deli—delights that included a corned beef wholly unlike the stuff at home. The meat lent much-needed flavor to the cheap veggies they survived on, providing bone-sticking comfort on cold nights in Boston or New York City or Philadelphia. Today, Irish Americans eat corned beef and cabbage to celebrate our homeland’s primary patron saint, to remember the scrappy ancestors who brought us here, and to soak up the copious amounts of green beer we plan on gulping in their honor."
If you do read it, they say that it became popular to the Irish community living in the United States. They also say that bacon was the meat of choice to have with cabbage in Ireland. Your rant about what's historically accurate is what they already wrote in the recipe description/lead up.
What would help you is to learn the metric system as everyone else in the world has save and except for Liberia and Myanmar. 0.040z is not very useful however, 1.13g is. In metric, water boils at 100c and freezes at 0c. 1l of water has the mass of 1kg and if you need convert from l to ml, you slide the decimal three places to the right. It couldn't be more simple. The U.S. unit of measure is obsolete and has no place in the modern world and likely contributes to why U.S. students place 36th in the world in math.
I went to Ireland and was all excited to try corned beef and cabbage there. No dice. It's an American thing.
Hey guys, although I've been cooking sous vide for several years now, lately I'm trying to understand better the science that's going on behind it. Doesn't collagen break down between 71°C and 82°C? If that's the case, then at these temperatures the collagen would never break down. I know you're giving up some tenderness as you move out of the medium range, but in tough cuts isn't breaking down the collagen a good thing? Thanks in advance for any advice on this.
Are we adding any extra liquid to the corned beef bag?
Hi Randy! Nope!
Hi Catherine! Chef Nick tried using the store bag several times, and he didn't have great success which is why we don't recommend that here. As the structure of the meat changes, the store bag can't handle it and may pop or tear, so best to transfer to a larger bag before cooking. To answer your question though, the dry rub is ultimately optional!
Hi Scott! You can follow the brining instructions in this recipe!
Have you ever, in your years of cooking sous vide, cooked a very tough cut: tongue, brisket, shoulder, chuck, rump, rounds, etc. at a temperature lower than 71°C? If you have, you'd be able to answer this question.
"When you cook, collagen begins to melt at about 160°F and turns to a rich liquid, gelatin. This gives meat a lot of flavor and a wonderful silky texture. When cooking it is important to liquify collagen.
Denaturation of the collagen molecule is a kinetic process, and hence a function of both temperature and duration of heating. Cooking at low temperatures require long periods of time to liquify collagen."
-Science of Cooking
While collagen will melt into gelatin at 160°F/71°C relatively rapidly, and increasingly more rapidly moving towards 180°F/82°C, it does not require these high temperatures to become gelatin. If it did, there would never be a tough cut that was not heated to a minimum of 71°C. I hope that helps.
Question! Won't this turn out super salty without either soaking in water or simmering it in a pot of water first?
Hi Louis! Collagen has a triple helix structure, and heat can disrupt or denature this structure starting around 52 C if given enough time (say, 1–2 days). This denaturing doesn't necessarily convert collagen into gelatin – where the three strands of the triple helix separate completely and become water soluble – but it significantly tenderizes the meat. This is what we're using in our tough to steak-like recipes.
Thanks Brian. The only tough cuts that I've cooked sous vide are brisket, rump and round. I've had no luck with the rump, limited luck with the brisket and widely varying results with the round. It seems with the round that my best bet is to cook at 125°F/52°C for at least four hours and up to eight. Anything over that temp just turns to leather. There in lies my confusion. It would seem that holding it at 160°F or so would be the trick. If that's when collagen turns to gelatin and all this tenderization and taste is introduced to the meat, then why does it pass more for a Nike than a great slice of sous vide magic?
Once you guys start talking about helix structures and a kinetic process, my CS degree seems to fail me.
Why is the recipe for such a huge amount of rub? I used only a very small portion to coat my 5 lb piece of flat using the "light hand" that you recommend.. Even a very heavy hand would have resulted in more than half the rub left over.
I honestly have no idea. I've never experienced meat all of a sudden getting tough in the water bath. I'm honestly at a loss.
Hypothetically, if a person lost track of which day it was and started the corned beef on Monday, March 14, what would happen if you sous vided the beef for 72 hours at 140 degrees F.? Asking for a friend...
Just the rub
So I discovered this recipe after buying the pre-corned beef from the butcher. It's 8.5 pounds (I have a lot of people coming over). Should I adjust the cooking time/temp? If so, how?
Hi Steve, it really depends on the type of brine used on the beef you purchase or make.
Hi David, we do have a tendency to do larger batches of rub so you can have some leftover, but thanks for this feedback! Nick recommends putting any leftover rub on tater tots.
Hi Russ! Hypothetically, it would probably still be great, but you'd definitely have a different texture. Please pass this info along to your friend for us.
Hi Phil! For an 8.5 lb piece of beef, Nick recommends 48 hours and 60° c. Best of luck!
Also, if you look at the beginning of the actual recipe portion of the page, there's a button where you can scale the ingredients. Try a half batch.
Ellen: Thanks. My friend will let you know how it turns out...
how long for a 5 lb piece of beef?
so now I know what the gum is used for
When it says you can "prep" the cabbage and carrot puree a few days in advance, what exactly does that mean? Can I actually cook them in advance and then reheat to serve? If so, how do I reheat them?
I assume the 70g of butter go in the bag with the carrots, but the recipe doesn't say. Is that correct?
It will be about the same time 48 hours at 60°C or you can go 24 hours at 68°C. SV is interesting that way, for long cooks size of the product being cooked plays a much less important roll to get the proper texture. On shorter cooks size does make for a larger variable.
@Ellen Thank you for that bit of information. I read the recipe and it said I could SV in the original vacuum packaging. After reading your post I decided to put the original packaging in a ziplock bag using the displacement method, glad because the original bag has leaked into the ziplock bag. Next time I will remove the product and vacuum pack it myself. Thank you again, you saved St. Paddy's day.
I ended up cooking mine yesterday for service today. I think I'm going to heat them back up in the sous vide bags until they're warm. I'll update after dinner.
This turned out exactly as expected! Used a pre-brined corned beef from Costco. Normally would have cured my own but already have two Canadian bacons, belly bacon, and hams curing with no more space in the fridge.
I cooked the beef for 72 hours at 140 degrees. It was tender but a little dry. I fixed that by spooning broth over the cubed beef. I did not fry the parsley nor the potatoes. (Hey, I have an 11-year-old.) And I may have overcooked the red cabbage. But this tasted heavenly and was fun to make. The carrot puree was delicious!
When I didn't get a reply, I just did what I thought would work and it did: I made the puree first and then put it in a ziploc bag to hold in the fridge. I then made the cabbage. About 20 mins before service, I put both bags into the sous vide bath @ 140ºF with the corned beef which was still going. They were both at a nice temp for consuming when plated. I really liked the recipe. The only change I made was I sauteed/pan-fried the smashed potatoes in 1/3 cup of duck fat. Yum!
Hi David! Exactly! Nick likes to reheat the carrot purée stovetop in a pot and the cabbage can be reheated in the original bag it was cooked in in the same bath you reheat the corned beef in!
It was delicious! The only thing i did not enjoy was the "pickled" cabbage... I would maybe pursue a different red cabbage recipe. Otherwise, it was such a great dish. I even made my own corned beef and brined it for 10 days. Great recipe overall!
I was sorry to see the question of what temp to cook the brined brisket at to make a falling apart CB. Looking at the CB on the web site it appears that the goal was to have it steak texture i.e. medium rare type. I was hoping to have it looser in consistence. It actually came out like a steak. There didn't seem to be a conclusion as to how to get a really loose consistency without spoiling the flavor. I cooked mine at 140 F for over 48 hours. This was disappointing but would have been OK except I should have tried to rinse the salt off the brined brisket. If someone could extend the temp question further it would be really helpful.
The cabbage didn't taste like cabbage and we threw it out. Next time I'll let the cabbage taste come through. Cabbage has a great flavor.
Apologies for not updating. St. Patricks Day festivities happened and you know how that goes... I stored my cabbage in a ziplock and reheated it in sous vide bags. My carrot puree was stored in squeeze bottles with some saran wrap to beneath the cap. I just heated the bottle in it's entirety in the water bath. And nice idea with the duck fat for the potatoes!
Awesome! Thanks for the feedback!
In general the amount of rub a recipe on this site makes is a lot more than is needed. I made 1/3 of this rub and had twice as much as I needed. It was delicious but too much. I would prefer making only enough rub for a single use. If I want to have extra I can scale it.
If you're looking for a "traditional" texture, try 160F. At that temp, the fat melts, the collagen turns to gelatin and the meat flakes apart. The time element is still 1 to 2 days.
This whas grate! I add a spinach pure for an extra green for St Patrick's day!
Great recipe. Thanks for all the effort to put it together! Not a tremendously skilled cook or anything, but gave it a whirl and it came out really well. One note and one question: Like other have noted, it's way more rub than you could ever use for this one recipe . One question I have is how did your puree (and all those who posted pictures with comments) get to yellow? Our carrot puree was, well, the color of carrots :-) The only two items I didn't use were the sugar and the xanthan gum. It would be surprising to me that one of those would change the color so markedly but I obviously missed something. Thanks again!
After sounding 2 years of praise and jubilation for my Joule and new found Sous Vide cooking, I had my first EPIC FAIL.... Two 3 pound commercial pack pre brined Corn Beef points. Each rinsed and put in silicone cook bags, Temp set for 142 and the cook time was 40 hours. They came out totally MUSH. Not fit to eat... like paste. At first I thought i would be clever and put it in a pastry bag and squeeze over cabbage... but even the taste was nasty. The liquid that I had reserved to cook the cabbage & veggies was so nasty that i had to throw that away too!... I know what you are thinking- just 2 bad pieces of meat. I had purchased a 3rd piece that i had intended to freeze. In a holiday panic I pulled it out and did a traditional oven cook.. delicious... Corn beef is not on my " let's sous vide this again" list... yuk...
As we're past St. Patrick's day I'm not sure anyone will see this for 11 months or so but I'll ask anyway. I'm 12 hrs into a 48hr cook of a pre-brined brisket (that I soaked in clean water overnight). I vac sealed the bag and in the first 12 hours the brisket has stared to float. The bag is by no means filled with air but enough has been "produced" to cause the floating. My simple solution has been to cut open the bag, submerge the brisket and continue cooking. My question is whether or not this is normal. I know that this happens when I cook ribs at a higher temp, but not sure if this is expected at 145F...
Thanks!
"Nick recommends putting any leftover rub on tater tots. ".... like 50 pounds of tater tots... Com'on man... you make me feel sorry that I paid for this site. How much rub do you want us to make? I spent more money on seeds than on corned beef. I like you guys, I like this site, but really....
PS - That's the spice packet that came with the corned beef.
Is there a reason no salt is used when cooking the cabbage or is that an oversight?
But your Thanksgiving Oil is tremendous.
This activity will make it easier to scale for a smaller batch if you want, we will take a second look at this activity and see if it needs an update, sorry about that! On a side note, it should hold great in a sealed jar for a long while.
https://www.chefsteps.com/activities/corned-beef-spice-blend
