Corned Beef Recipe (Made From Cured Brisket of Beef)

Cooking your own corned beef at home is really easy. All you need is a cured corned brisket of beef, a big pot and a few hours.

You can buy a prepackaged, uncooked corned beef brisket at the supermarket all year round, though they're certainly in plentiful supply around St. Patrick's Day. You can also cure your own corned beef. Some butchers (​the really good ones) will even cure a corned beef brisket for you. 

You'll note that in addition to the meat, we've included a few ingredients like garlic, whole allspice, whole peppercorns and so on. But these aren't strictly necessary. If your brisket has been properly brined, you could simmer it in plain water and it'll turn out great.

You'll see that we specify placing the brisket in the pot fat-side-down because we want the meat to be cooked by the hot water, not by the flame underneath the pot—especially at the beginning when the heat is on high. It probably makes no difference either way, but that's just the way we do it.

Also, you could simply simmer the brisket on the stovetop, but we find that the cooking temperature stays more steady if we cook it in the oven. On the stovetop, because you're just eyeballing the temperature, you can sometimes find that your liquid has been boiling rather than simmering, which is not what you want. Brisket is a tough cut of beef with a lot of connective tissue, so we really want to cook it slowly and gently.