Update, I’ve since done this, curing my own meat like the Serious Eats dude describes… that was even better. I’m still tweaking that, but I’ll write that up soon.

So when do you eat corned beef?  St. Patrick’s day, right? With cabbage, which you know is nasty but that’s tradition. And then you wash it down with Guinness so you feel like a Mick. Putting aside the fact that Irish people apparently didn’t eat corned beef until they got to America, it’s not a bad tradition.

In fact, if you skip the cabbage, it’s pretty damn good. But here’s the awesome thing: since people only eat the stuff 1 day each year, on March 18th, corned beef gets cheap  as shit. Walk into the store 2 days later, buy yourself a package of corned beef, fire up the sous vide, and let ‘er rip.

Actually, what I really want to do is to do the seasoning myself, but I’m not organized enough for that. I saw a great recipe over at serious eats that I want to try one day. In the meantime, I took their cooking instructions, picked up a packet of the corned beef at the store, and gave it a shot. Mighty glad I did… best corned beef ever.

Basically, here’s what you do:

Open the package, the one labeled corned beef with a little packet of round things, and pat the meat dry

dump the seasoning packet all over the meat (not sure if this is critical)

Vacuum seal the meat

Drop in the sous vide for 10 hours at 180
Pull it out, dump it in an ice bath, then refrigerate it. Serious Eats recommends overnight to 4 days which sounds great. I let it sit for about 5 hours and it was still great.

Slice up the cold meat. Put it in a frying pan. Put the pan over a big pot of water in which you’ve dumped your veggies. Heat it all up.

Open a Guinness. Eat.