Saint Patrick’s Day is coming up, and folk are gathering their supplies to make the yearly corned beef and cabbage dinner, so I thought I’d share our take on tradition. Yeh; we have corned beef and cabbage, but, the corned beef is cooked in stout and then slow roasted in a cherry soda and jalapeño jelly barbecue sauce, and, this year, the cabbage is stir fried with onion, garlic, and Cajun seasonings (details on that to come).
This post is all about the sauce… and, as a bonus, the corned beef.
INGREDIENTS
Sauce:
•1 cup ketchup*
•1/4 cup BBQ sauce
•1 bottle cherry cream soda
•1/2 pint jalapeño pepper jelly
•1/2 cup brown sugar
•1 tsp mustard powder
•2 tsp Cajun Power Spicy Garlic Pepper Sauce – or your preferred hot
Corned Beef:
•1 (3-1/2 lb) corned beef
•2 sweet onions, coarsely chopped
•1 bottle stout
•Gateway to the North Maple Garlic Seasoning – or your preferred steak seasoning
•Black pepper
•Dried parsley
•Dried chives
•Freeze dried shallots
*I used my own, home made ‘sup!, barbecue sauce, and pepper jelly for this recipe; but feel free to use your preferred store bought brands.
Whisk the barbecue sauce ingredients together in a two quart sauce pan and bring to a boil over medium heat, stirring often.
Reduce the heat to low and simmer, still stirring often, for 30 minutes or so, until the sauce is a deep, brownish red, and thickened. Remove from the heat and allow to cool.
If you are doing your corned beef in one day, (plan on about eight hours from start to finish), leave the sauce on the side of the stove. If (more prudently), you plan on breaking up your corned beef cooking over two days, transfer the sauce to a covered jar and stash in the fridge until needed.
Now, for the corned beef…
First things first – buy the flat cut. Yeh, the point cut is gonna be cheaper (as a rule), but it is also a lot fattier, and much more suited for shredding (corned beef tacos, anyone?) than slicing, so, don’t cheap out; get the flat cut, and, while we’re thinking about it, buy two – on corned beef is just gonna make you wish you had a second in reserve for leftovers and sammiches and corned beef salad.
Next, haul out your slow cooker, open the corned beef package, discard the seasoning packet included with the corned beef, and rinse most of that red crap off the beef. You won’t be needing any of that stuff.
Arrange the chopped onions over the bottom of you slow cooker, then place the corned beef(s) on top.
Season the top of the beef well with your spices of choice (you will really not need to add any salt, but feel free to substitute your own faves for the seasonings I have listed), then pour the bottle of stout over the top.
Cover and cook on low for four hours – it is gonna be smelling really good, so be strong.
After four hours in the slow cooker, remove the corned beef and some of the onions from the stout and place in a baking pan.
At this point, I normally allow the beef to cool off, then stash in the fridge to finish the next day; if you want to do this all in one day, I hope you started early, ’cause you’re still three hours away from dinner.
Heat your oven to 250º and bring your corned beef (if you’ve gone the stash in the fridge and cook it the next day route) to room temperature.
Bake the corned beef, tightly covered in foil, for 90 minutes, then remove the foil and cover the corned beef with the barbecue sauce.
Return to the oven and bake, uncovered, for another 90 minutes, adding a bit more sauce every 30 minutes or so.
Remove the corned beef from the oven, loosely cover with foil, and set aside to rest for ten minutes before slicing.
Serve.
We enjoyed ours with horseradish sauce, Portuguese style roasted sweet potatoes, stir fried Cajun spiced cabbage, and Barb’s Aunt Beezy’s most excellent soda bread.
Erin go most excellent dinner, all!