Not going to lie I have been looking forward to St Patrick’s day in a major way this year. Not for the drinking and the merriment, although that is reason enough – but because this year I would be experiencing Sous Vide Corned Beef! I always thought boiling the corned beef was good, but knew that most of the flavor of the meat (the fat & goodness) was leeching out into the water.  I know that the plus side of that is that you also boil your cabbage, carrots and potatoes in that water and the flavor goes into those components, but with sous vide – locking in all that flavor? I couldn’t wait to try it.

I looked online for recipes, and a lot of them mentioned going at 140 for 24-48 hours. Me, being the over-achiever that I am, chose 135 for 72 hours…

As my water heated, I put my 3.5lb brisket into a vacuum bag –

I threw some extra peppercorns in the mix, because why not?

I love showing off my ability to ‘check’ on my anova from work: 9 and a half hours left son!

Flash forward to 72 hours later:

look at all that juice in that bag! rendered fat – Dare me to do a shot of it? You know I saved it too:

I didn’t know what to do so I decided to just fry the whole thing up in a pan real quick:

You can probably judge from that picture that this thing was falling apart. Time to check it out:

It was super juicy, but the texture was off – I honestly didn’t really enjoy it. I should have listened to the other bloggers out there and did the 140 at somewhere between 24-48 hours. This stuff had the consistency of pâté. I could literally smear it on crackers like a jelly – all of the proteins had broken down, and it didn’t have any snap left to it, which is actually part of the reason why I like corned beef-  I want it to kind of get stuck in my teeth, and have that stringy action. My buddy Chris did some as well and cooked it more in line with the recommendations from the internet – and it turned out exactly the way I wished mine did – more tender than if it were to have been boiled and chock full of flavor. Kudos to you bro!

I noticed that the fried areas of my beef weren’t too bad – crisping pieces up and reducing the moisture definitely helped make it more palatable. Also, going against all teachings of cooking pros – cutting with the grain, made the pieces actually stay together rather than stick to the knife and crumble into paste when I tried to peel it off.  Well – lesson learned!