[conspire] pseudo sous vide for St. Paddy's Day

[paulz at ieee.org]

Knowing that there are several accomplished cooks on this list, I'll pass on my experience with corned beef.
Long years ago, I made the unfortunate observation that what looked like a big corned beef wasn't so big after cooking.  I found a couple of reasons why.

Raw meat can have a lot of fat.   A few years ago, one grocery store had corned beef advertised at $1.29 / lb.  I found the meat on special, but next to it was another section priced at $1.99/lb.   In comparing the two, it was obvious that $1.29 was buying mostly fat that would be later trimmed away leaving a very small portion of meat.  Now, if there is a choice, I give strong consideration to the higher price and hopefully get more meat per dollar.
Meat shrinks when cooked.  The hotter the temperature, the more shrinkage.  The tradition of simmering or boiling made sense only before there were better ways to check the cooking temperature. I'm sure Ross can add a lot more details.

Last year, I did the corned beef in the sous vide cooker.  There were a couple of problems.1.  It took my apparatus several hours to heat up.2.  The potatoes were seriously under-cooked.But the meat was fork tender.  :-)

This year I tried a different approach which was corrected those problems.

Before sitting down to breakfast, I put a large pot of water on the stove.  I used a candy thermometer to read the temperature.  Before I had finished my first coffee, the water was close to boiling.  I turned down the heat, and added the corned beef.  The cold meat dropped the temperature, no surprise.  While I finished and cleaned up breakfast, I monitored the temperature and adjusted the heat setting several times.  Eventually I found a heat setting that put the temperature around 170F, which is what I recalled using the last time.  With the lid on a big pot, the stove just kept the temperature constant until late afternoon.  Didn't need a fancy PID controller.

I took out the meat.  While it was resting, I cut up the cabbage and tatties.  A small sample verified that the meat was tender and could be cut in thin slices that didn't fall apart.  After confirming the meat was done, I put the veggies in the pot and raised the temperature to a nice simmer.  

Hope that if you also cooked corned beef, it came out to your liking.
Tomorrow, I hope the store will have bread back on the shelf, because corned beef on rye makes a great sandwich.
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