Corned Beef and Cabbage

Once a year, come mid-March, we Americans enjoy the best excuse ever to make corned beef and cabbage, St. Patrick’s Day!

Never mind that the dish isn’t really eaten in Ireland, or at least not with the enthusiasm for it that you’ll find here. We’ll celebrate the day the way we like, and raise a toast with a pint of Guinness as well.

The traditional way to prepare corned beef and cabbage is to boil it, both the beef and the cabbage.

Several years ago my friend Suzanne introduced me to her favorite way of making the corned beef—speckled with cloves, slathered in honey mustard and baked, served alongside sautéed cabbage.

One day we cooked the dish both ways, boiled and baked. The winner?

The whole family agreed, the baked version, hands down.

But traditions die hard. So, here we present to you both versions, a baked corned beef with honey and mustard (blanched first to extract some of the excess salt), and a boiled version. Also we show two ways to cook the cabbage, boiled or sautéed.

By the way, when buying corned beef you have a choice between “flat cut” and “point cut”. Either cut will work with these methods.

The point cut will have more fat marbling throughout the meat, making it a more flavorful cut, but there will be more shrinkage due to fat rendering out of the meat, so you will need more to have the same amount of cooked meat. The flat cut is a leaner cut of corned beef.

(By the way, here’s how to cure your own corned beef.)

Enjoy and Happy St Patrick’s Day!

Updated from the archives. First posted 2009. 

Corned Beef and Cabbage Recipe

Corned beef is cured in a salt mixture, so it can be very salty, depending on the source. We recommend first bringing the corned beef to a boil in plain water, and discarding the water, (repeat for less salt), before proceeding with the baked version.

 

Ingredients

Corned Beef (baked)

• 3 lbs corned beef (in package)
• 10 whole cloves
• 1/4 cup hot sweet honey mustard
• 2 Tbsp brown sugar

Corned Beef (boiled)

• 3 lbs corned beef (in package, including spice packet)

Cabbage (sautéed)

• Olive oil and butter
• 1 medium yellow onion, chopped
• 1 cloves garlic, minced
• 1 large head of cabbage, sliced into 3/8-inch to 1/2-inch wide slices
• Salt

Cabbage (boiled)

• 1 large head of cabbage, sliced into 3/8-inch to 1/2-inch wide slices
• Additional vegetables such as a couple carrots (cut to 1 inch pieces) or several new potatoes (quartered)

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