Homemade Corned Beef Here’s how to easily cure your marinating brisket before smoking corned beef for St. It’s made with beef brisket, pickling spices, and salt, and needs to cure for 5 days.

The result is a corned beef that’s more flavorful and unique than you can buy in the store. Elise founded Simply Recipes in 2003 and led the site until 2019. She has an MA in Food Research from Stanford University. Corned beef is essentially beef cured in a salt brine, with some pickling spices for added flavor. It gets its name “corn” from an old English word for grain, or small pieces of hard things the size of grain, such as salt. Over the years, many of my friends have encouraged me to cure my own corned beef, insisting that it wasn’t hard to do, and well worth the effort. After finally getting around to it, I’m happy to report that my friends were right!

Make a salty curing brine with pickling spices like mustard seed, allspice berries, coriander seeds, and peppercorns. Marinate a beef brisket in the brine, for 5 to 7 days. Simmer the brined and drained brisket in water with more pickling spices for several hours until tender. Because you get to choose what pickling spices to use, you can make your own distinctively flavored corned beef.