All over but the crying

It's over. The Brisket, now officially a corned beef, and I, have met one another on a stove top and it has gone from brisket to corned beef in a seemingly endless process. I cooked it off today in a three hour run for the roses. When I finally arrived at the corned beef now more than a week in the making, it was anti-climactic.

First, you do need the Instacure No. 1, whatever that is, it should not be optional because the meat is definitely a pinky shade of grey. Secondly, though the brine was rinsed with vigor it is a salty end result. Finally, it's good, but I wanted it to be so much better than what could be bought commercially. And, I wanted it to be the sandwich on the cover of the magazine that sent me spinning for a pink meat reminiscent of New York's best Jewish deli's. We are a brined meat town. Everyone has a taste for this treatment and cut. You can feel it as you are reading, third tooth from the back remembers this meal far too well. It needed to light my world on fire. It just barely woke me from a nap I didn't know I was taking. Suckered in again.

There is something left to tell you however, about brisket come corned beef or anything else:
The way it is cut is everything and it can change a passable thing to a great thing. This hunk of mediocrity, by virtue of its birth, has one last chance at a big finish. Tomorrow, I will see John and we'll look at this thing together, put it on a commercial slicer and see what it has to give.
Corned beef, your moment of greatness awaits.

On another front, they are once again up to the same kitchen antics at Restaurant 121, where I was last night before pastry class: If you ever run an upscale restaurant in a cultured burb: Don't put Smukers jam on the plate with pate and call it "raspberry puree". Even if, Smuckers techincally is a puree, it is one we know by heart because before you threw it on the plate with my pate, it had another, more committed partner: Skippy peanut butter, which my parents made for with me with Raspberry Puree, you know, back when we called it jelly.