FOOD NEWS
How To Set Up A Perfect Low-And-Slow Simmer For Corned Beef
By Alli Neal
Corned beef's association with the Irish boiled dinner and Saint Patrick's Day has become a tradition in America. If you want your corned beef to be a delicious, melt-in-your-mouth tender dish, though, there's one hard and fast rule to making it: don't boil it.
The key to tenderizing corned beef is to melt down the collagen in it, and the sweet spot for beef is an internal temperature between 120 degrees Fahrenheit (rare) and 155 degrees Fahrenheit (well done). Chef Kenji Lopez-Alt found that eight hours at 180 degrees Fahrenheit in cooking liquid worked, which can be achieved in multiple ways.
Lopez-Alt found that a simmer at around 190 degrees Fahrenheit took about six hours to cook (the high end of a simmer only took three), and the corned beef came out drier at 205 degrees Fahrenheit. It can also simmer in a Dutch oven, covered in a few inches of water at 200 degrees, with the lid cracked, which will keep the water at approximately 180 degrees, yielding nicely-textured corned beef in around 10 hours.
The happiest medium is the slow cooker, as the "keep warm" setting will maintain a temperature between 170 degrees and 180 degrees Fahrenheit. You can generally leave it unattended for the requisite 10 to 20 hours required for cooking, but don't forget to monitor the liquid levels in your slow cooker, as overfilling can be a hazard and underfilling won't cook the meat properly.