Corned Beef

You don't have to be Irish to appreciate corned beef, cabbage, and a good, hearty stout. This roundup of our favorite Irish recipes makes us wish it was St. Patrick's Day all year long.

Corned beef for every meal. That's how we celebrate St. Patrick's Day.

Zingerman’s Raw Corned Beef Brisket is perfectly salty, easy to shred, and succulent but not too fatty.

Everyone loves corned beef on St. Paddy's Day—but what most of us really look forward to is corned beef hash the following morning. Here's how to make it

This corned beef hash is a two-step process, but nothing about it is difficult. 

For a hash with plenty of crisp texture, cook it over moderately high heat scraping and folding in the browned bits from the bottom of the pan as it cooks.

This beef was at its best, tender, moist, not at all salty, bursting with subtle spice, and deliciously robust. This is the way corned beef should taste every time. It was hard to resist the pieces directly as I was slicing them for the platter.

This update of the classic corned beef dinner nixes boring, boiled sides in favor of extra-crispy roasted cabbage and potato wedges and a vibrant, seedy dressing.

Roasted or sautéed dark green leek tops are just as good and way more beautiful than their more popular white onion siblings: tender, totally flavorful—they're the hero of this hash.

Corned beef is timeless and deserves a spot at the table, not just on St. Paddy’s Day. It is a crowd-pleaser that loves the low-and-slow ethos of the slow cooker, turning it tender without fail.

The Reuben sandwich and the Rosen family date back to when Alan's Grandpa Harry and his brother Mike ran the Enduro Sandwich Shoppes in the late 1920s in Manhattan. That began a long Rosen history of serving some of the best Reubens in New York—but not always with corned beef! Today you can walk into Junior's and still order the Original Reuben, made only with corned beef. But now you also have the option of a Turkey Reuben with melted Swiss and coleslaw, a Pastrami Reuben, and this one, the Combo Reuben, which is overstuffed with corned beef and pastrami. Feel free to make them any way you like. At Junior's each Reuben comes with grilled sauerkraut and melted Swiss and is always on rye bread, hot off the grill, with potato salad on the side.

This comforting broth has the flavour of home at Easter for me. You'll need brisket or silverside for this recipe, and the cooking process is long and slow, but it makes the meat tender and juicy.

In the melting pot of New Orleans culture, our Irish heritage is one of the lesser-known components. However, the Irish played a pivotal role in the history and development of this great city. Lauren's ancestors' landing here can be traced to the year 1825. Today, many Irish pubs are scattered around town, and we refer to the area where many immigrants settled as the Irish Channel. Every year, in addition to attending local St. Patrick's Day parades and festivities, we like to celebrate the Irish by making this recipe.

Since both my parents worked full-time, when I was 2 weeks old they hired a seemingly proper English lady to take care of me. But Ammie was not the mild mannered woman she appeared to be. In fact, she turned out to be the quirkiest third parent you could ever imagine. She fed us forbidden chocolate (despite her belief that chocolate actually “made your blood boil”), and she let us watch TV when my parents were out of town (very illegal). Ammie was nothing if not opinionated. She displayed the nationalist zeal of an expatriate and was completely obsessed with the royal family. She was so pro-British and anti-Irish that every March 17 she would thumb her nose at her enemy by sending my sister and me off to school dressed completely in orange, in honor of the British monarchy. Needless to say, corned beef and cabbage was not a food ritual in our household. I didn’t discover it until I moved back east to college, where I sampled it at the homes of many of my Irish-American friends. The Lucques version is an updated rendition of that classic one-pot Irish meal. Traditionally, the vegetables are cooked alongside the meat for hours, producing dull, mushy carrots and sad, gray turnips. To keep the vegetables bright, I cook them separately in the beef broth. The parsley-mustard sauce (great for sandwiches the next day) cuts the richness of the corned beef and perks up the entire dish.

These balls represent the old-school deli soul of our Lower East Side neighborhood. When Jesse, one of the managers in the kitchen, brought up the idea of Reuben balls, we were a bit skeptical, but he insisted they would be delicious and asked if he could run a test batch. Well, he was clearly onto something because these balls taste just like a classic Reuben sandwich, especially when drizzled with Thousand Island Dressing (page 71). This is another meatball that works well in mini form as an hors d’oeuvre with dressing on the side for dipping.

At the shop we think all holidays deserve their own meatball. In New York City, Saint Patrick’s Day is a big deal, celebrated with a major parade, and so of course a meatball was born. These are a clever twist on the usual corned beef and cabbage pairing, and they were so popular that now we serve them throughout the year. We’re not fans of artificial coloring but we suppose you could even dye them green if you wanted to. We love to serve them with Mashed Potatoes (page 79) and Mushroom Gravy (page 63).