Corned Beef Curing

I plan to cure my own beef to make corned beef for St. Patrick's Day.  It is something that I have wanted to do, but just did not get organized about learning how to etc.  I remember seeing it in my Julia Child cookbook.  It is basically a liberal dry rub, but requires about 2 weeks and then 2 days to desalinate. I would call this the dry method.

Curing.  I'm using  Mark Ruhlman's exposition of how to do this using a brine method.  I would call this the wet method, and it takes about 1/2 the time.   Amazing Ribs also has a nice exposition which you can find here.  I'm a big fan of researching more than one method to ensure that I have a reasonably good understanding of the process. I'll experiment when I have more time--and in fact, I might just start the dry method concurrent with the wet method and have corned beef 2x in one month.

Here's another resource , at the Home Preserving Bible, for some technical information on brining liquid strengths and composition of curing liquids.

Cooking.  Well, curing is the initial stage. It still has to be prepared.  Last year I found Elise's method on Simply Recipes.  Frankly, I would not bake corned beef on its own as I suspected there is a high risk of failure for having an acceptably moist and tender outcome--and some of the comments on the site affirmed that suspicion.  Accordingly, I elected to conscript my Romertopf into service last year after years of sitting around unloved. And set off to find a method.

In researching clay pot methods, I found a fabulous method using the Romertopf cooker which has several points of intersection with Simply Recipes.  I used this last year, and I will not go back.

I'm looking forward to seeing how my curing experiment will fare.

P. S.  This is a picture of what it looked like, fast forward, on St. Patrick's day.