Guinness Corned Beef with Cabbage

You can use Guinness in place of water, stock and wine in recipes. It adds a deep, rich, earthy flavor profile to the dish. I used to work for the Guinness company (Diageo) and created this delicious Guinness Corned Beef with Cabbage recipe.

Why This Guinness Corned Beef Is So Good

Using Guinness beer or an Irish Stout instead of water dramatically increases the flavor of the corned beef. The resulting sauce is dark, rich, complex flavor.

Cooking in the oven, low and slow guarantees moist, flavorful, incredibly tender corned beef recipe.

Cooking the vegetables separately prevents the vegetables from overcooking and becoming mushy.

Top Tips For This Guinness Corned Beef

Beef brisket is usually packed in a solution of salts and preservatives – discard the solution and rinse beef before cooking.

Keep an eye on your beer as it cooks, if it overspills it’s tough to clean off the cooker!

This recipe works well either on the stove, oven or slow cooker.

Ingredients

For the Corned Beef

Guinness beer

Beef broth

Brown sugar

Packaged brisket

Pickling spice (spice packet that came with brisket)

Onion

Garlic

For The Vegetables

Cabbage, carrots, red potatoes

Cooking oil or butter

Parsley

How to Cook Guinness Corned Beef Recipe with Cabbage

For the Corned Beef – you’ll need dark brown sugar, 2 bottles of Guinness, pickling spice (only if it doesn’t come in your corned beef package, onion, garlic and of course the corned beef meat that’s been rinsed very well and then patted dry.

This recipe works well either on the stove, oven or slow cooker.

Cut the onion and the garlic in half lengthwise. You’ll just need these halves.

In a large pot, combine the brown sugar, Guinness and beef broth.

Add the pickling spice, either that you’ve purchased or the packet that comes with the meat.

Add the onion and garlic.

Then slide and snuggle in the beef.

Look at that beer froth!

We’re going to slow cook the Corned Beef in the oven, but first, let’s give it a head start on the stove and bring the beer to a simmer. Keep an eye on this – beer easily bubbles over and it’s a pain to clean. Of course, you could completely skip this route and throw this baby in the slow cooker.

After the liquid begins simmering, we’ll cover and slip it into the oven at 300F for 4 hours. Low ‘n slow.

Perfect Veggies for Corned Beef

Why not throw the vegetable in with the corned beef? Well, two very good reasons:

1) The vegetables really don’t need that long to cook – I want my carrots to taste like carrots, not overcooked corned beef sauce.

2) Vegetables cooked with the meat always end up looking all brown and sad. I want my carrots to look like carrots!

Cooking them separately allows me to cook the vegetables perfectly. I add in some of the corned beef sauce to flavor the vegetables – just enough for nice flavor.

Cut the cabbage into 8 wedges, the potatoes and carrots into 3/4-inch chunks.

You’ll brown the cabbage wedges on each side. Medium heat, just a few minutes per side.

Then flip to brown the other side.

Next add the potatoes and the carrots.

Pour in 2 cups of the Corned Beef cooking liquid into the pot. The liquid is incredibly flavorful and will do wonders for the vegetables. I promise you, this is way better than just boiling cabbage in water!

Cover and cook for 15 minutes. Carefully remove the cabbage (it should be done by now) and leave the carrots and potatoes to cook for another 5-7 minutes, until they are cooked through. You can check by piercing with a paring knife or fork.

The last step is to sprinkle with freshly minced parsley.

Slice the corned beef and serve with the vegetables. Spoon some of the cooking liquid over the meat.

Guinness Corned Beef with Cabbage

We normally associate eating Corned Beef with Cabbage during St. Patrick’s Day, and ironically, the dish isn’t distinctly Irish — it’s more an Irish-American tradition, something we made up to go great with copious amounts of beer.

So I thought it would be fitting to braise this Corned Beef in Guinness Beer, instead of water or the “stuff” that the brisket is magically suspended in inside the package.

The “stuff” is a solution of salt, seasoning and other preservatives that I really don’t care for. It’s also incredibly salty. I always rinse the corned beef well, getting rid of the solution and then pat dry.

Why is it called “Corned Beef”?

After all these years of enjoying Corned Beef several times a year, I finally had the bright idea to actually look up why it was called “corned” beef. Is there corn involved in the pickling process? Did a “Mr Corned” exist and it was named after him?

It turns out after a simple search, it’s an easy explanation. The beef brisket used in making Corned Beef is salt and pickle cured and the salt pellets used resemble corn kernals.

Okay, that makes sense.

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Have you tried this Guinness Corned Beef with Cabbage? Feel free to leave a star rating and I’d love to hear from you in the comments below!