Key facts
- Alternative names
- Salt beef, bully beef (if canned )
- Main ingredients
- Beef, salt, nitrates
- Variations
- Adding sugar and spices
via Wikipedia infobox
~20 min read
Encyclopedic overview
Corned beef (called salt beef in Ireland and Commonwealth countries) is a salt-cured piece of beef. The term comes from the treatment of the meat with large-grained rock salt, also called "corns" of salt. Sometimes, sugar and spices are added to corned beef recipes. Corned beef is featured as an ingredient in many cuisines.
Most recipes include nitrates, which convert the natural myoglobin in beef to nitrosomyoglobin, giving it a pink color. Nitrates and nitrites reduce the risk of dangerous botulism during curing by inhibiting the growth of Clostridium botulinum bacteria spores, but react with amines in beef to form compounds that cause cancer. Beef cured without nitrates has a gray color and is sometimes called "New England corned beef".
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “corned beef” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.