A while back I was pleased to see retail Choice whole briskest offered for $2.99 per pound. That price was much better than what I had been seeing. At that time I made one large brisket into 2 very good pieces of pastrami. This past week Choice briskets were offered at $1.99/lb. and I immediately began thinking of ways to prudently further process them.
As luck would have it, whole bone-in pork shoulder butt roasts were also offered at a good price. I settled on making shredded corned beef brisket Goetta and using 3 pounds of the brisket fat trimmings to increase the fat percentage of precooked breakfast sausage patties; which used bone-in pork shoulder butts as well. While the above ad states “whole pork shoulder,” they were solely butts and not true whole pork shoulders that contained both un-separated picnic and butt sections. Picnics contain a lot of bone, so butts are a better deal. If you would like to review precooked sausage patty making, (Click Here).
This is a big 17 pound brisket. After seam separating it into the flat and point cuts, then trimming all fat to within a sixteenth of an inch thick, there was 10.5 pounds of lean left for making a batch of Goetta. That’s almost a 1/3 fat weight loss and so the cost of usable lean went up to $2.95 per pound. However, 3 pounds of brisket fat was used in sausage, If you want to see my standard pork Goetta procedure (Click Here). I have covered simple batch ingredient adjustment in several posts; so will not bother with addressing it again here. Since this is a cured meat product I added 2 tsp. of Prague Powder # 1 and 1/4 tsp. of sodium erythorbate (cure accelerator). Cure accelerator allows for continuous processing and also reduces residual nitrite in finished product. I did slightly bump up the amount of salt that’s called-for in my all pork Goetta recipe because most retail fresh pork has been meat plant pumped with a light saltwater solution, whereas fresh beef is not.
Trimmed and moderately fine diced brisket lean. Note the amount of potentially usable trim fat generated from one large brisket. Sodium phosphate was dissolved in a little water first thing, then it was mixed into the diced beef. Cure and erythorbate were mixed in next, after being dissolved in a little more water.
Here, onions, salt, leaf marjoram, fine ground black pepper and enough water to almost cover everything were also added.
All ingredients in one pan and heading for finish covered steam-cooking in the oven.
A 13″ long Pullman loaf pan filled and beginning to cool.
Chill loaves for at least 12 hours and then slice for freezer packaging. I quarter each slice and pack 2 slice equivalents per sandwich size bag; with 2 layers of wax paper in between.
After posting this last picture on our family Facebook page, I ended up buying 4 more briskets, while they were still on sale, and making several more Goetta bricks for family members. They had to pack the Goetta themselves.