The beef is cooked

Yesterday was the end of the curing process. The beef has shrunk quite a bit with over a pint of fluid coming out of it which if I was minded to do could be used to cook a pork tongue in. Anyone who is vegetarian must think this blog is pretty nasty.

Before cooking the beef looked like this


The beef is taken out of its gloop and then washed and its is then broiled in a sealed pot for, in this case, an hour and a half and then allowed to stand in the pot for another 30 mins.

Here's the meat in the pot for broiling



And after broiling you can get a nice base for a stock




The meat is then allowed to cool and then carved ready for eating



It tastes beautiful. It will be served on Christmas Day for breakfast



Happy Christmas blog fans.

New pictures and a new computer

Apologies to you all for not updating this blog for a few days but this has been due to the untimely death of my computer. Happily I have taken delivery of a rather splendid iMac upon which this blog is now being written but you won't notice any difference only it is an awful lot easier to construct the blog pages.

The last posting was on 3rd December and by the following week the beef was festering way very pleasantly



Jo has gone to town decorating the house and making it look generally lovely for Christmas but the tree is all my own work. Decorating the house took about five and a half hours of which 5 hours was spent trying to unravel the lights for the front window. They might accidently break before going away after the festive period.

Right. If you are in the mood to waste a little more time the beef is progressing well. Last night I rubbed in the salt and spice mix and this evening gave the meat its first "turn". This has to be done once every 24 hours for three weeks.

You can see that already there is a good amount of juice at the bottom of the pot and the meat has actually shrunk a little. More liquid will come out of the beef as the salt cures it over the next few days.

The pot is kept in a cool place during this process. Our conservatory is pretty cold at the moment as we wait for snow tonight.

More pictures in a few days time.