Meat Column, The Country -- July 2019

Is there a cut of meat more polarising than corned silverside? Whenever I tweet about corned beef, and to be fair I tweet about it quite a lot, I’m greeted with either nods of approval or disturbingly graphic approximations of people retching. There doesn’t seem to be much middle ground.

Some people don’t like the smell, others find it too bland or too salty and the detractors are universal in their disapproval of “boiled meat”.

If you’re fortunate enough to occasionally fill your freezer with an entire cattle beast, you’ll be familiar with struggle of utilising the least favoured cuts. For some it’s schnitzel and for others it’s stewing steak, but in my household it’s always been corned beef, possibly because I’m the only one who will eat it.

Even I have to admit that corned beef gets a bit boring after you’ve cooked your sixth or seventh for the year and there’s still more sitting in the freezer. I swear my butcher sometimes gives me other people’s just to mess with me.

In order to liven things up I started experimenting, adding chilli powder to the recipe for a bit of zing, substituting jam for the sugar component in a quest for fruitiness, even adding whole oranges to the crockpot when I thought nobody was looking.

My biggest corned beef breakthrough came when, after a party, we had a surplus of wine cluttering up the pantry. What the hell I thought as I tipped a whole bottle of sauvignon blanc into the crockpot, thus doing my bit to conserve water.

The result was amazing: rich, tender and fruity. I tweeted my discovery and twitter was soon abuzz with people experimenting with different wines, thank goodness for the $7 clean skin! If you’re thinking of giving it a go I highly recommend trying it with a cabernet sauvignon.

All these were merely variations on the same boiled beef theme and I wanted to try something really different, so the obvious solution was to build myself a smoker.

Most smoking recipes you find on the internet are American, and I soon learned that corned beef in America is made from the brisket, not silverside, but I’ve never been one to let details like that get in my way. Through twitter I also learned that American recipes calling for the use of chilli powder actually mean a chilli seasoning mix, this is not something you want to learn through trial and error!

The recipe itself is dead simple:
First, build your smoker
Defrost and soak your corned silverside in water for 2 hours
Mix together two tablespoons of ground black peppercorns, half a tablespoon of ground coriander seeds, half a tablespoon of onion powder, one teaspoon of dried thyme, one teaspoon of paprika and one teaspoon of garlic powder.

Remove the beef from its bath and pat it dry. I smeared the meat with mild American mustard as a binder, but that’s purely optional. Cover the meat with the rub and wrap it tightly in plastic wrap and refrigerate overnight.

The next morning allow the meat to come up to room temperature as you fire up the smoker, I aimed for a temperature of 120 degrees C. Remember that smoking is inexact, my corned beef would be ready when the internal temperature hit 90 degrees, which in this case was about 7 hours.

Once off the smoker I wrapped it in foil and let it rest for another hour.
I couldn’t resist trying it hot and it was truly glorious. The fat had rendered out, there was a chewy smoky exterior and wow, aren’t coriander seeds a true spice revelation?

The true delight came the next day after the meat had spent the night in the fridge and the flavours had matured and set. The keen eyed amongst you may have recognised the rub as essentially a pastrami mix minus the sugar, I’m not claiming that’s what I made, but it’s close enough that I’ll never have to buy pastrami again.

It's Time To Be Pragmatic -- July 2019

I was visiting family in Sydney recently and, having thoroughly annoyed everyone with my lack of enthusiasm for shopping, was sent packing to the pub where I’d arranged to meet a couple of Twitter friends from Wellington.

Over the course of a few pints Hadyn, who was there for a Sony product launch, asked me how my politics had changed since I’d been on Twitter. He asked me this because I am a white, middle-aged male who votes to the right and the majority of people who follow and interact with me tend to vote to the left.

Maybe the third pint is the charm because I didn’t even hesitate with my answer, “I’ve become far more pragmatic” I replied. Maybe it’s age, maybe it’s being exposed to other people’s points of view, or maybe it’s plain old cynicism, but I no longer reflexively defend the blue team.

I’m more inclined to acknowledge when the Right does something silly or just plain dumb, though I’m far more likely to tweet about it when the Left mucks up because the reactions I get from the partisan lefties on twitter are hilarious.

I’m also far likelier to praise the red (and green and black) team if they get something right, or accept that they’re committed to doing something I don’t like and I just have to do the best I can to work with it.

As farmers we don’t like being told what to do with our land, our animals, and our businesses. We get grumpy and we tend to stick our toes in and fight, to let the people telling us what to do that we don’t like it and they can just bugger off. It’s part of who we are and, since Fonterra is a farmer owned and farmer run co-operative, it’s also who Fonterra have been since its inception.

Submissions have just closed on the Zero Carbon Bill and, like it or not, it will pass into law. We knew this government was committed to this legislation when the Prime Minister stood up and declared that climate change was her generation’s nuclear free moment. You don’t have to agree with her, but you do have to accept that she’s got the will and the numbers to make it happen.

I’m very pleased to see that, like me, Fonterra have a new found pragmatism. They could have reverted to type and pointlessly fought the government over this legislation; instead they have chosen to support the Bill and will seek to have some amendments, such as setting methane targets at the lower end of the scale, made at select committee.

I suspect that given their recent announcement to not install any further coal burners and to embed sustainability at the heart of the Co-op, Fonterra are well ahead of the curve as far as meeting the targets set in the Bill go.

I’m pleased too to see the Shareholders’ Council, who I have been critical of in the past, standing shoulder to shoulder with the Board in a joint press release about their submissions on the Bill. That press release highlighted the common ground they shared, their differences are there if you care to read their separate submissions, but those tensions are quite rightly being kept private between the Council and the Board rather than being aired publicly.

The Bill will pass, but having the support of New Zealand’s largest company will certainly make things a lot easier for the government. I can only hope the various ministers acknowledge the goodwill Fonterra are trying to build.

Fonterra’s Board’s first duty is to the health of the Co-operative, and the biggest threat I see at this point in time is the government’s failure to adequately reform DIRA. The current government certainly went further than the previous one in making changes to DIRA, but they went nowhere near far enough.

I understand that being pragmatic is about give and take, I just hope Fonterra have built up enough goodwill with present government for them to start giving too.