Corned Beef Hash with Poached Eggs and Toast Points

It's St. Patrick's Day and my parents always make corned beef and cabbage. I don't like corned beef and cabbage. Never have. It's too rich and I always feel sick after eating it. I do enjoy corned beef hash though, so for the past few years I've been trying different methods of making corned beef hash. The first year I tried it, I just took some of their cooked corned beef and shredded it. Then fried potatoes and combined the two. It was good, but not exactly what I was looking for. When I was growing up we'd occasionally have canned corn beef hash with eggs and toast as a weekend breakfast, which is surprisingly good considering it's a canned meat product. I realized that what I wanted was just a better version of that canned corned beef hash, and this year I finally nailed it. 

Ingredients:

2 C ground cooked corned beef brisket
3 red potatoes peeled and sliced
1 small onion chopped
1/2 red bell pepper chopped
2 tsp lemon juice
3 garlic cloves minced
2 eggs
1 tbsp vinegar
1 slice of bread for toast
1 slice of stale bread
salt and pepper to taste
chives for garnish

Alright I actually used smoked corned beef (because I have a smoker and brisket is great smoked so why not), but there's no reason why regular braised corned beef wouldn't taste almost as good. Side note: if you're smoking corned beef soak it in water for 2 hours before you smoke it because there is a TON of salt in corned beef and there's no liquid to leech out some of the salt like in a braise. Since I wanted to make this recipe super accessible for everyone you also need a meat grinder! It might be possible to take refrigerated corned beef and pulse it in a food processor to get something similar to ground. I didn't test this, but I think it could work. However, if it's in the food processor you need to be very careful to not let it get overly ground or you will end up with meat paste, which is just ew. Once you have confirmed that you have a source of ground corned beef everything else is very easy. First off chop that onion and pepper and mince the garlic.

You need to pre-cook the vegetables because they will burn if you add them at the same time as the potatoes.

This is how far you want the vegetables to cook; they should just be tender because they'll be reintroduced to heat later. I cooked them slow and prepared the potatoes while they cooked because there's a lot of slicing involved with the potatoes.

If you've ever had canned corn beef hash then you know that the potatoes are in pretty small pieces. There's not really anything to indicate scale in this photo, but those are approximately 1/4 inch cubes. Normally when I fry potatoes I par-boil them, but I was concerned that it would be difficult to cut potatoes that small if they were partially cooked. Once they're sliced, heat up a pan with a little bit of olive oil over medium heat then add the potatoes. They're small so they should cook in 5-10 minutes. I just started tasting them to check how they were doing after around 5 minutes. Add plenty of pepper and a little salt. As I mentioned earlier, corned beef is really salty, so just be careful how much you add.

That's what it looks like when you grind up corned beef. Weird beef pellets.

Alright that looks more like I was expecting. The best part about corned beef hash is that there is so much surface area you can get everything really caramelized and delicious. Just let it sit in the pan for a couple of minutes then flip it. Repeat this several times until you have beautiful, golden, caramelized corned beef and potatoes. This is why you didn't want to add the onion, red pepper, and garlic earlier. They would have burned during this process.

Mmmm corned beef hash just like out of a can (plus onion, red pepper, and garlic). I tasted it when I got this far and it was too salty and rich so I added lemon juice. Way better. Add some lemon juice. At this point it's time for some poached eggs. I have no pictures of this process because it's just an egg hanging out in a hot tub and nobody wants to see that. I can explain it though. Take a shallow pan and fill it with water and a tablespoon of vinegar. Distilled white or cider vinegar are fine. Bring that to a boil between a heavy boil and a simmer. Crack an egg into a small dish. Stir the boiling water in a small circle then add the egg to the swirling water. Cook it for 4-4.5 minutes. Drop some toast when you add your egg. Now you need a slotted spoon to remove the egg without taking a bunch of water with it. When it's out of the water make sure that none of the whites are still transparent, then place it on a piece of stale bread. You can use a paper towel in a pinch but the heel of a loaf of bread or a piece that's stale works even better. Butter your toast and cut it into strips if you want it to look fancy. Now plate your delicious hash, perfectly poached eggs and toast points.

A nice bed of the hash with poached eggs (don't forget to salt and pepper them) on top garnished with chives and toast points resting on the eggs. Lovely.

Proof of yolk! This dish was absolutely fantastic. It was the corned beef hash I'd been searching for. It's a little involved since you have to grind corned beef, but it's totally worth it. Much better than the canned version and a lot of corned beef hash I've had in restaurants, which is probably also canned most of the time. If you like corned beef hash you need to try this. Just LOOK at that yolk glistening in the light. If that doesn't convince you, nothing will.