Chinese and Irish Fusion: Corned Beef and Cabbage

Right now I'm enjoying my left over St. Patrick's day dinner for lunch! My dad made a traditional Irish dish but in a non-traditional way. He made his own version by adding taro and turnip. It became a Chinese and Irish fusion corn beef and cabbage stew. He cooked it in a pressure cooker but cooked it for too long so the meat was too soft and it fell apart.


He used purple cabbage, potato, carrots, taro and turnip. It was interesting...I never had purple cabbage before and thought it tasted bitter then the regular cabbages. The taro actually made the stew thicker, I not sure if I liked that...

and to make it more Chinese, we ate it with rice....

Yesterday I asked my dad a few stupid questions:

Me: What's corned beef?
Dad: it's beef
Me: ohhh.... but why is it red like that?
Dad: they put stuff on it to make it red...
Me: how do you know when it's fully cooked? if it's red, people might think it's raw...
Dad: it doesn't take long for it to be fully cooked, you'll just know....
Me: easy for you to say because you are a chef...
Dad: well of course, that's because I'm good
Me: *rolled eyes*

I found out that corned beef is red because they use saltpeter (potassium nitrate) to prepare it. They add saltpeter to the pickling brine to cured the beef. The nitrate forms a stable red colored complex with hemoglobin, without the saltpeter the meat would be brown.

-Recipe for Corned Beef and Cabbage

-History about the dish