Homemade Corned Beef Hash

Anyone who knows me, knows that one of my favorite things in the whole world is corned beef hash (or as I call it, CBH). I've loved it for as long as I can remember and I try to order it whenever I can.

I fell in love with Hormel CBH and have been known to eat nearly my own weight in the stuff. I've had different versions of CBH throughout the years in restaurants with varying degrees of success. It seems that it's not a terribly popular menu item places and when they do have it, it's usually canned and not home made and even when it is home made, it's hit or miss at best. It wasn't until my wife made me hers that I discovered CBH nirvana.

She used a family recipe that we have traditionally done around christmas time. We have a tradition of making Ruebens (in lieu of a whole dinner) and then we make hash the next morning. Delicious.

Since I made Cubans last week, and they are my second favorite sandwich, I decided to also make my favorite, the Rueben. We have my wife's mom and sister in town right now, so I decided to make CBH for breakfast with the leftover corned beef.

Homemade Corned Beef Hash

4 strips of bacon, diced

1/2 a large onion

salt & pepper

3 cloves of garlic, minced

1 teaspoon fresh thyme, minced

1.5 lbs diced potatoes (I used frozen "southern style" hash browns)

2 bay leaves

1 lb of leftover corned beef, diced

3/4 cup of heavy cream

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This dish takes a little bit of time to cook, but when you have company over it seems to go by faster as you can chat while everything cooks.

Begin by rendering out the bacon in a large pot, preferably non-stick. A dutch oven would be great for this. 

Go ahead and put a pot of water on to boil to parboil the potatoes. Add the bay leaves and some salt. 

Once the bacon is a bit crisp, add the onion.

Give it a good stir, season with salt and pepper, and cook over medium-high heat. 

Get your potatoes weighed out.

Mince the garlic.

Cut up your leftover corned beef.

Delicious

Drop the potatoes into the water and cook for about 5 minutes.

Get your thyme minced up.

 When your onions are brown around the edges, add the garlic and thyme.

Cook for about a minute and add the corned beef.

Give it a stir and cook for about 3 minutes, or until everything comes up to temp.

Drain your potatoes and add them to the pot. Remove the bay leaves. 

Give everything a bit of salt and pepper and add the cream. 

Stir everything and smash the mix into the bottom of the pan. 

I turned up the heat a bit to get some color on the bottom and encourage everything to melt together.

I've had hash that's really chunky and "rustic", as in the potatoes and beef chunks are separate and distinguishable. I prefer the meat and potatoes to be a little more uniform, so I cook it down a bit. 

Taste for salt and pepper again (I added even more) and turn out to serve. 

This CBH beats the pants out of any I've had in restaurants over the years and I absolutely prefer it to even my old faithful, Hormel (though it's almost unfair to compare the two).

The smokiness of the bacon and the brininess of the corned beef melt with the onion and cream and works so well together with the thyme. 

I like two eggs over medium, black coffee and some toast with mine. Delicious.

Enjoy!