#disappointing

I have been meaning to do a Brazil-themed post in honour of the World Cup host nation since the tournament began way back in June. Recent weeks have passed me by in a flash though, and now it really is all over following Deutschland's triumph over Argentina on Sunday night. 

While they may have put on an excellent championships, the Brazilians are still licking their wounds after that complete and utter trouncing in the semi-finals by the Germans, and their third place play-off match against the Netherlands where they barely did much better. They really did make a complete and utter hash of their later matches...so, given that Brazil is one of the largest exporters of beef and related products, including a significant proportion of the corned beef shipped and sold around the world, it only seems appropriate therefore to mark their defeat with the classic corned beef hash.

Proof that it does indeed come from Brazil

NOT available from your local Tesco

I won't be hashing up any prime Brazilian corned beef myself though, because did you know you can actually buy tins of ready-made CBH? What a world we live in. Well, I say you can buy tins of it - perhaps 'could' would be more correct - I got this tin from Tesco a few months back now, but they seem to have stopped selling it now. I assume it's just a discontinued line rather than something Seara have stopped making - otherwise I may be inadvertently opening and eating a collectors' item. Or maybe not.

Believe it or not, this looks better than it smells.

In all my tinned adventures so far, I have yet to be greeted by a smell quite as reminiscent of cat food as that which hits me on opening the tin - not the most appealing thing to be reminded of when you're about to start cooking your dinner. A pinkish mass sits staring at me, about a centimetre from the rim, as if it once filled the tin but has shrunk with age. Its surface is studded with cubes of potato, lending a starchy backnote to the cat food smell, which would probably cause your average moggy to turn their nose up at the contents too.


The tapering cuboid shape of a standard tin of corned beef, plus the fact you have to open it with a key half-way down, has often intrigued me. Supposedly they are designed that way to make extracting the product easier. I can't say I had ever found this to be the case (their razor-sharp edges certainly make the process more hazardous, if nothing else) - until, that is, I attempt to get the CBH out of its cylindrical tin, which is nigh-on impossible.

Doesn't want to come out. The Brazilian football team probably feel the same in public at the moment

After a good minute or so of shaking , the stuff has only just reached the rim of the tin. I try to loosen it with a knife, and then give it a strong whack on the base, but only a small clod falls out onto my chopping board, scattering a few potato cubes as they break loose from the beef. It takes a lot more digging with the knife, vain attempts at squeezing the tin to get the CBH away from the sides, and a fair bit of patience before the remaining contents are also out, now looking like something the cat has either dragged in, or brought up, or both. Not very appetising-looking, but try it I must.


As advised by the label, I put the hash into a saucepan and stir gently while heating, taking care not to "boil or overcook, as this will impair the flavour". Would it actually be possible to boil a solid mass like this? It seems unlikely. If the result of my more gentle heating is indeed unimpaired flavour, then I am glad I didn't overcook it, as it really isn't anything special. Yes, the corned beef tastes like corned beef, and the potato like potato. Nothing too awful on that front. But a proper homemade corned beef hash is so much greater than the sum of its parts; this, sadly, is not.

Here, the beef has been over-processed into a rather uniform mass, and the potato is all in disappointingly neat little cubes. They've got it completely wrong on both counts - there should be chunks of beef and potato of various sizes. Some pieces should have been more mashed down than others, giving a variety to the texture of the finished dish, and a good amount should have been allowed to crisp up or even char on the bottom of the pan. As with a bubble and squeak, the crispy bits are undoubtedly the best part, but they are sadly missing here. A frying pan would have produced far better a result than Seara's suggested saucepan, whose high sides and thicker bottom probably mean that the hash partly steams rather than fries.

The ingredients on the label list both onion and garlic powder, which may be adding to the overall flavour, but it just isn't enough here. Actual pieces of onion are, in my opinion, a must for a real CBH, slowly cooked first if possible to the point of soft, sweet caramelisation, and then also allowed to stick to the pan here and there and brown nicely, just like the beef and potato.

If there is one thing that is deserving of admiration though, it is the serving suggestion on the label, depicting a pretty hefty meal: a big helping of the hash, topped with a fried egg, toast on the side - that's double carbs AND double protein - and finished with a sprig of dill, to provide a bit of greenery and maybe a vitamin or two. I doubt if that would count as one of your 5-a-day, though. 

Not feeling anywhere near that hungry, I opt for just a bit of salad on the side. A fairly half-arsed salad, I'll admit - just lettuce and cucumber - but it's not as if Brazil put much effort into their matches either. A big dollop of mustard finishes things off nicely, as it does with most things. In fact it's far tastier than the hash itself. Unfortunately I only have Dijon mustard to hand; German would, I feel, have been more appropriate, proving that they could trounce Brazil in the flavour stakes as well as on the football pitch. Deutschland über alles!