Anyone wanting to stop my lifelong relationship with pastrami will have to come and pull it from my cold dead hands, urh, teeth….
Here in Mexico, after much disappointment, I have embarked on making my own.
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Listen to the podcast and feel good about your Mexican “deli”-“essen” pastrami.
Reminds me of sign I saw in Oregon.
“They will get my weed when they take it from my warm and interesting to look at fingers”
Cheers
Qazulight
I’ve been making my own pastrami since 2006. Been a wonderful journey. Learned a lot along the way.
My first attempt was encouragingly good regarding texture and flavor, but not there yet. I need to adjust the seasonings to the actual beef I use is my guess.
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I experimented with my smoker over a period of 6 or 7 years and still never reached the quality of the pastrami (and other deli meats) I remember buying from a local butcher in Washington Heights maybe 40 or 50 years ago. I suspect that I wasn’t willing to more heavily use the salt-based and nitrate-based ingredients. And perhaps my lower willingness to use lots of sugar as well. And I also suspect that the quality of the meat is lower. I haven’t smoked meat in a few years (even though I have a new smoker in the box in the garage) and have settled for eating the lower quality stuff that is available nowadays.
Jewish-deli style pastrami is difficult to replicate because the exact methods of making it are not well understood outside the families who do it. Making regular pastrami is straight forward enough. You can easily make better pastrami than you can get at the grocery store, but getting to that next level is where the challenge lies.
Some of the keys seem to be a very long brine (like weeks), followed by a long smoke, and then a long rest period. The rest period of one of the challenging parts for the home cook because the during the rest period the brisket should be kept at about 140 F for 4-6 hours (maybe longer). Most home ovens don’t go that low if you don’t have a warming drawer (which I don’t).
I do sort of a hybrid rest where I keep it at 160 for a few hours (the lowest my smoker will go) and then into a cooler wrapped in a towel for a few more hours. The smoke and the rest will likely take close to 24 hours.
Reportedly, some Jewish delis steam the brisket during the rest period but as far as I know, all of them use steam to heat it up. That steam step is a key.
Those steps don’t get me all the way to the holy grail of Jewish deli pastrami but better than most and way better than grocery store pastrami.
Indeed!! 0988655321
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