Main plate Pastrami

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Chips

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Here's my pic heavy post about my 7 day pastrami recipe. There's no worse time to make pastrami than when beef prices have doubled, but here we go. This is a 17 pound Prime grade brisket from Costco. 2 months ago, it was $2.69/lb. I trimmed the brisket leaving about 1/4 of fat, all in all, removing about a pound and a half of pure fat and gristle.

I had a 3/4 C bag of Corned Beef spices from Penzeys sitting around that I wanted to use up. So I doctored that up with an additional tablespoon of coriander seed, toasted lightly in a warm pan, then crushed a bit more in my mortar and pestle.

Those spices (with 2 tablespoons reserved for the final dry rub) went into the pickling brine consisting of:
  • 1..5 C kosher salt
  • 3/4 C light brown sugar
  • 1 bottle of Guinness Extra Stout
  • 30g Pink Salt #1
  • water to fill a big rubbermaid style juice jug mixing everything till dissolved.
  • additional water to cover the brisket in the steam table/hotel pan.

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Toasted lightly in a pan, keeping the heat no more than medium. You want these fragrant, but not toasted too much.


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This certainly makes the house smell nice.


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Lightly pulverized in my mortar and pestle. Mainly to break up the allspice berries.

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Here's a few tablespoons reserved which will make up a component of the final dry rub. It was ground after the 7th day of pickling, when the brisket got smoked.


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I coated the brisket with about 1/4 C each of dried minced onion and garlic. The brine with all the remaining ingredients (beer, pink salt, sugar etc) is in the rubbermaid jug.


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In the pan with additional water to bring it up to the level of the brisket. If you don't have full coverage, you can use simple plates to weigh it down. The brisket gets flipped once a day till the 7 days process finishes curing the meat.


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Seven days later, we have raw corned beef! On to the dry rub and mustard mix to help it stick

  • 1 cup plain yellow mustard
  • 1/3 cup white sugar
  • 1/3 cup worcestershire sauce
Stirred till smooth then painted on. The rub ingredients:

  • 2 T of the reserved spice mix from the brining ground and mixed with,
  • 2 T Paprika
  • 2 T Sugar
  • 2 T Onion powder
  • 2 T Garlic Powder


Before getting to the stage of applying the mustard and dry rub, it is very important to thoroughly rinse the excess surface salt solution off with cold running water. You could even soak it in several exchanges of fresh cold water if you wanted to. But this step cannot be skipped or it would be inedible due to the saltiness. Rubbing aggressively under running water with your hands also helps knock off any small hard bits of spices like cloves, allspice, etc that you don't want to bite into after it's cooked.



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Painted on


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Rub applied


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At this point, I built a simple fire for the smoker (Weber Smoky Mountain) one level long coil of charcoal with splits of hickory wood applied to the first half. Each chunk of hickory will burn in stages and by the time you're getting to the back half of the unlit charcoal, the pastrami will be close to the 150-160•F stage that it gets wrapped in aluminum foil tightly, then it doesn't matter about the smoke anymore, you just need the heat to continue cooking till tender, about 205•F or until it's soft as butter.


Final stage of pics on the next post, since it's limited to 10 per post.
 
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So here's the (now) pastrami, once its smoked its no longer corned beef, once it hit 160•F and was wrapped.

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After finishing, and allowed to rest, still wrapped, in a cooler with several towels, a few hours later I'm slicing some darn tasty pastrami.

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So brunch today was classic pastrami on rye with some deli mustard and pickles.


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So to critique my own recipe for things to do different or better next time, I'll cut the salt down to 1 Cup for the brine. It wasn't overwhelmingly salty, but a tad more than I wanted.

Also, to keep the brisket moist during the cook, I spray the surface about once every 45 minutes or so with plain water. A moist surface helps with smoke adhesion and bark formation. I like the deep mahogany color of the bark, but if you want it darker, cooking a a slightly hotter temp ( I ran at 250 for pretty much the entire cook) and spraying with anything that contains sugar like apple juice will help make a darker bark.

Overall, I'd give this one about an 8 out of 10. Very happy with it
 
Great stuff! I read the first part while you were posting the second. Looks like it turned out great. Pastrami >>>>> corned beef.

Thanks for the great write-up and step-by-step photos.
 
Thank you! I need to edit the first post to include the very very important part of rinsing the brined brisket extremely well, or it would end up being inedibly salty. I'll edit that part in now.
 
Awesome write-up and pics!

Did you get even curing in the thickest parts of the point? Any time I have done whole brisket for pastrami, a 7-day brine would leave a bit of a gray center, so I adjusted to either separating points from flats, injecting brine, or adding a few days in the brine. If I really had to push it, I'd score the points after separating so they were pretty even with the flats (late deliveries, backed up prep, etc).

For finishing the cook, I found steaming after the initial smoking (perforated hotel pan, wrapped in the oven) was an effective way to get it evenly cooked and tender, but your method sounds great and would yield a more attractive surface.

My mouth is watering looking at those pictures. Great stuff.
 
Awesome write-up and pics!

Did you get even curing in the thickest parts of the point? Any time I have done whole brisket for pastrami, a 7-day brine would leave a bit of a gray center, so I adjusted to either separating points from flats, injecting brine, or adding a few days in the brine. If I really had to push it, I'd score the points after separating so they were pretty even with the flats (late deliveries, backed up prep, etc).

For finishing the cook, I found steaming after the initial smoking (perforated hotel pan, wrapped in the oven) was an effective way to get it evenly cooked and tender, but your method sounds great and would yield a more attractive surface.

My mouth is watering looking at those pictures. Great stuff.


So far, as I can tell, yes. Bright pink all the way thru.
 
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