Chips
Senior Member
- Joined
- Sep 10, 2012
- Messages
- 426
- Reaction score
- 1,011
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:
Toasted lightly in a pan, keeping the heat no more than medium. You want these fragrant, but not toasted too much.
This certainly makes the house smell nice.
Lightly pulverized in my mortar and pestle. Mainly to break up the allspice berries.
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.
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.
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.
Seven days later, we have raw corned beef! On to the dry rub and mustard mix to help it stick
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.
Painted on
Rub applied
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.
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.
Toasted lightly in a pan, keeping the heat no more than medium. You want these fragrant, but not toasted too much.
This certainly makes the house smell nice.
Lightly pulverized in my mortar and pestle. Mainly to break up the allspice berries.
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.
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.
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.
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
- 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.
Painted on
Rub applied
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.
Last edited: