A pastrami comes to life
I don’t know where to start. Do I write up a storm about yesterday’s pastrami party and put the photos in later? Do I tell you guys just how mouth watering and tasty it came out? Do I tell you how I saved the pastrami three hours into the smoking when I checked it’s internal temperature (the recipe called for four hours in the smoker)? Or do I just start with the photo slideshow and take it from there? I say photos first. Then comments. My mouth is salivating as I write this….
Three weeks the brisket spent in the brine of salt, sugar, thyme, garlic, juniper berries, peppercorns and bay leaves.
Juniper berries about to be ground.
The brisket is coated with ground peppercorns and juniper berries.
After a few hours in the smoker.
Let me make a quick note here. I basically followed Emeril Lagasse’s pastrami recipe from foodnetwork.com. His recipe called for about a 4 hour smoking of the brisket.
I read up a bunch of other pastrami recipes and learned that once the brisket hits a core internal temperature of 165 degrees Fahrenheit, your pastrami is done. Also, I read a review that said the smoker I used - Cameron’s indoor smoker - destroyed the reviewer’s pastrami. This one reviewer wrote that the smoker burned all the wood chips and after four hours of this, his pastrami came out burnt, ruined and probably tasted like a hockey puck.
A few weeks ago I noticed the same thing after smoking a salmon. All the wood chips had fully burned out and that was just a 90 minute smoking. Knowing this, I wasn’t going to make the same mistake as the reviewer when smoking the pastrami for multiple hours. So every hour that my pastrami smoked, I opened up the Cameron smoker, removed the pastrami with a pair of vise grips attached to the drip tray and put in fresh wood chips. This ensured that I had a fresh and steady source of oaky smoke to cook and flavor my pastrami.
After the third hour of smoking, I decided to check the internal temperature of the meat and it registered 175 degrees Fahrenheit. Disregarding Emeril’s advice to smoke it for four hours, I now knew that my pastrami was DONE and ready to cool before serving. I made the right decision here. If I had cooked it any longer, it would have come out flat and dry. At 175 degrees, it was juicy, lean, tender and freaking delicious.
Back to the photos.
Here we go.
It was so soft and easy to cut.
I couldn’t get a slice as thin as Katz’s. Oh well.
MMMMMMMM.
MMMMMMMMMMMMMM.
MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM.
Look at that. I kid not when I say it tasted soooooo amazingly good. I couldn’t believe that I made a REAL DEAL pastrami. My confidence going into the smoking was mixed after reading the negative review of my smoker. But after my apartment was saturated in the smell of the cooking meat and the burning wood chips, I knew I was doing something right. We dressed our rye bread with Nathan’s deli mustard, heaped generous portions of the above slices on, devoured and chased with Guss’s pickles and vodka. Then we did it all over again.
Multiple bottles of vodka were drank. By 5pm, my brother was passed out. By 8pm, I was the same. It was a feast of epic proportions. I cannot wait to do something like this again!!!!
