Best Homemade Deli Pastrami Recipe

Make pastrami at home that will rival the best Deli-made you have ever had. Succulent and peppery hot off the grill. (Follow video directions for a beef brisket -- or, skip ahead to boiling stage for an already corned beef brisket.) And visit my cooking blog for cheap ingredients, recipe text & photos: http://the99centchef.blogspot.com/2012/07/homemade-deli-pastrami-video.html

My Easy and Quicker Homemade Pastrami recipe with store-bought Corned Beef is right here: http://the99centchef.blogspot.com/2022/07/easy-homemade-pastrami-video-recipe.html

Ingredients
1 large brisket. The size will vary - I've made pastrami with 4 to 5-pound sizes, so far.
Ingredients for Curing Dry Rub
1/4 cup of salt - kosher preferred. I've even used regular table salt.
1 tablespoon curing salt - optional, it's to keep the pink color of the meat. Okay to leave out if color is not important, or if curing salt is not available.
1/4 cup brown sugar - or regular sugar
2 tablespoons ground black pepper
1 tablespoon ground coriander -
1 tablespoon powdered garlic - optional

Directions for Curing Pastrami
Rinse off the beef brisket. Mix salt, sugar, black pepper, and coriander together. (All the spices I used were already ground up.)

Rinse off the brisket, pat dry, or let it drain for a few minutes. Coat all sides of the brisket with curing spices.

Place coated brisket in a Ziploc bag or sealable container (not metal though, use ceramic, glass, or plastic.) Store coated and sealed brisket in the back of the refrigerator for at least a week.

Dry Rub Ingredients for Smoking
1 tablespoon ground coriander - optional. Once corned, the beef brisket has enough coriander flavor.

2 tablespoons ground black pepper - okay to use less. Sometimes black pepper can overpower everything, but I like my pastrami that way.

Wood chips for smoking the pastrami on a BBQ grill -- about 4 cups.

Directions for Cooking Pastrami
After the brisket is cured for a week, remove it from the refrigerator and rinse off the meat.

Add brisket to a large pot with a cover and fill it with water to just above the meat. Bring to a boil, reduce to a low simmer, and cover.

You want to low boil it for 30 minutes then totally replace the briny water with fresh - enough water to cover the meat by an inch. This first extra boiling step helps leech out most of the salt, otherwise, your finished pastrami is very salty.

When you get the fresh water to boil, reduce the heat to low, put a lid on the pot, and simmer for at least 3 hours. Check on it from time to time to make sure the water doesn't cook out (The water can cook out by a third, that's okay, as the meat will continue to steam.)

When finished boiling, remove the meat and set it to drain.

Make a dry rub to coat the meat for smoking. Mix the pepper and coriander and coat all sides of the brisket.

Smoke Corned Beef
There are several ways, you mainly need an outdoor grill with a cover. I have a 2-burner gas grill. The object is to smoke the meat with indirect heat. That is, place the meat as far away from the flame as possible. The meat is already cooked, so you just want to smoke it at this stage. If you have a simple outdoor charcoal BBQ grill then build a fire way off to one side.

The flame is for a pan of wood chips. You could even loosely wrap a large handful of chips in aluminum foil and place them over hot coals or the gas flame. Leave some space between the flame and the wood container or the wood will catch fire too easily.

Depending on how hot the flame is, the wood chips should start smoking in a few minutes. When the smoke starts, place the boiled brisket in a pan and place it as far away from the flame as possible, and cover the grill tightly. Check every 10 minutes or so and replace the wood chips with fresh ones as they cook away.

I smoked my pastrami for an hour. You want a lot of smoke from the wood chips to get that smoky Pastrami flavor. Wispy smoke will not do it, the BBQ grill should fill up with smoke.

During the hour of smoking, I had to replace the blackened wood chips a couple of times.

After the pastrami is smoked, place it on a cutting board, slice across the grain, and make a big fat pastrami sandwich, your way!

Видео Best Homemade Deli Pastrami Recipe канала the99centchef