BRANDT BEEF PASTRAMI

Ms. Goofy gifted me a beautiful beef brisket from Brandt Beef. A whole packeris a lot of meat for just two people to eat.The packer is the whole brisket including the fatty point end and the lean flat piece.We decided to separate the point from the flat and make two separate cooks. Last Superbowl weekend we cooked the point end and made some very tasty burnt ends. We do love burnt ends. Who doesn't like meat candy. We now had a large lean cut of flat end brisket for our next cook. We are going to transform this into pastrami. This is done in several steps and takes a week long preparation. The first step is to cure the beef with salt and spices. We are basically making a corned beef. This corned beef is then cooked in a smoker and the results are some of the best pastrami ever.

We used a wet brine technique for our curing. The recipe is linked at the bottom of our post. It is a very simple process of combining spices, pink salt and salt into a brine. You do need some real estate in your refrigerator to hold the brining bucket. The curing will take 5 to 7 days. We then smoked our cured meat with a combination of apple and hickory wood. It sure smelled good as the cook progressed. When our meat hit an internal temperature of 160 degrees we were ready for lift off. Of course a half hour of resting time was needed before slicing.

Words have escaped me for how good this was. The smoke component of apple and hickory wood perfumed our meat to an alluring bouquet of happiness. The meat was tender. The spices complemented and were in balanced harmony. Oh my! I cannot wait for sandwiches tomorrow. A sandwich with a slather of German mustard is just what the doctor ordered. This process takes a time commitment but is so worth every morsel.

Recipe Here