Learn the art of making pastrami

Do you know the difference between corned beef and pastrami or how the pastrami making process works?

Tune into this week’s episode of the BBQ Tips Podcast to learn all about the brine, seasoning and different meats that you can turn into pastrami.

This past week, I actually took a little bit of time off to enjoy my hometown of Las Vegas, Nevada, and my niece was in town competing in a basketball tournament and her team won. So congratulations to Lillie and the Hardwood Elites.

If you guys follow me on social media, you’ll see that I’ve been doing a series called Will It Pastrami? So that’s what we’re going to talk about today. Corned beef and pastrami.

The difference between corned beef and pastrami

There is a difference between the two, and mainly it’s the cooking process. Corned beef and pastrami are both basically meats that are brined in a liquid with some kind of pickling spices and curing salt.

The difference, though, is that corned beef is usually boiled or steamed and pastrami is smoked.

Now, pastrami can be anything. Usually, it’s beef like brisket or even beef navel. That’s what’s popular in delicatessens in New York. But you can pastramify, which I think is a word I kind of invented here, but you can pastramify anything.

You’re basically just going through the brining process and then smoking it.

So I’ve been experimenting with all sorts of different meats. But before I get into that, I want to talk to you about the brine itself.

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Corned Beef Brine

That brine is usually a combination of water, kosher salt, brown sugar, pickling spice and pink curing salt. Let’s talk a little bit about each one of those ingredients.

Water is water. You can use bottled water or tap water, whichever you prefer there.

When it comes to salt, though, I highly recommend using kosher salt. Make sure you pay attention to whether the recipe says kosher salt or table salt.

You can’t really use them interchangeably because table salt is going to be saltier than kosher salt. My recipe calls for kosher salt.

Then you’re going to use brown sugar. You can also use white sugar, but I prefer brown sugar. And then pickling spice.

When it comes to pickling spice, you can either buy that at the store or make your own. My pickling spice recipe includes things like cardamom and allspice and cinnamon and bay leaves and even a little bit of orange zest.

You mix that in with the rest of the ingredients.

The most important ingredient in this brine, because we’re making pastrami, is the curing salt.

Curing salts have been used for years to preserve meats because they inhibit the growth of bacteria. Well, this is pink curing salt number one, which is sodium nitrite.

There’s also pink curing salt number two, which is sodium nitrate.

Sodium nitrite is used for things like bacon, lunch meats, pastrami and corned beef.

Whereas sodium nitrate, which is pink curing salt number two, is used for harder cured meats like salamis and pepperoni.

So we’re going to use pink curing salt number one. It’s also sometimes called Prague powder number one. Just make sure it’s sodium nitrite and not sodium nitrate.

Now, I will say that it is very important that you follow the recipe that you’re using for the sodium nitrite. Too much of it can be toxic. That’s why it’s colored pink.

That way you don’t mistake it for regular table salt and use too much.

The standard rule for the safe amount of nitrite is one teaspoon of nitrite per 5 pounds of meat. But that’s if you’re actually putting the nitrite directly on the meat. We’re going to be using a brine.

So for that, it’s usually 2 to 3 teaspoons of nitrite to a gallon of water, which should be enough to cure 5 to 7 pounds of meat.

So again, my corned beef brine recipe includes water, kosher salt, brown sugar, pickling spice and a tablespoon, which is three teaspoons, of that pink curing salt.

When I make my corned beef brine, I put half of the amount of water in a pot on the stove and I add the rest of the ingredients. I bring it to a simmer and let everything dissolve.

Then I take it off the stove and add the rest of the water or even sometimes ice, because you need to bring everything down to a cool temperature. You don’t want to put a hot corned beef brine with your meat, otherwise you’ll start the cooking process. We don’t want the cooking process to start. We just want to start the brining process.

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The brining process

Once you have your corned beef brine made, you can make pastrami out of just about anything. But we’re going to start with brisket, because that’s the cut of meat that’s usually used to make pastrami.

So you’re going to want to take your brisket and trim it up, remove the excess fat just like you would if you’re going to smoke it regularly,

You’re going to want to put it in a food-safe bag. I usually use those Reynolds turkey bags that you can find like around Thanksgiving time.

They’re in the foil section. Put your brisket inside of that and then pour your corned beef brine right inside. Then I try to push out all the air, give it a twist and tie a knot.

Then, I put it in either a bucket or a big tub and set that in the refrigerator. For brisket, you’re going to want to brine it in the refrigerator for five to seven days.

The longer you brine it, the saltier it will become and the more pink it will actually become once you smoke it. You can do less time if you prefer a less salty flavor, or you can do even more time.

Go to the full seven days if you really like that oomph of pastrami. I usually do five or six days myself.

Once you’ve gone five to seven days, take the brisket out of the brine and take it to the sink and rinse off all of that brine. That helps remove kind of that excess salty flavor.

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The seasoning process

Next, you’re going to want to apply some sort of seasoning. I like to use a pastrami rub. It kind of continues with those pickling spice flavors and it doesn’t have any salt in it because we’ve already introduced the salt, so you don’t need to add any more.

Then I like to rub my brisket all over. Set it on a baking rack, set it on a pan, and actually put it back in the refrigerator for one more day to cure.

And that just really helps elevate the flavors and get more of the seasoning spices into the brisket through the dry brining process.

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The smoking process

Once that final day is up, it’s time to actually make your pastrami. And here’s where the difference lies. If you want to make corned beef, simply cook it in the oven or you can even boil it or steam it. That’s what corned beef actually is.

But if you want to make pastrami, throw that brisket on the smoker. You can use a charcoal smoker, a pellet smoker, whatever type of smoker that you have.

I like to use hickory and cherry woods when I’m making pastrami. But you can get creative and use whatever types of woods or charcoal that you like.

Smoke your brisket just like you usually would. You can either go at 225F and let it smoke for several hours until it reaches an internal temp of a little bit over 200F degrees.

Or you can cook it hot and fast. You can cook it at 300F degrees if that’s what you prefer, on like a drum smoker or something like that. Same thing. Let it cook. And if you want, you can even wrap it like you traditionally would with a brisket.

Then it’s really important to let your brisket rest. Same philosophy that we do when we’re smoking a regular brisket.

When you slice it, be sure to slice it against the grain. You can either do really thin slices and then you can build pastrami sandwiches on rye bread or you can do thicker slices and serve it with cabbage and potatoes.

If you want to have extra extra thin slices and really shave it, I recommend actually chilling the brisket after it’s smoked and after it’s rested and then using a meat slicer and putting it on the thinnest slice possible.

Then you can get the super fine shavings and build those really tall deli sandwiches.

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Other meats you can turn into pastrami

All right, That’s corned beef brisket or brisket pastrami. But let’s talk about my Will it Pastrami? series. So, yes, you can do pastrami with brisket, but you can do it with so many other meats. And while beef is really, really popular, you can also try poultry or pork.

So let me talk about a few of the things that I’ve tried recently. I did Dino ribs, which are those beef plate ribs, those really huge ones.

I put those in the brine for four or five days because it’s a little bit smaller cut than the brisket, but the rest of the process is the same.

Brine it. Then I rinsed it and then I put on the rub, let it sit in the fridge overnight and then I smoked it just like I normally do for my dino ribs.

Another really fun experiment that I recently did was a pastrami beef shank. So a beef shank is actually the cow’s leg and the way that butchers trim them up nowadays, they make them look like Thor’s hammer. So the bone is like long, like a handle, and then all the meat is at the bottom.

I trimmed away the silver skin. I tied it with butcher’s twine, and then I put it in the brine, followed the same process, rinsed it off, rubbed it with my pastrami rubbed, and then smoked it until it was fork tender.

And we made amazing beef shank pastrami tacos.

If you want to play around with another inexpensive cut of beef, definitely try a chuck roast. I’ve done that plenty of times.

All right, let’s step away from beef for a minute and talk about pork. You can also pastramify pork. I’ve done pork shoulder, I’ve done pork belly burnt ends. I’ve done pork loin.

There are really no limits to what you can do with corned beef brine and pork. I have found, though, that I like to do it for just a few fewer days when it comes to the brining process.

When I’m cooking with pork and making pastrami with a pork loin, I usually only do two to three days. A pork shoulder, I usually do four to five days. And pork belly burnt ends, actually limit that to about two to three days because they’re usually already cut into cubes. And so that pork belly bacon is a lot smaller.

You can also make pastrami with poultry. Recently, one of my videos of Will It Pastrami? was pastrami chicken wings. Now, because this protein is a little bit more delicate, you only have to do the cure for about two days.

I soaked my wings in the cure for two days, rinsed them off, seasoned them and then smoked them up on the grill.

They didn’t have quite the pink color that you’re going to get out of the beef because their myoglobin proteins are a little bit different in chicken than they are in beef. But you still got that amazing pastrami flavor.

And it was a really fun twist. I also serve those with a thousand island dipping sauce instead of ranch or blue cheese, just to keep with that little vibe of the corned beef flavor.

I have not made pastrami out of duck yet, but I’ve heard that’s also a really good one. I’ve seen people do that on social media, so if you want to experiment with that, definitely give that a try.

I would love actually for you guys to leave me a comment. Let me know what you’d like to see me make pastrami out of because it’s so fun for me to experiment. And I always just like to see if it’s going to work. So send me your ideas.

There are two other recipes that I want to talk to you about that I’ve experimented with that are super fun and you don’t even have to do the brining process yourself.

So every February to March, you can usually find corned beef at your meat counter. It’s going to already be in the brining solution for you.

It is usually brisket and you can usually see on the packaging that they’re either giving you the flat cut or the point cut. I usually always look for the point cut because that’s got more flavor, more marbling and more fat.

So if you pick up one of those, again it’s already brined. All you have to do is take it home and rinse it off and then you can apply your rub.

It even comes with its own seasoning packet. You can use that or you can use the pastrami rub on my website or even your own pastrami rub.

From there, you can either smoke it yourself or boil it or put it in the oven, whatever you want to do to either make corned beef or pastrami.

But two of the things that I like to do are make corned beef burnt ends and corned beef sausage.

To make the corned beef burnt ends, go ahead and take the brisket point out of the packaging and rinse it off.

Season it up and then put it on the smoker and smoke it for a while. Then you’re going to slice it into cubes and wrap it.

Do the Texas crutch wrap in some foil with some Guinness beer and some butter. Let that continue to cook until it’s nice and tender and then you’re going to finish it off in a glaze.

I’ve got a Guinness glaze on my website. That’s really good. It’s got some butter and brown sugar and some Worcestershire sauce and then you’ve got burnt ends.

They’re not Texas style by any means, but they’ve got that pastrami flavor with a little bit of Guinness. They are super fun for a St Patrick’s Day.

All right. The last recipe that I want to touch on is corned beef sausage. There are two options when it comes to making this. Again, you can either buy the corned beef in the store that’s already been brined or you can brine your own brisket.

You’re going to want to use five pounds of brisket meat to one pound of brisket fat.

If you can’t find beef fat or you don’t have your own brisket to trim off some of that fat, you can also use bacon or you can throw in pork, but you basically want to have a good ratio of fat to meat so that your sausage has a nice, nice bite and is nice and juicy.

You’re going to take that five pounds of meat and that one pound of fat and you’re going to put that through a meat grinder.

Once you grind everything, you’re going to want to mix in six ounces of beer. I like to use Guinness. It just gives that Irish American feel to everything. So I mix that right in.

You want to keep your ingredients really cold. That’s really important in sausage making, and then you’ll go ahead and stuff it into your sausage casings.

Chill that some more, and then you have a couple of options. You can either grill those pastrami brats or you can smoke those pastrami brats on your smoker for several hours.

Either way, in the end, you’re going to get a brat or sausage that’s unlike any sausage anybody’s ever had before. And it is perfect for St Patrick’s Day or any time of year you want to have just kind of a fun twist on sausage.

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All right, that’s it. Pastrami 101. You now know how to make your own corned beef brine. And now you can pastramify anything.

I want to see what you guys are making. Go ahead and shoot me a DM or tag @girlscangrill so I can check out what you’re doing. And again, if you have ideas of things you want me to pastramify, comment below.

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