Pastrami

Ingredients

• For the cure brine
• 2 kg beef brisket, navel cut, fattier than the flat; more forgiving through the long process
• 120 g kosher salt
• 60 g white sugar
• 6 g curing salt (sodium nitrite, Prague Powder No. 1), essential for colour preservation and flavour
• 6 cloves garlic, crushed
• 2 tsp coriander seed, lightly cracked
• 2 tsp mustard seed
• 4 bay leaves
• 1 tsp allspice berries, lightly cracked
• 1 tsp whole cloves
• 2 litres cold water, enough to submerge the brisket fully
• For the crust
• 30 g black peppercorns, coarsely ground — not fine
• 30 g coriander seed, coarsely ground
• For smoking
• 500 g hardwood chunks or chips, oak or hickory, soaked if chips; unsoaked chunks preferred for thin blue smoke
• To serve
• 8 slices rye bread, seeded or unseeded
• 60 g spicy brown mustard

Method

1. 1
   Dissolve the salt, sugar, and curing salt in the cold water. Add the garlic, coriander seed, mustard seed, bay leaves, allspice, and cloves. Submerge the brisket fully in the brine; weight it down if necessary. Refrigerate for 5–7 days, turning the brisket once daily. At fewer than five days the spices and salt will not have penetrated to the centre; at seven days the cure is complete — the flesh is firm and uniformly coloured to the core.
2. 2
   Remove the brisket from the brine and rinse briefly under cold water. Pat thoroughly dry with kitchen paper. Combine the coarsely ground black pepper and coarsely ground coriander seed. Press the mixture firmly and thickly over every surface of the brisket — the crust should be dense and even, not sparse. This coat is structural: it will form the bark during smoking and define the exterior bite of the finished pastrami. The surface should be completely obscured by the spice layer.
3. 3
   Prepare a smoker or kettle grill for indirect low heat. Maintain a chamber temperature of 100–120°C throughout. Add oak or hickory; the smoke must be thin and blue — not white or billowing. Place the coated brisket fat-side up over indirect heat. Smoke for 4–6 hours. The bark is ready when the exterior is uniformly dark and dry, the smoke ring visible at the edge of a test cut, and the smell is deeply woody and peppery rather than acrid.
4. 4
   This is where the dish lives or dies. Transfer the smoked brisket to a steamer — a roasting pan fitted with a rack, filled with 3–4 cm of water, sealed tightly with foil, works in the home kitchen. Steam over a steady simmer for 2–3 hours. The moist heat converts the remaining collagen to gelatin, completing what smoking began. The internal temperature must reach 93–96°C. Without this step the pastrami is merely smoked corned beef — firm, sliceable, but not great pastrami. The meat is ready when a probe meets no resistance and a thick slice folds on itself without breaking.
5. 5
   Rest the brisket uncovered for 10 minutes. Slice by hand, against the grain, in slices of approximately 5 mm. Machine-slicing destroys the texture; thin slicing dries the meat out. The interior should be pink throughout — the colour of the curing salt's reaction with myoglobin — ringed by a dark, peppery bark. Pile the slices high on rye bread spread with spicy brown mustard.