Pastrami on Rye

As tradition built it

Pastrami on Rye

Serves 8 to 10. About 2 hours' work, plus 5 to 7 days' curing and a night under the rub.

Ingredients

The brine

• 6½ tbsp fine sea salt
• 5 tbsp white sugar
• 1¼ tbsp brown sugar
• 1¼ tbsp honey
• 1¼ tbsp pink curing salt (sodium nitrite)
• 1 tsp garlic, chopped
• ½ tsp mustard seed
• ¼ tsp coriander
• 1.5 litres warm water

The meat

• 2.3 to 3.6kg beef brisket, the flat, fat cap left on

The rub

• 60ml black pepper, coarsely ground
• 60ml coriander, coarsely ground

The smoke

• 120ml hickory or oak chips

To serve

• to serve seedless rye bread
• to serve deli mustard

Method

1. Mix the brine ingredients in a food safe container and chill it an hour.
2. Rinse the brisket, sink it in the brine and weigh it down. Cure it in the fridge 5 to 7 days, stirring the brine every other day. It is cured when the middle is an even pink.
3. Mix the pepper and coriander. Lift the brisket out, pat it dry, and coat it evenly. Leave it in the fridge overnight, uncovered.
4. Heat the oven to 110°C. Soak the chips an hour, light them in a cast iron pan with a kitchen torch, and set the pan on the oven floor. Put the brisket on a tray on the top shelf and cook 4 to 6 hours, to 77°C inside. Cool it and wrap it.
5. To serve, slice it cold and steam it 15 minutes, or reheat it covered at 180°C with a cup of hot water for an hour. Slice it against the grain and serve it on rye with mustard.

Notes

The sequence is practised at Katz's Delicatessen and, in its own modern form, by Evan Bloom of Wise Sons Jewish Delicatessen, whose own five-to-seven-day brine and hickory-or-oak smoke were explicitly built after a pilgrimage to Katz's.

The recipe is Evan Bloom's, of Wise Sons in San Francisco, for the Jewish Food Society. Katz's, in New York, uses navel, brines it for weeks, smokes it for hours, then boils it 2 to 3 hours before it goes into the steam tables, and carves it by hand to order.

What a modern chef changes

The three-stage cure held exactly as tradition sets it

Cross-refs Rung 04, pastrami's three-stage cure

Method

1. Hold the three-week brine and the multi-day smoke exactly as tradition sets them; this technique already is the elevation, and does not need shortening.
2. Finish the steam stage sous vide instead of over a counter kettle, holding the meat at a single, precise, low temperature for hours rather than a variable steaming heat, for a more evenly tender result edge to edge.
3. Dry a portion of the pepper-and-coriander crust separately in the dehydrator into a coarse dust in the spice grinder, finished over the sliced meat at the table for a top note the wet cure and smoke alone cannot deliver.