North America · Volume 31, Salt Pork, Scrapple and the Cold Atlantic Table

Pastrami on Rye

New York (Katz's Delicatessen); Romanian Jewish deli tradition

An illustration of the dish, not a photograph of it cooked.

Time: Not statedNo source states a time and the atlas has too few comparable dishes to estimate one.

Researched: Researched from 45 sources in the brief, none yet linked in the text
Reviewed: Not yet reviewed from inside the tradition
Cooked: Not yet cooked and reported

by New York (Katz's Delicatessen); Romanian Jewish deli tradition

Pastrami arrived with Jewish immigration from Romania and Bessarabia from the 1870s onward. In Romania the technique had been applied to goose; in America, cheaper beef navel replaced it. The essential named authority here is Ted Merwin, then a Judaic studies professor at Dickinson College, Pennsylvania, whose Pastrami on Rye: An Overstuffed History of the Jewish Deli won the 2015 National Jewish Book Award and is the first full-length scholarly history of the form. Merwin's central, chapter-relevant thesis complicates a simple immigrant-nostalgia story: the deli reached its cultural peak not in the immigrant generation itself but in the interwar era, when American-born children of immigrants ate at theatre-district delis as a marker of having arrived. There were over 1,500 kosher delis in New York in 1931; fewer than twenty survive today.

Read the history

As tradition built it

Pastrami on Rye

Brined roughly three weeks, smoked around three days

Ingredients

about 2kg (4.4 lb) beef navel or brisket
3 litres water, 180g kosher salt, 120g brown sugar, 12g pink curing salt (Cure #1), with garlic, bay and mustard seed wet brine
3 to 4 tbsp black peppercorns and 2 tbsp coriander seeds, toasted and coarsely cracked coarse black pepper and coriander
2 slices, per sandwich rye bread
to taste mustard

Method

Cure the beef navel or brisket in a wet brine for roughly three weeks.
Rub it with a coarse black pepper and coriander crust.
Smoke it for around three days at a low, steady temperature.
Boil and finish it in steam at the counter before slicing.
Serve hand-cut, thick, on rye bread 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.

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

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.
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.
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.

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