Pastrami Recipe

Great pastrami has the perfect balance of salty, savory, and smoky in one bite. The exterior of each slice is firm and dense, but when bitten into, the meat is silky with fat and gives way effortlessly, perfect for piling onto the ultimate pastrami on rye sandwich. It’s a carnivore’s dream. 

If you want this type of pastrami-experience, the easiest and most practical way to go about it is to take Daniel’s advice: Find a great Jewish deli, take a seat at the counter, and order a pastrami on rye. Or order a few pounds of the thinly sliced jewel-toned meat to bring home and enjoy later. But if you want great pastrami and you’re an outdoor cooking enthusiast like myself, then you’ve come to the right place for your next multi-day giant-slab-of-meat-cooking project.

Transforming a tough cut of beef into satiny slices of pastrami takes a lot of time and care. Making pastrami at home is no small feat: The beef is brined and cured, soaked, smoked, steamed, and finally rested before being hand-sliced. From start to finish it takes a minimum of eight days before you can sink your teeth into it. If you’re not deterred by this gargantuan task and are able to fully commit to the process, the result is a triumphant moment of accomplishment with a side of incredible smoked and cured beef. Here’s a practical overview of how to cure and smoke deli-worthy pastrami at home.

Why Whole Brisket Is the Best Cut of Beef for Pastrami

At most American delis, including New York’s famous Katz’s, the navel—sometimes referred to as the plate—is the preferred cut of beef for pastrami. Navel is cut from the area below the ribs, right behind the brisket; it has more marbled fat running throughout the meat and is typically a little less stringy than brisket. Think of it as the “bacon of the cow,” if you will. But while the navel is sold wholesale to large operations like delis, it’s almost impossible to find at a local butcher or grocery store for home cooking. 

Since navel isn’t an accessible choice for home cooks, I recommend the next best choice: brisket. It might be next best, but it’s a mighty fine cut of beef for making pastrami. The brisket sits right next to the navel and has many similar characteristics—both are tougher, fattier cuts of meat that benefit from cooking for a long time over low heat.

A whole beef brisket is actually made up of two distinct muscles: the point cut and the flat cut. The point cut (aka deckle) is the triangular muscle that sits on top of the flat, and it is much higher in intramuscular fat than the lean flat, making it correspondingly rich and moist like the navel. Ok, great, so the point cut sounds like the perfect substitute for navel, right? Why not just use that and avoid the flat entirely? Again, purchasing availability is the major reason. You can rarely find a point cut on its own at a market or local butcher: When split, the point usually gets sold wholesale to restaurants, leaving the lean, tough, and dry flat behind for home cooks to purchase retail. But that won’t result in great pastrami. 

There is one way to get the point when shopping retail, though, and that's to buy a whole brisket, which has the flat and point muscles in one big slab of beef. You’ll most likely still need to call your butcher to order the cut ahead of time, but they should be able to accommodate you.

While the interior of the whole brisket isn’t quite as fatty as the navel, the large fat cap on top of the brisket will render while it cooks slowly and baste the meat, making up for what it lacks in interior marbling. Plus once all the brisket is sliced you can intermingle fattier slices from the point with leaner slices from the flat in your sandwich. (Or serve the juicier point cut to your preferred guests and the leaner slices of flat to those less deserving—I won’t judge.) 

There’s also the argument for using a whole brisket simply for its larger size. Look at it this way: If I’m going to invest over a week of my life to cook one piece of meat, I’d rather start with a larger cut and have more to eat as a result. And since the beef is cured, it can sit in your fridge for two weeks once it’s cooked, so you don’t need to worry about extra meat spoiling before you have the chance to enjoy it. (But it’s so good you’ll eat it before two weeks are up, trust me.)

The Purpose of Curing and Soaking the Pastrami

Pastrami starts with dry curing the brisket in the fridge for several days to let the salt and nitrites penetrate the beef. Before refrigeration, curing large cuts of meat like pastrami with salt was used as a technique to keep spoilage at bay. Salt draws out the moisture from the meat through the process of osmosis. Water is a breeding ground for most types of harmful bacteria, so drawing the water out of the meat kills and inhibits the growth and activity of any bad bacteria. The dryer the meat, the longer its shelf life. These days, salt curing’s main advantage is the flavor and the firmer texture it gives to the pastrami. Curing is the first step to turn the large, tough, stringy brisket into a tender, succulent roast for slicing.

In addition to using kosher salt to cure the brisket, a small amount of pink curing salt such as Prague Powder #1 is used. This pink salt is enriched with sodium nitrate, which adds a distinct depth of flavor that is nuanced but noticeable while minimizing the growth of unwanted bacteria. But perhaps the biggest reason to use curing salt in the mixture is that the sodium nitrate turns the meat a deep reddish pink: the iconic pastrami glow. 

Along with the salts, seasoning and spices like black pepper, coriander, granulated garlic, allspice, and ground bay leaves are added to the curing mixture. This mixture is rubbed all over the brisket before the meat is refrigerated for a full seven days. The meat needs this week for the cure to penetrate the entire brisket and transform its texture and color throughout. After the meat is cured, it needs to soak overnight—with several water changes along the way—to desalinate properly, otherwise the final pastrami would be an inedible salt lick.

The Spice Rub

After the meat is soaked but before it is smoked, it gets a second round of seasoning with a spice rub. The rub adds nuanced flavor to the final pastrami and also helps form the dark crusty bark on the exterior of the meat once it's smoked. Katz’s full spice blend is a secret, but the heavy hitters in most pastrami spice blends are garlic, pepper, and coriander. This recipe follows suit, calling for a generous amount of the spice rub to ensure the entire brisket is well coated and seasoned.

Tips on Smoking the Brisket

The only way to properly tenderize a tough cut of meat like brisket is to cook it at a low temperature over many hours. Brisket is filled with stringy connective tissue and pockets of marbled fat that need time to fully soften. In this pastrami recipe I use the same cooking technique and set-up for smoking brisket that I’ve outlined in detail in my Montreal Smoked Meat recipe, but I’ll summarize a few key points below.

How to Smoke the Brisket on a Smoker

If you have a smoker, this is the time to use it. Set up the smoker based on the manufacturer’s recommendations. There are so many styles of smokers that vary in shape (vertical, horizontal, or cabinet), fuel source (electric or charcoal), and size that it’s impossible to get too detailed in this recipe for how to set up your specific smoker. As long as you properly set up and maintain the smoker’s temperature between 225 to 275°F (105 to 135℃) throughout the lengthy (six- to ten-hour) cooking process, you’ll have success. Don’t forget to add wood to the smoker every one to two hours to keep the smoke level consistent for the brisket’s first stage of cooking.

How to Smoke the Brisket on a Charcoal Grill

For a less hands-on approach to smoking the brisket, use a round charcoal grill and form a “snake” around the perimeter of the grill with a double layer of charcoal briquettes leaned against each other. With the snake setup, the briquettes will burn slowly and continuously without monitoring.

In my opinion, the snake is the easiest and best way to smoke meats low and slow on a charcoal kettle grill. It’s as close to a “set it and forget it” outdoor slow cooking project as you will get. It requires a standard round 22-inch kettle grill. The inside of the kettle grill is lined with charcoal briquettes that lean on and just touch the next briquette to form a large “C” or snake around the ring of the grill. Another double row of briquettes is placed on top, then wood chunks are nestled onto the coals at evenly spaced increments. One end of the “snake” is ignited, and the briquettes slowly burn at a low, steady temperature around the perimeter of the grill, igniting the wood as it goes.

The goal with this setup is to achieve a consistent temperature and a long burn without needing to add more coals or wood every hour. There is just one point in the lengthy cooking time when additional coals need to be added to the grill—when the meat reaches 180℉ and it comes off the grill to be wrapped with aluminum foil so it can finish cooking with steam (I’ll describe this steaming process a bit further down).

Admittedly, when this snake set-up is used, it runs a bit hotter than is generally considered ideal for smoking brisket. As the charcoal snake burns, the temperature fluctuates from 225℉ all the way up to 325℉, a good 50℉ hotter than the 275℉ cap most folks try to stay under. Since it reaches a higher temperature for extended periods of time while cooking, the final cooking time is overall shorter than the that listed for a smoker running in the 225 to 275℉ range.

Whether on a smoker or a charcoal grill, at this smoking stage, you are not cooking the brisket until tender. You are smoking the brisket low and slow to begin to soften its network of tough connective tissue while building rich smoky flavor. Once the brisket reaches 170℉ it’s time to pull the meat from the smoker and finish it by steaming.

Why Steaming Is the Best Way to Finish Cooking the Brisket

While restaurants like Katz’s finish cooking their pastrami by boiling and steaming many at a time in industrial sized steam-injected ovens and tilt skillets, as I describe in my Montreal smoked meat recipe, creating your own steam set-up at home on the stove or in the oven is impractical and unnecessary.

After smoking the brisket, the easiest and best way to finish cooking the meat is to remove it from the smoker or grill, then wrap it tightly in aluminum foil and put it back on the smoker or grill to finish cooking. This wrapping technique is referred to as the “Texas-crutch” and it effectively traps in the beef’s moisture and steams the brisket, which launches the beef past its stalled cooking temperature of 180℉, and takes it to the final juicy and fully tender stage of around 195 to 200℉.  

Larger cuts of tough meat, when cooked at low temps, hit a point (usually around 180℉) when the interior temperature stops rising and stays stagnant for an extended period of time. This is commonly referred to in the barbecue world as “the stall.” The stall is caused by moisture evaporating from the surface at this stage of cooking and starting to cool the meat. It has nothing to do with fat or collagen. If you steam the meat at this point, it eliminates the evaporative cooling effect, and causes the temperature to rise more quickly, allowing the meat to reach a temperature of 195℉ or higher, when it becomes fully tender.

Don't Forget to Let Your Pastrami Rest

Once steamed, the brisket will need to rest for a couple hours to ensure it will retain its juices once sliced. I choose to rest the brisket, still wrapped in its foil, in an insulated cooler. This ensures the pastrami is still nice and warm if you choose to slice it and serve it warm. Of course you can remove the foil and cool the brisket down and refrigerate until completely chilled before slicing and serving, but I recommend enjoying at least some of it while it’s freshly rested and warm. A just-cooked, tender pastrami is too good to pass up, unless you're a monster.