Pastrami Test 2, Day 4

So I woke up early Saturday (6 AM) to get to work on the pastrami that had been in a brine for 3 days, and having fallen asleep at 2 AM the night before, I was in zombie mode and totally forgot to take pictures.  I’ll try to remember everything that went wrong and keep them in mind as lessons for next time.  I refer to the meat as either brisket, corned beef, or pastrami: they are all the same piece of meat, but representative of the different stages of the cooking process.  Brisket is the raw, uncooked, unbrined meat, corned beef is the meat after brining, and pastrami is the meat after smoking.

Get Some Rest

Obviously, I needed to be well rested to be on my A game.  I was spilling stuff all over the place, forgetting this, forgetting that… just bad planning by me.

But onto what happened with the pastrami:

Use a Container that Actually Fits

That flat tupperware container that I thought would be perfect for the brine did not work out.  Usually when you put something in a brine, you weigh it down with a bowl or plate to keep the entire piece of meat submerged in the brine.  When setting up the brine, I put a plate on top of the meat and covered it with the tupperware lid.  This ended up being too tight of a fit, and the bottom of the plate completely cut off the meat from the brine.  As I pulled the corned beef out on Saturday, the first thing I saw was a giant circle of pink in the middle of the meat.  The pressure from the lid onto the plate and onto the meat prevented a whole section of the meat from soaking up the brine.

Athough I’m not absolutely certain yet, the effect of the tight container is that when finished cooking, the center of the pastrami was that greyish-brown color of regular cooked meat.  I’m guessing this is due to the brisket not absorbing the pink salt from the brine.  Hopefully Test 1 will prove this case.

Give Yourself Some Time

I wanted to get up at 5 AM to give myself a headstart towards a 1 PM lunchtime goal, but as the best laid schemes of mice and men go, I woke up at 6.  This put me in a time crunch of sorts, as I wasn’t sure how long it would take to smoke.  Most websites say about an hour per pound.  To start, I tried to get as much smoke on the meat with as little heat as possible.  The first hour I had the smoker going at 150 degrees, but fearing that I would not have enough time to get the meat up to 150 within the next 4 hours, I brought the smoker up to 200.  Within 3 hours in the smoker, the center of the pastrami had already reached 150.

Know How Deep Your Roasting Pan/Rack Is

Test 1 is definitely going into a steamer rather than a roasting pan.  I failed to use a little common sense and filled the roasting pan with an inch of water as specified in Charcuterie.  My roasting rack hangs lower than an inch from the bottom of the pan, so when I dropped the rack with the pastrami into the pan, a lot of the spices came off in the water.

Steam It

Along the same lines, I think the 1″ depth of the water goes towards gently roasting/steaming the pastrami, but since I had dumped about half of the water out, the pastrami cooked in the oven much faster.  Just use a steamer and these problems won’t occur.

Test 1

There weren’t enough people around for Test 1, so I took it out of the brine and it’s chilling in my fridge.  I hope it keeps for next weekend.  Still deciding whether to make a corned beef w/ cabbage, or stick w/ the pastrami thing.

Pastrami Test 2, Day 1

Here’s the lowdown of what Test 1 is and why I’m doing Test 2 concurrently.  I was reading through various websites that Pastrami is nothing more than black pepper and coriander crusted, smoked Corned Beef.  After seeing that concensus, I whipped out the ol’ Charcuterie book and proceeded to prepare a Corned Beef, as detailed in the book.  For some reason, it had never occured to me to look up Pastrami in the book, but while the brine was cooling down I skimmed through it and lo and behold, a separate listing for Pastrami, which has a different recipe/brine than Corned Beef.  So Test 2 is the actual Pastrami recipe which adds dark brown sugar and honey, and calls for less pickling spice.

USDA Choice Beef Brisket

Fatty Side

Pastrami Brine

Rubbermaid 1.5 G Container

Since I didn’t start this one until 9PM, I couldn’t let the brine cool all the way down to room temp before I stuck it in the fridge to chill.  Hopefully that won’t have any significant effect on the result.  Anyway, I’m considering doing an actual Corned Beef on Saturday since I have the proper Corned Beef preparation just chilling in the fridge.  Depends on how many people are gonna be around to eat I suppose.

This preparation only calls for 3 days in the brine, so this will be ready on Saturday as well.  Still didn’t get an answer from Ruhlman after I posted a comment on his blog, although I did ask it on a more dated post (it was the most recent one, but it had been a few days since he had posted it).  Maybe I’ll hit him up on Twitter.

Pastrami Test 1, Day 1

Making pastrami, or at least trying to, with Charcuterie as my main resource.  If you want the recipe, go buy the book.

Picked up a 5.47lb USDA Choice Brisket with about a 1/4″ of fat on it.  Not gonna trim it leaner, although sometimes they say to have about 1/8″.  The guy at Huntington Meats said, “Hey, if you like it fatter, leave it on.”

This is why I’m fat

5 1/2 lb USDA Choice Beef Brisket

The Brine

Soaking in my Coleman Personal Cooler

See You in 5 Days!

Picked up the spices at Whole Paycheck.  Mostly WF’s “cheap” brand, 365, but of note… the only pickling spice I could find was from a brand called Spicely that doles it out in tiny 1 TBsp boxes.  I was trying to open the baggie of spices gently, but like an idiot, I ripped it and spilled spices all over the place.  The recipe is supposed to call for 20g of it, but when I put it on the scale, I only had 13g of good stuff left.  THIS IS WHY YOU ALWAYS BUY EXTRA!  Doh.

So I’ve boiled the brine and I’m letting it cool down to room temp, but I don’t know if I should do it with the lid on (making it take forever) or with the lid off (and possibly letting something foreign join the party).  I’m playing it safe and leaving it covered, but I imagine it’ll be a few hours beofre it gets down in temperature.

The irony is not lost on me that I’m posting about making a fatty pastrami on the same blog that I went on and on about lowering my cholesterol and living healthier.  Maybe this is a sign that I need to get back to that.  We’ll see how my cholesterol is next week.

Anyway, so the brisket’s gonna sit in my fridge for 5 days.  It was probably a bad move to do it on a Saturday night, but it was the only day I had enough time to get everything together.  Hopefully the 5-day incubation period isn’t a hard number and it can take an extra day in there.  If not, what should I do with it?  Rinse it off and let it sit?  Where are the answers to these important questions, Ruhlman?!?  I guess I’ll find out if it’s too salty when I eat it.

How Healthy Are Ethnic Foods? (The Diet, Month 2)

Healthy fast food is hard to find, and when it comes to 1) healthy, 2) American, 3) fast food, you usually have to pick between two of the three.  When I say American, I don’t mean strictly hamburgers and hot dogs; I mean everything that has fallen into the realm of standard fare for Americans on-the-go, including pizzas, tacos, and breakfast sandwiches, none of which I have consumed over the last two months (minus a late night, alcohol-induced trip to King Taco on New Year’s Day).  Instead, I have been relying on ethnic fast foods to get me through those busy days, which got me to thinking, how healthy is a sweet corn tamale from Mama’s, or a bowl of Daikoku ramen, or a “xiao long bao” from Din Tai Fung.  How healthy, really, are the ethnic foods that I’ve been eating, and how have they been affecting my diet.

I don’t know the exact recipes that these places use, but I have found standard recipes for the aforementioned foods, and this post will be based on that information.

Corn Tamales (as prepared by the Too Hot Tamales, Mary Sue Milliken and Susan Feniger) from the book Mesa Mexicana

10 ears corn
2 tablespoons unsalted butter
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon ground white pepper
pinch of sugar, if necessary
1/2 cup heavy cream
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 cup hominy grits
1 recipe Salsa Fresca, see recipe

Immediately, two ingredients jump off the list in terms of health (particularly, cholesterol): butter and heavy cream.  My guess is that most places substitute butter with some kind of cooking oil, and they might avoid the heavy cream in sweetening the corn, but assuming that most tamales are prepared in a similar way, corn tamales are going to have to be taken out of the picture for the rest of my diet.

Daikoku Ramen (with Kurobuta pork)

Most of the online ramen recipes provide simplified instructions for what is really a labor of love for ramen chefs.  Daikokuya’s soup base is made from a pork broth that is simmered for over a day, and I can’t really find any online instructions for making a similar broth, so I’m not too sure what goes into that.  It should suffice to say that I don’t think broth of any sort is unhealthy.  What’s easier to see is what else goes into a bowl of Daikoku ramen: kurobuta pork, generic ramen noodles, a hard-boiled egg, and a sprinkling of green onion, bamboo shoots, and bean sprouts.

First off, the center of the hard-boiled egg is avoidable.  Leaving a slice of chashu in the bowl is almost impossible.  That tender, fatty slice of heaven known as kurobuta pork taunts me to no end, but that marbling will raise my cholesterol and needs to be left behind.  Ramen noodles can be made with or without eggs, and I’m not sure with the variety they serve at Daikokuya, but noodles are mostly just flour anyway.  The vegetables are so sparse that they really do nothing to help or hurt my diet.

Steamed Pork Dumplings
I found this recipe on Cooking.com, which uses The Heritage of Chinese Cooking as its source.

For Filling:
1/2 pound fresh ground pork (should be fatty)
3 oz fresh uncooked (green) shrimp, shelled, deveined, and minced
3 oz water chestnuts, finely chopped
1/2 cup finely chopped bamboo shoots
1 cup finely chopped scallions
1/2 cup minced celery

Most of the recipes online don’t vary too much, and my aunt makes them using a similar recipe, with no glaring ingredients when it comes to unhealthiness.  The nice thing that comes with dumplings (and tamales for that matter) is that they’re always steamed, which is probably the healthiest way to cook something.  (That might be wrong, but I don’t really care).

So what does all this diet “research” amount to in this crazy world?  I’m going to try to get some nutritional information on the tamales I have been eating, and in the meantime (at least until this diet is over) will stick to steamed dumplings.

Worm Update
I dumped some of the scraps from the meal I prepared on the day I got the worms, and I just checked on them today.  The little guys are actively eating and pooping out nutritious soil, but they’re eating much slower than I expected.  They’re still working on that first meal, and I don’t know when I’ll be able to add more scraps.  In their defense, it has been unusually cold in Southern California, and they do slow down a bit when it gets nippy.  I’ve moved them indoors for the time being, and hopefully that will help them go to town.

Mini-Update

The worms came in the mail yesterday, and I’ll set up their nest tonight.  I don’t have a proper camera, so I’ll be taking some camera phone pictures and uploading them when I finally find that usb cable.  I also have a big diet post coming which I’ve been doing some research on (so you know it’s gonna be good), and I’m due for another blood test tomorrow.  Hopefully, I’ll have time to update tomorrow before this hectic weekend is upon us.

In the meantime, you can see my ridiculousness at Xanga.