A couple of summers ago we made a big batch of sauerkraut and just ran out this spring. I bought a jar at the store because we needed some but decided to make another batch. This time we just shredded a single head, around three pounds, and went with a slightly different recipe. Alton Brown has a simple one. Unlike the first batch, this one has some flavorings – juniper berries and caraway seeds.
We found a small plastic pail that worked great, the inside diameter being just right for a small plate to fit atop the cabbage. A plastic mayo jar filled with water provided the weight to keep everything submerged. I added a little water now and again to keep the level over the plate, and skimmed the mold that developed every few days. Harmless although a little off-putting.
We ended with a good quart of ‘kraut. I immediately started another batch. The seeds and berries added good flavor to the batch, I went with the same recipe. We’ll just keep it in the fridge and not bother with trying to seal it into Mason jars.
It tastes great! Here are a couple of brats I had tonight.
juniper berries
Pastrami!
We smoked a home made corned beef yesterday after rubbing on a generous helping of the proper spices, as you can see in the photo above. That’s after firming up in the fridge overnight for easier slicing. I suppose I should back up a little. Pastrami is a smoked chunk of corned meat. We went with a beef brisket but you can corn (preserve with salt) other meats as well. Turkey seems to be a popular substitute for beef for making a pastrami, at least in the deli at the local grocery.
There are tons of recipes out there for corning briskets, I went with this one from Alton Brown.
The 2 gallon plastic zip bag was a great idea, and Mrs J found a large, shallow, plastic container that held everything nicely. We let it soak for a week, turning the brisket over daily to make sure the brine got to every part. I spent several sessions looking for spice recipes for the rub and found too many to recount here. I ended up going with three main ingredients: Coarsely ground black pepper, ground coriander seeds, and juniper berries. The juniper berries were the hardest to find locally but we ran across some in a co-op grocery not far from the Asian food store that we shop regularly.
I tried to grind the juniper berries into the meat with the palm of my hand, not sure how better to do it, but the flavor came through. I gave the berries a spin in the spice grinder first but most of them were still intact. I used a mix of wood chips for the smoke flavor on this – hickory, apple, and cherry. With the smoker set to 225 it took about 10 hours to get to 160 internally. I then wrapped the brisket in several layers of aluminum foil and returned it to the smoker. It made it to 172 before I decided to remove it due to oncoming rough weather. (I had the smoker set up in our detached garage.) One of the questions I researched was “at what temperature is it done”, and found some disagreement. 160 -165 seemed to be the minimum but there were several that said they liked to see it get higher than that. One fellow said 190 was fine by him. I figured I could always cook it more if mine wasn’t yet good to go but I’m pretty happy with the way it turned out.
I have a decent counter top model slicer and it made short work of the slab. We ended up with 4 pounds of sliced pastrami. The uncooked brisket was 5 or 6 pounds, I forgot to make a note of it so I’m just guessing.
