What exactly is pastrami?

Like cheese, pastrami is a good example of old-fashioned food preservation techniques. Find out how corned beef becomes pastrami in this podcast from HowStuffWorks.com.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to brain Stuff from how stuff works dot com
where smart Happens. Hi, I'm Marshall Brain with today's question,
what exactly is pastrami? Pastrami is a time machine in
a way, so is cheese. For that matter. Pastrami is
a technology for preserving meat that our ancestors used before

(00:22):
refrigerators were invented. Cheese falls into that same category. Cheese
is a non refrigerated technology for storing milk. It turns
out that pastrami and cheese both happened to taste good,
so they're still very popular, even though the preservation technologies
that they represent are no longer needed. Prior to refrigeration,

(00:44):
killing a large animal like a cow or a pig
presented a problem. Either you had to have a huge
party so that you could eat the whole thing at once,
or you had to find a way to preserve it.
About the only way to preserve meat prior to the
twentieth century is by salting. If you add enough salt
to meat, you kill all the bacteria in the meat

(01:06):
and you can preserve it for a very long time.
There are two ways to get salt into meat. You
can coat the outside of the meat with dry salt
and let that salt diffuse into the meat over several weeks.
That's called dry curing. Or you can make a salty
brine and let the meat soak in it for several weeks.

(01:26):
There's still some possibility of spoilage. The thing you have
to worry about is bacterial problems during the time it
takes the salt to soak in. The easiest solution to
that problem is to do your salting in the winter,
so you can take advantage of nature's refrigerator for a
few weeks. So to make bastrami, you start by making

(01:46):
corned beef. Corned beef is a beef brisket soaked in
brine with a little sugar and spices added. According to
the Joy of Cooking, corned beef has nothing to do
with corn, but got its name when a granular salt
the size of a kernel of wheat corn to a
Britain was used to process it. By smoking corn beef,

(02:09):
you turn it into pastrami. The smoking adds flavor to
the meat. Do you have any ideas or suggestions for
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brain stuff blog on the how stuff works dot com

(02:31):
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