Finished Pastrami

So, need to do a few catch up posts, but I ended up finishing the pastrami (and distributing it to a good number of people).

Here's the finished product:

So after my last post (when I boiled, and peeled the tongue) all I had left to do is smoke the tongue.

For this I put the tongues on the cold side of my smoker, lit the fire, and let it go.

And then re-lit the fire 30 minutes later.  And then stood in the cold another hour trying to make the fire keep going. 

I was a really bad boy scout.  Anyways, the fire eventually lit, and I ended up smoking it for about 4 hours on a fire of oak/mulberry. Note the nice smoke ring in the product above. 

After smoking sliced the pastrami super thin.  Slicing thin both gives the meat a deli feel, and also makes it more difficult to perceive the taste buds on the edges of the meat. 


The meat was a hit with people, and appealed to a crowd skewing male and older.  I'll probably make it again next year, if I still have access to cheap tongue.

Beef Pastrami Next Steps

Over the weekend I finished up the Pastrami.  I'll post this in two steps because it ends up being quite a bit of work.

First I pulled the tongues out of the brine. One of the tongues (the smallest one) didn't feel like it had been fully cured, but I moved ahead anyways due to limited time before the holidays.

After washing the excess salt off of the tongues, I put them in pots to boil with spices: carrots, onions, a couple of cloves, and bay leaves.  Boiling the tongues gives you a head start on the cooking process, and breaks down some of the tough sinew parts of the tongue.  It also allows for easier peeling of the tongue (a delightful process indeed).

I boiled the tongues for about three hours on the stove.  At this point the house smelled great, very beefy with the cloves and onions providing a nice background.

Now for the most "pleasant part."  After the tongues had cooled, I have to "peel the tongues."  The process is just removing the outer tough layer of skin on top, and generally can be done by hand.. it's just a little creepy.  This layer is tough, not really edible, and would likely just prevent smoke from penetrating the tongues properly.

My wife took some great pictures of the process:

The brining

I realized I forgot to post on the process of actually brining the cow tongues. 

It's an easy process, basically put the tongues in a large non reactive pot, add brine ingredients, and put it in the fridge for at least a week.

My brine recipe is:
3 parts salt
1 part brown sugar
a few cloves of garlic
a few bay leaves


Easy recipe, and easy process to start.  The worst part of this is dealing with the tongues.  A few reasons:

• They're tongues, and look weird.
• You can see where they were cut out of the cow.
• They still have taste buds, which you can feel.
• They have weird coloring.

And now some pictures to creep you out...

Hard Apple Cider

Every so often, I like to have apple juice around for the week.  It's technically a fruit, and reasonably healthy because I go for the unsweetened stuff.  So, I had a couple of cans of apple juice concentrate in the fridge this week...

On Tuesday night, I was a little bit bored, just hanging out with the baby and doing some cleaning in the kitchen, saw the apple juice and thought.. Hey, I've never made booze out of that!

Looking at a can of low-end apple juice and thinking hard apple cider may seem absurd, but I've made booze out of a lot of crap before.  And I really like hard apple cider (the stuff at the store is kind of expensive though).

This would be my first booze making experiment teaming up with my daughter (she's three months old, fyi).  Time to get down to business, and locate my *other* supplies.

I quickly located a couple of sources of yeast (brewers yeast in the fridge, the dehydrated baking stuff in the pantry).  I needed a vessel to ferment the brew in, something cheap that I wouldn't mind throwing out after the apple cider is completed.  Ah, in the recycle bin, an empty two liter sprite zero bottle.  Perfect.

So here's my general fermentation process:

1. Clean the container, and any other item I'll use in fermenting.
2. Make the juice, generally a little stronger (less water) that I would make normal juice.
3. Test for sugar content.  I use a "Hydromoter" that I bought cheaply a few years ago.  It floats in the water and allows me to calculate the initial sugar percentage.  From this I can calculate potential alcohol.
4. Add sugar (maybe).  In some cases (especially when I'm making bad wine) I want to add sugar to up the potential alcohol content.  In this case, step 3 yielded a potential alcohol of 8.5%, which is actually a little higher than most hard ciders.
5. Start the yeast.  A trick I've learned to jump start yeast is to put the yeast in bowl of warm water and a lot of sugar.  It will quickly start bubbling.
6. Add the yeast.  Just pour it into the sprite zero container.
7. Cap off the bottle.  Because of the way fermentation works, you need to allow this to breath, or it might explode.  I generally cover mine with a piece of cloth, held on with a rubberband. 

This whole process would have taken less than fifteen minutes, in theory.   Except after step 5, I remembered one key missing step.. I hadn't let the wife know I would be fermenting in the house.  And the garage wasn't an option for my fermenter, due to temps in Kansas this time of year.   She's usually cool with this type of thing, but I should probably check in first.

Checked in, wife was cool with it (after a quick eye roll) and I completed the final steps and I'm well on my way.

Here's a picture of the fermentation after a day:

Starting the Pastrami

Over the weekend, I finally got ambitious enough to start my cow tongue pastrami.  The main reason for this ambition was that my wife had reminded me, that given the brining/smoking schedule, I barely had enough time to finish before the holidays.

My wife has promised portions this pastrami to a lot of different people (her family, some coworkers, probably some other random people), such that I need to have it ready before Christmas.  So a lot of people are looking forward to this little bit of weirdness.


I have five cow tongues (acquired from my in-laws in central ks), but I'm saving one back to make lengua tacos, so I'll start the process with just four.

First step, thawing the tongues.

Seems easy enough

Until the dog knocks one off and starts playing with it

Then you're left with this

The end of my food stamp diet..

Friday of last week, my "food stamp diet" came to a premature end.  With a car accident. 

Friday was a good day on the diet, until the accident, and I set about eating my normal rice, ham, and ramen diet.  But then I left work...

Another driver ran a yield and my car was left undrivable.  I had to call my wife to come pick me up, and on the way home, I just felt like junk food.

So I broke my food stamp diet, with the worst food I could find.  LJS.  Long John Silver's.

Fried fish, french fries, and "crumbs"  ..

Anyways, this isn't overall indictment of my attempt at living on food stamps, because I had plenty of food left.  I just, wanted junk food, was in a wreck, so I had some. Had I not had the money to buy LJS, I would have gladly went home and eaten my ham and chicken. 

So, now this blog will likely take a turn, towards my more "normal"cooking activities.

On being resourceful... ie my biggest regret

My biggest regret so far is the promise to my wife not to kill anything for food (I have no doubt she was right to make this request, it would just.. be easier if I could).

A couple of days ago I took a walk over my lunch hour by a stream near my building.  On the walk, I saw a few edible things I could have picked up, notably some freshwater mussels (ok those are actually gross) and some wild growing walnuts. 

If I could forage for food this whole thing wouldn't be difficult at all. In fact, it would have been much easier to do this in summer when my vegetable garden was growing.  It's interesting to consider what degree people in poverty could have access to these high quality food sources. 

For a few years I lived in north east Wichita, and can remember seeing people, quite obviously in poverty, fishing in area ponds and lakes.   Were they actually supplementing their diet this way, or was it just a cheap form of recreation?

 I didn't pick up any walnuts.  Nor dig out any fresh water mussels.  I'll do this the "expensive" way and buy my food. Time for lunch, ramen it is again... but I could be eating walnuts and fish, for free.