Pastrami Recipe For St. Paddys - No Sous Vide

I am new to the Chef Steps community, but am very inspired by everything going on here.

I have been admiring the Sous Vide Pastrami recipe for quite some time now. Obviously I've missed the boat for St. Paddys day as we're less than a week away, but I wanted to ask about adapting this recipe without sous vide. I have a big green egg smoker that I use, and a bbq guru that allows me to maintain low temps (~200-225) for long periods of time (up to 24 hours, my neighbors love me). How can I adapt the cooking portion of this recipe to not include the sous vide part. I would think short ribs done at at a slightly higher temp. I've done whole rack short ribs on the smoker at about 250 for 5 hours in the past. Can I achieve an acceptable result this way? Obviously I'm probably sacrificing some texture doing it this method.

Another idea I had was to pressure cook or braise them in a liquid similar to the brine prior to smoking. Any thoughts on that??

Would love to make some Pastrami!

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Chris_Young_80640

@Michael_Minasian — It's pretty difficult to directly adapt this recipe without the sous vide cooking step. To be honest, that very low-temperature, long cooking time is what yields the remarkable texture. Your best bet, in my opinion, would be to seal the meat in a Ziploc bag, submerge that in a large pot of water, and see what temperature you can maintain on your stove top on it's lowest setting. Basically, improvised sous vide:

https://www.chefsteps.com/activities/improvised-sous-vide-pot-on-a-stove-method

Another method, that might work better, is to fill a cooler with water heated about 10 degrees above the desired cooking temperature. Then drop the sealed bag of meat into that water and close the lid. Every 12 hours or so, you'll need to check the water temperature, and add a bit of boiling water if it gets too cool.

https://www.chefsteps.com/activities/improvised-sous-vide-insulated-cooler-method

Hope this gives you a starting point.

mike.minasian

Thanks Chris, I've heard of the "Ghetto" vide alternatives. This might be my excuse to give it a go!

mike.minasian

What size cooler would be sufficiently large to fit two plates of short ribs?

Matt_67991

If you're using a cooler, you'll want to have as much thermal mass and as low of a surface to volume ratio as possible, so the bigger the better.

mike.minasian

So I ended up testing the cooler method for the French Fry recipe and found that I had pretty significant heat loss. I even wrapped the cooler in towels. It still worked, but they took almost double the time to cook.

I'm planning to get an Anova before attempting something on this scale, for this length of time.

Matt_67991

The cooler method works better for lower temperatures, such as those involving meats.

Liquids approaching boiling temperature lose a substantial amount of heat due to evaporative cooling. Heat transfer is also proportional to the temperature delta between the cooking medium and ambient temperature (Fourier's Law), which increases the hotter the liquid. Off the top of my head, the first reason is probably way more significant for things in that temperature range.

A large pot on the stove would be more appropriate for vegetables, french fry pretreatment and things in that temperature regime.