pastrami

Brian Lagerstrom

Our supplies and methods - general notes

• We bought two flat cuts of brisket - one 5.5 lb and one 6.5 lb guy. The 6.5 lb slab appeared to still have some of the point on it. We didn't have a vessel suitable to adequately submerge the 6.5 feller in brine, so we cut this one in half and submerged both halves together in a 2 gallon container that we borrowed from my dad's restaurant. So on the day of The Big Smoke, we had three slabs of brisket: two small guys which were halves of the 6.5 slab, and one full 5.5 lb slab.
• We followed Brian's video, and also consulted other resources such as this guide on amazingribs.com. Brian's guide has you cook the pastrami for 6 hours in a smoker, and then cook it for another 6-8 hours in an oven (!). We were initially perplexed by why Brian has you cook the briskets two separate times. Then Jackson figured out that the smoker Brian was using, called a Big Chief, only gets as hot as 160 degrees. It maintains a low temperature and presumably imparts a lot of smokey flavor, but does not actually cook the briskets very much. So for future reference, if we ever make pastrami again (a big if), we shouldn't follow Brian's cooking advice unless we are also using a Traeger smoker.
• We used a Traeger smoker instead. Following my dad's advice, we aimed to cook the briskets at a temp of 225-250, until the internal temp of the briskets reached 200. We expected this to take 4-6 hours. Apparently, as soon as the briskets reach somewhere around 190-200 and have a certain pliable feel to them, they should be taken off. As long as they reach this stage of cooking on the smoker, there is no need to finish them in the oven, wrapped in foil, as Brian does in his video.

 

Prep

• 7 days ahead of time: brined briskets in beef brine, using brine recipe from Brian's video, linked.
• Night before The Big Smoke: make dry rub from Brian's video. Grinding up all those peppercorns was pretty hard on my dad's blender.
• Some recipes, such as this one, suggest soaking the briskets in water over night the day before The Big Smoke in order to desalinate them. Brian does not mention doing this in his video and we decided to skip this.

 

Day of The Big Smoke

• Rinsed the brined briskets thoroughly in cold water and dried them with paper towels.
• Covered them liberally with the dry rub, using Brian's video again as a guide
• Transferred briskets to the location of The Big Smoke, Dave's office.
• Julian (owner of smoker) was around this morning and told us that the smoker runs low. So in order to heat it to 225, we should set the dial to at least 275. That said, the smoker has a digital display of the smoker's internal temperature which Julian says is accurate. So we can constantly check on the smoker temperature without opening it up and losing heat.
• Put briskets on at 10:45am. This was 45 minutes later than planned because the smoker was taking a while to heat up. By this point, the temp dial was set to 325.
• The smoker temp was 220 when we put the briskets on. It immediately dropped down to 190 when we put the briskets on. This is to be expected, and we are not worried about it so long as the smoker temp rises again somewhat quickly.
• 11:05. Smoker temp had risen to 215. We would like the smoker temp to hover in the 225-250 range, so hopefully the temp will climb some more. Somewhere around this time, we raised the dial temp to 350.
• 11:20. Temp on the smoker is 222. This is probably good enough (?)
• 11:34. Smoker temp was down to 216 so I increased the dial to 375(!)
• 11:45. Smoker temp had increased to 248, so I decreased dial back down to 350.
• 12:00. Smoker temp is 220. (Dial still at 350).
• 12:40. Smoker temp is right around 235, according to digital external thermometer. We opened the smoker and saw that the internal thermometer was reading 250. The internal thermometer was in the back-right part of the grill, so this may be a hot zone. We rotated the briskets in the smoker and moved the thermometer to the back-left side. Increased dial temp to 375 to help the smoker heat back up after being open, but the temp bounced back to the 240s in just a few minutes, so we brought the dial back down to 350.
• 1:28. Smoker temp is 228. Things appear stable.
• 2:09. Temp was up to 256, so we decreased dial down to 325.
• 2:45. 4 hour mark, rotated and temped:
  150 big guy
  160 small 1
  168 small 2
  Grill at about 228
• 3:30. Smoker temp is 235 ish (I forget exact number). We are coastin' B-).
• 4:00pm. Checked internal temp for smokers. The biggest hunk of brisket was at 155. The smaller two cuts were at 163 and 180. We decided to crutch the biggest cut (meaning we wrapped it in foil). The smaller two we left unwrapped. Here's to hopin'.
• 4:55pm. Some technical issues have come up. The smoker pellets appear to have burned unevenly, and there is a hole in the pile of pellets being fed to the smoker. Consequently, the smoker temp dropped dramatically, down to 110 or something abysmal like that. we opened the smoker and temped the briskets. One of them is at 190, very close. The other uncovered one was at 170 and the crutched big brisket was at 176. We re-arranged the pellets so that there are no longer gaping holes in the pile of pellets. (I know that makes no sense but I don't know how else to describe it.) We are thinking the 190 small hunk will come off soon. The other two hunks will probably take another hour or so.
• 5:10pm. Crisis. We came out and the smoker had for some reason shut off entirely. The display was showing "LEr", which I guess means "low error reading". I think the smoker was basically malfunctioning, something to do with the pellet feeding system maybe ? Anyways, the smoker was very cold but thankfully the briskets had not yet lost a lot of heat. We re-lit the smoker and for some reason the smoker completely caught aflame, and we had a grease fire for a few minutes. David helpfully suggested transferring the briskets to a grill set at a low temp to stay warm while we waited for the smoker temp to stabilize. The smoker was very hot for a few minutes but eventually came back down and we put the briskets back on.
• 5:30. Smoker temp appears to be stable around 250 but after the whole ordeal in the last bullet point, the briskets lost a lot of heat. All three hunks were registering a temp of 170 or so. We wrapped the remaining two in foil to accelerate the process.
• 6:00pm. The large slab which has been crutched for a while is at 190. The other two, which were only crutched 30 minutes ago, were still at 170 :'-(. We are hopeful that the large piece will come off soon.
• 6:30. We took off the smaller two pieces of brisket. The smallest piece was at 190, and the other piece was at 185. So we ultimately failed to get the briskets up to 200, but the whole ordeal was taking forever and everyone was getting hungry. The largest piece was still slowly creeping up toward 200, and we decided to leave that one crutched and cookin' on the smoker while we served the other two briskets.
• 7:30 ish. We came back out to check on the big, crutched brisket that we had left cookin', only to find that the smoker had once again shut down with an "LEr" error. We will never know what internal temp that last brisket reached.

 

Day after The Big Smoke

• We still had the full brisket leftover which we had left on the smoker for the longest. We decided to take a page out of Brian Lagerstrom's book and continue cooking it wrapped in foil in an oven set to 300. We made this decision before realizing that Brian's smoker only reaches a temperature of 160 degrees, and this extended cook is not suitable when the brisket has already been cooked in a 225-250^o smoker. That said, given we have no evidence of the brisket ever reaching an internal temp of 200^o during The Big Smoke, there was a good argument for doing the extended cook in the oven after all.
• We cooked the brisket in a 300^o oven for about an hour. After that, the internal temp of the brisket was around 180^o or so. Then we turned the oven down to 250 for another 30 minutes, roughly. At that point, the brisket was very close to being 200^o internally. We left the brisket in the oven set to 170^o for the rest of the day to stay warm until we were ready to eat it at dinner.
• Given the extended cook, this pastrami was noticeably more tender than the brisket we had the day prior. That said I think we may have overcooked it a bit. It was almost crumbly at points. I think in the future, cooking it only once in the smoker, and waiting for it to get to an internal temp of somewhere around 195-200 is ideal. But my dad says that the best way to tell when a brisket is ready is by feel, not by internal temperature. So in the future, we will begin probing and feeling the briskets as soon as they hit an internal temp of 190. We will wait for them to have that pliable, but still springy, feel to them.

 

Concluding thoughts

• The pastrami seasoning was delicious, but both times I ate it I was extremely thirsty afterwards. I would like to try desalinating the briskets in the future, meaning that we would soak the brined briskets in cold water overnight before putting them on the smoker.

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Comments:

On Jan. 1, 2026 Mike Trudeau wrote:

This has been my go to recipe for the last 30 years! I made a few changes, adding cumin to the tub, increasing smoker temp to 275, and using capybara instead of brisket. Turned out great but I am now under indictment for customs violations