Gimpysoft

So we were trying to decide what to eat for dinner last night, and Bex mentioned the Corned Beef Brisket we’ve had in the freezer since St. Patrick’s Day. She suggests that I put it in the smoker. I do some quick interline searches and it turns out that when you smoke Corned Beef, you get Pastrami. Well, I certainly couldn’t turn down homemade pastrami, so I fired up the weber.

I started with a nice crust of coarsely ground black pepper, then threw it on the weber set up for indirect cooking. The temperature was too high at first , but finally I got the vents set right and got it down to a nice 250°. I spent some time away from the smoker and when I returned the temperature had dropped quite a bit, so I added more coals and unfortunately finished the cooking too quickly. As a result, the pastrami was a bit more tough than I would have liked, and was very salty. Still, it definitely tasted like pastrami, and we’ve already decided to cure some brisket ourselves to try this again.

I think that if I had kept the temperature better under control at the beginning and the end this would have been great, so I’m looking forward to doing this with my own cured brisked. I think we’re going to cure two, smoking one into pastrami and boiling one for traditional corned beef.

One other fun thing I got to try out was my remote thermometer that I received as a Christmas present this year. It was nice, and I’m looking forward to a two-line graph for my next smoking attempt, one for grill air temperature, and one for internal meat temperature. The only drawback to using one of these is that it makes it a bit difficult to deal with the grill’s lid. I think that I might want to drill a hole in the base of the weber that I can snake the temperature probe’s wire through. Also, I think I’m going to upgrade to one with two temperature sensors or get a second one that I can actually install in the grill lid. The the only step left is getting the sensor data into my computer so I can capture real time sensor information.

Hmmmm….