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This was a PA Special. I went to walmart for bread and milk that night and came back with 30 lb of venison for the price of none.
Take that, corporate cattle barons! No! I will not be buying your fatty $15.99 a lb NY strip steaks! (Oh wait, that was last summer's prices...)
Yes, Worth, you can skip past this one if you want
. That is, if you want to miss out on what I did with perfectly good meat from a frozen roadside cooler that is indistinguishable from a a rifle shot deer, after the butchering.
Venison Pastrami
This meat was 12lb total of both loins and part of one hindquarter. Silverskin removed and cured 2/21 to 3/10. When applying the curing salts and spices, I do 2lb increments to make sure Cure#1 is evenly distributed. Three times 2# for 6# per gallon bag, into a fridge and flipped the first few days. Besides this meat, the poor deer provided a fresh shoulder roast, and a canner load of extra-coarse grind meat, very lean, browned in butter with salt and pepper, and canned in quart jars. Plus some scrap for the dogs.
Well cured venison after 2-1/2 weeks
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Out of the bag, cure still on.
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Cure rinsed off and sprinkled with seasoning consisting of 3x coarse black pepper, 1x garlic pepper, 1x coriander. Ready for smoker!
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An hour of cold smoking at about 42F. Pear tree wood chips.
Meatguard on duty!
I sat there and reading a book while it wafted past. It smelled incredible.
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I raise the temp slowly, and taking about 7 hours to reach 159F. Which is about 10F-15F over the minimum for venison. The next step is steaming it in beef stock, then letting it cool and dry. I used wire racks outside overnight in an opened cooler. It was plenty cold.
The next day, the slicer makes a showing. 60lb of sweet bologna, frozen in 10lb rolls until now, is thawed to divy up. It was the remainder of 100lb we had made back in end of October for $1.55/lb. Four rolls were sliced right away, and six rolls were frozen. Now, the rest is sliced and sealed. The thawing was timed up with the pastrami cook to only need to use the slicer one time. That hobart is a beast to carry up from the basement and has to be cleaned well afterward. The bologna is sealed in gallon bags in 4 low stacks, about 3 lb per bag. It stay remarkably fresh this way.
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After 60lb of that, and eating close to a pound of ends to help "clean up", it's back to the pastrami.
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You can't buy that.
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I tend to double up when possible, because the very thin slices take a long time. This was after the 60 lb of 100% venison sweet bologna, also done as thin as possible.
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The 12lb of trimmed venison yielded about 10.5 lb of pastrami after all curing and smoking. Incredibly tender. Not that salty at all. Kept in the fridge, it would stay good for weeks. But most is sealed and frozen in 1 lb bags. And it usually doesn't stick around long after opening.
With the crumbs and ends, a Creamed Dried Beef was the first dish. Gone in no time, no pics. Next stop, reubens, maybe. Or just sandwiches in general. I'm a big fan of an everything bagel, toasted, with light cream cheese, a slice of provolone, and a small pile of this pastrami to top it off.
