What exactly is pastrami?

is a non refrigerated technology for storing milk. It turns out that pastrami and cheese both happened to taste good, so they're still very popular, even though the preservation technologies that they represent are no longer needed. Prior to refrigeration, killing a large animal like a cow or a pig presented a problem. Either you had to have a huge party so that you could eat the whole thing at once, or you had to find a way to preserve it. About the only way to preserve meat prior to the

twentieth century is by salting. If you add enough salt to meat, you kill all the bacteria in the meat and you can preserve it for a very long time. There are two ways to get salt into meat. You can coat the outside of the meat with dry salt and let that salt diffuse into the meat over several weeks. That's called dry curing. Or you can make a salty brine and let the meat soak in it for several weeks.

There's still some possibility of spoilage. The thing you have to worry about is bacterial problems during the time it takes the salt to soak in. The easiest solution to that problem is to do your salting in the winter, so you can take advantage of nature's refrigerator for a few weeks. So to make bastrami, you start by making corned beef. Corned beef is a beef brisket soaked in

brine with a little sugar and spices added. According to the Joy of Cooking, corned beef has nothing to do with corn, but got its name when a granular salt the size of a kernel of wheat corn to a Britain was used to process it. By smoking corn beef, you turn it into pastrami. The smoking adds flavor to the meat. Do you have any ideas or suggestions for this podcast? If so, please send me an email at podcast at how stuff works dot com. For more on

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