You Should Make Turkey Pastrami for Thanksgiving

While I really only enjoy Thanksgiving turkey in the hour after it comes out of the oven, it certainly seems the majority are in it for the sandwiches. Day-after turkey sammies are a legendary aspect of Thanksgiving not attributable to any religious, historical or cultural aspect of the day. So why bother with a roasted bird, what if you just skipped right to the beloved sandwich? And if you’re going to go for turkey sandwiches, why not lean in hard and make turkey pastrami instead?

How hard is pastrami to make, anyway:

So hard. I made pastrami—real beef pastrami—exactly once. It is canon Amanda dinner party. I made almost twenty pounds of it, lovingly sourced, cured, smoked and served. It is, despite years of mic drop culinary feats, the dish everyone goes back to. “Hey, have you thought about revisiting that pastrami?” Not a chance, frendz,; life is not long enough.

Which is when I started wondering if you could cut some corners, and I think the fact that I’m here talking about it speaks for itself.

Setting up the meat:

I went to multiple sources for my setup, Amazing Ribs and every recipe for turkey pastrami I could find, and then I applied all of that knowledge to a scientific method I call “winging it.” I started with a whole turkey breast, deboned, skin on. I have since found myself wondering why not try the recipe with dark meat, but alas, I did not.

The shortcut here, is that usually you simply “cure” the breasts with the prague powder, also known as salt cure #1. Instead, I’m skipping that step and going right to the spice mix, which happens to include more cure #1. While you could let the meat hang out in the fridge for two weeks, I found that five days was enough time to get a reasonable cure for our purposes.