Pastrami

Second time I have made this. Unusually, I don't have any record of how I did it last time. I found this recipe from Emeril that looks good. It has the extra step of poaching the meat after smoking it.  Started with a 5.4 lb piece of brisket, still in the cryovac, from Harris-Teeter.  Here it is in the flavored brine, in a Pyrex dish, covered with plastic wrap, ready to go in the refrigerator for 3 weeks:

Three weeks later, it looks like this:

During that interval I flipped it twice.  Here it is after rinsing off the brine, drying, and sprinkling with chopped juniper berries and ground black pepper:

Then onto the Big Green Egg with some applewood for smoke.  I didn't use very much charcoal, so after 3 hrs, the fire was going out (internal temperature of the meat ~150F).  It looked like this after smoking:

My plan was to cook it just until it came out of the plateau, so I wrapped it in heavy duty aluminum foil and transferred it to the oven and adjusted the temperature so the effective temperature inside the foil was  ~235F.  It cooked without a plateau, and went straight up to ~180 before I pulled it out of the oven.  (Maybe that was because the brining broke down the collagen that normally has to melt?)  After that I simmered it in water for ~2 hours.

A few days later, here is how it looked after slicing:

It had a nice smokey taste (you can see the obvious smoke ring), and a very dense, but tender structure.  Not particularly spicy or salty.  delicious, but when I do it again, I will either skip the post-smoke poaching step, or make it very short.