We have finished our sweetbread pastrami. In fact, we ate some yesterday in our pasta cooking class. We cut it into large chunks and sauteed it in butter and tossed it with pumpernickel farfalle, sauerkraut and grated Parmesan. The only change in this dish would be using an aged Gruyere instead of the Parmesan.
The entire process for making the pastrami was a long though quite simple and it basically followed the approach we outlined in our initial discussion on the subject. We brined the sweetbreads in soy sauce and maple syrup for three days. After that, we blanched the sweetbreads from cold water to a boil, shocked them
in ice water and then removed the sinew and off pieces from the exterior. Once the sweetbreads were cleaned we soaked them in smoked soy sauce and then crusted them with our pastrami spice mix: white, smoked Lampong and Long peppercorns, brown and yellow mustard seeds, fennel seed, coriander seed and allspice. Once the spice blend was applied we added vacuum sealed the sweetbreads and cooked them for two hours at 65 degrees C. When the sweetbreads were cooked we pressed them to a uniform thickness and chilled them for a later use; in our case with the farfalle.
The first taste of the sweetbreads was amazingly delicious. It has now piqued my mind with the possibilities for this new addition to our culinary repertoire.
