Tasty Tip 5

Okay, this ain't really a tasty tip as much as a food fact. Today, children, we'll be discussing the difference between corned beef and pastrami.

Pastrami's on the left

Click here to see where I stole the pic from

Ready? Excellent. Buckle up, people.

Pastrami is corned beef that's been smoked.

There, that wasn't so bad, was it? Hardly hurt at all.

So off on a slight tangent: why's it called corned beef? Well, let's get in our Wayback Machine and see how meat was treated in days of yore. Don't forget that they didn't have refrigeration (or canning). So some smart person realized that if you salt the crap out of the meat, it preserves it for awhile. Couple of ways you can salt it. The dry cure, where you pack it in salt for several weeks and let the salt find its way into the meat. The other way is to soak it in a brine. It was the British who called it corned beef because the size of the salt granule used in the brine happened to be the size of a wheat kernel, which the Brits called corn. [I stole the info from this site here.]

Here's your tasty tip. The other day I had a pastrami and egg salad sandwich at Heidi's Brooklyn Deli. Now that was tasty. And even though Heidi's is now in 11 states (yes, eleven), it started right here in Denver at the corner of 32nd and Lowell.