Corned Beef vs Pastrami: What's the Difference?

The shared start: a salt cure

Corned beef is beef cured in salt. USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service says the cure once used coarse salt grains and today uses a brine, usually on less tender cuts like brisket, rump or round. Nitrite in the cure fixes the pigment, which is why both meats stay pink after cooking.

From there, corned beef is simply cooked in liquid, low and slow, until fork-tender. Our homemade deli corned beef cures a brisket for six days in a salt and pink curing salt brine, then cooks it gently in the oven before it is sliced thin for rye.

What turns it into pastrami

Pastrami starts where corned beef stops. Meathead, the founder of AmazingRibs, sums it up as corned beef with a spice rub that is then smoked, which is why his home recipe begins with store-bought corned beef. The cured meat is soaked to pull out excess salt, crusted mostly with cracked black pepper and coriander, smoked low, then steamed or wrapped in foil until the connective tissue goes soft.

The cut differs too. Traditional New York pastrami uses navel, the fatty plate below the ribs, though brisket is now common. Meathead reports that Katz's Delicatessen, one of New York's oldest delis, starts with navel, wet-cures it for weeks, then rubs, smokes and steams it on the day it is served. He also notes that staff gave him different answers to the same questions. Our pastrami on rye is a home version built on brisket.

Romanian Jewish roots

Both the word and the dish are usually traced to Romania. Meathead writes that culinary historians credit poor Jewish communities there, where it may first have been made from goose or duck as well as beef, so pastrami has Romanian Jewish roots. By family tradition, a New York kosher butcher named Sussman Volk made the first American pastrami in 1887, a claim others dispute.

Corned beef took a parallel path through the same delis and butcher shops. Jewish immigrants from Eastern and Central Europe sold salted, slow-cooked brisket in New York, Smithsonian notes, and it later became the base of the Reuben sandwich.

Montreal smoked meat, the close cousin

Montreal has its own version, made by Jewish immigrants from Romania and Eastern Europe. Serious Eats calls the process almost identical to pastrami: brisket dry-cured for about a week, smoked, then steamed and hand-sliced onto rye with yellow mustard. The differences are the cut, often the whole brisket rather than the flat or plate, and a busier rub with more spices.

Meathead adds that Montreal smoked meat is usually dry-cured and rarely has sugar in the rub. Try it with our Montreal smoked meat, then pick a side in our corned beef vs pastrami debate.

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