Real Ones Know Montreal Smoked Meat Is Better Than Pastrami (2024)

I’ll never forget my first taste of Montreal-style smoked beef brisket. I was on my first trip to the city many years ago. Prior to my trip, I had asked my fellow food-minded coworkers for recommendations on where and what to eat while visiting the city. The first response from almost everyone was, “You’ve gotta try the smoked meat at Schwartz’s Deli.”

The crowds lined up outside the deli’s quaint storefront was a telltale sign that I was not led astray. When I finally made my way into the bustling restaurant and caught a glimpse of the sandwich flying by to table after table, my first impression was that it was just the local name for a pastrami on rye.But once I got a taste, I realized this wasn’t just any pastrami sandwich—it was better than any pastrami sandwich I’d ever had.

Before me was a tower of comical proportions of thinly sliced ruby red smoked brisket slathered with ballpark yellow mustard and served on rye bread. The cured meat was the perfect balance of salty, savory, and smoky in one bite. There was a touch of heat (was it pepper flakes or just black pepper?) with a hint of garlic and other savory spices I couldn’t quite put my finger on. It didn’t need anything other than the mustard. This sandwich was all about the meat. I saw why Canadians don’t even bother using the word “sandwich” when referencing it. It’s just smoked meat.

What Is Montreal Smoked Meat?

Simply put, Montreal smoked meat is Canada’s answer to the pastrami sandwich. It begins with a beef brisket that is dry brined, smoked, and finally steamed before being hand-sliced for sandwiches.

This process is almost identical to pastrami, and you can read in detail about the history of smoked meat and differences between Montreal-style smoked meat and pastrami, but here’s a quick summary of the two main differences. First, the seasoning: The spice rub used for smoked meat can vary while pastrami is primarily a mix of black pepper, coriander, and garlic. Second is the cut of meat—smoked meat is often made with the whole brisket, letting customers choose between the fatty deckle or the leaner flat, while pastrami is usually just the brisket flat or beef plate.

What You Need to know About Making Montreal Smoked Meat at Home

Admittedly, there are no shortcuts here with making smoked meat. It's a process that takes time and care. But, with proper execution and insight into the curing, seasoning, smoking, and steaming process for the meat, you are guaranteed a triumph when slicing into the perfectly tender smoky brisket. Here I’ve put my professional experience of cooking, curing, and smoking hundreds (maybe thousands?!) of pounds of various meats over the years to good use, and have broken down the key steps to making homemade smoked meat that’s perfect for piling high for sandwiches.

Curing and Seasoning the Brisket

Similar to pastrami, smoked meat starts with a dry cure to let the salt and nitrites penetrate the beef in the fridge for several days. While curing brisket with salt originated as a technique to keep spoilage at bay, these days its main advantage is the flavor and the firmer texture it gives to the meat. Salted cured meat is denser and slices cleaner than unsalted meat. This is due to the meat’s loss of water during the curing process and the tightening and shifting of the beef’s protein structure as it cures. Salt draws out the moisture from the meat through the process of osmosis. This kills and inhibits the growth and activity of any harmful bacteria. The dryer the meat, the longer it’s shelf life. It also dissolves muscle proteins that would normally contract during cooking, so more juices are retained.

In addition to a generous amount of kosher salt, this recipe calls for the pink curing salt Prague Powder #1; this pink salt is enriched with sodium nitrate, which keeps the meat rosy as it cooks, giving the brisket its signature pink hue. The added sodium nitrate also minimizes the growth of unwanted bacteria and adds a distinct rich flavor to the brisket.Don’t be tempted to swap in plain kosher salt for the pink salt. This would change the curing time and process, and also leave you with gray meat. Remember, we eat with our eyes first, and that signature pink hue is part of this iconic sandwich’s appeal! In addition to the salts, ground coriander, cloves, and ground bay leaves are added to the curing mixture for added depth of flavor. This mixture is rubbed all over the brisket before the meat is transferred to the fridge to cure.

To properly cure and turn pink throughout, the brisket needs a full seven days to cure in the refrigerator. Do not cut the curing time short! I’ve tested this, and have experienced the disappointment firsthand of going through the lengthy cooking process only to realize once the meat was sliced that the cure didn’t penetrate the meat completely.

Whether you store the curing meat in an oversized XXL zip-top bag, a large baking dish, or a roasting pan, make sure to flip the brisket over once every day while curing. This ensures the brisket is evenly coated on both sides to cure evenly.

Once properly cured, the brisket then needs to soak. I know, it seems a bit counterintuitive—you cure the meat to get it salty, then turn around and soak it to make it less salty—but without a good long soak with several changes of water, the brisket would be an inedible salt lick. It’s another example of a step you might be tempted to shortcut, but trust me, don’t.

The Spice Rub

As mentioned earlier, the Montreal smoked meat spice rub is one of the key things that differentiates this cured and smoked brisket from pastrami. Smoked meat is generally more intensely seasoned and has more spices in its rub than pastrami,s. The spice blend used here is a savory and aromatic combination of nine dried spices—coarsely ground black pepper, ground coriander, paprika, garlic powder, onion powder, dried dill weed, ground mustard, celery seed, and crushed red pepper flakes.

The large amount of black pepper with a touch of red pepper flakes adds a peppy bit of heat to the brisket while the coriander, garlic, and onion powder provide a savory and aromatic background for the smoked meat. The spice blend is robust enough to stand up to the long smoking and steaming process.You can freshly grind your own spices in a mortar and pestle or spice grinder or use high quality pre-ground spices (The best way to judge a ground spice’s quality is by the smell—pre-ground spices should be potent and almost take your breath away with a strong whiff.)

It may seem like a large volume (almost a half cup!) of spice blend, but remember that this is a large cut of meat and it needs this large volume for the flavor to penetrate the meat. Rub the brisket all over and firmly pack the rub into the meat, making sure to use all of the spice blend.

How to Smoke the Brisket On a Smoker

Ok, on to the main event: smoking time. You’ve been so patient with the brisket’s preparation process so far, so don’t let that patience wane now! This big dense cut of beef is filled with an intricate network of connective tissues, so it needs to cook low and slow to become tender.

If you have a smoker, this is the time to use it (also, good for you!). Set up the smoker based on the manufacturer’s recommendations. There are so many styles of smokers that vary in shape (vertical, horizontal, or cabinet), fuel source (electric or charcoal), and size that it’s impossible to get too detailed in this recipe for how to set up your specific smoker. As long as you properly set up and maintain the smoker’s temperature between 225 to 275°F (105 to 135℃) throughout the lengthy (six- to ten-hour) cooking process, you’ll have success. Just don’t forget to add wood to the smoker every one to two hours to keep the smoke level consistent for the brisket’s first stage of cooking.

At this smoking stage, you are not cooking the brisket until tender. You are smoking the brisket low and slow to begin to soften its network of tough connective tissue while building rich smoky flavor. Once the brisket reaches 170℉it’s time to pull the meat from the smoker and finish it by steaming.

I always and forever will prefer a charcoal smoker over an electric smoker for the more intense smoky flavor a charcoal smoker imparts, but in restaurants in Montreal brisket is exclusively smoked with an electric smoker. This is due to Montreal’s city regulations against live fires—it has nothing to do with a preference about the degree of smoky flavor. Point being, whatever style of smoker you have will work well here.

How to Smoke the Brisket on a Charcoal Grill

No smoker? No problem! You can still make impressive low-and-slow cooked brisket on a kettle charcoal grill. Better yet, with the proper setup, you can do so without needing to babysit the grill every hour to gauge the smoking temperature or to add more coals or wood.

Enter the charcoal “snake” (or "C" or "ring") setup used in this recipe. It's long been a popular method among barbecue enthusiasts, but I was first introduced to it by Morgan Bolling, barbecue expert and executive editor with Cook’s Country Magazine. I then went on to use the technique over and over again while developing recipes for cookbooks at Cook’s Country’s parent company, America’s Test Kitchen.

In my opinion, the snake is the easiest and best way to smoke meats low and slow on a charcoal kettle grill. It’s as close to a “set it and forget it” outdoor slow cooking project as you will get. It requires a standard round 22-inch kettle grill. The inside of the kettle grill is lined with charcoal briquettes that lean on and just touch the next briquette to form a large “C” or “snake” around the ring of the grill. Another double row of briquettes is placed on top, then wood chunks are nestled onto the coals at evenly spaced increments. One end of the “snake” is ignited, and the briquettes slowly burn at a low, steady temperature around the perimeter of the grill, igniting the wood as it goes.

The goal with this setup is to achieve a consistent temperature and a long burn without needing to add more coals or wood every hour. There is just one point in the lengthy cooking time when additional coals need to be added to the grill—when the meat reaches 180℉ and it comes off the grill to be wrapped with aluminum foil so it can finish cooking with steam (I’ll describe this steaming process a bit further down).

Admittedly, when this “snake” set-up is used, it runs a bit hotter than is generally considered ideal for smoking brisket. As the charcoal snake burns, the temperature fluctuates from 225℉ all the way up to 325℉, a good 50℉ hotter than the 275℉ cap most folks try to stay under. Since it reaches a higher temperature for extended periods of time while cooking, the final cooking time is overall shorter than the that listed for a smoker running in the 225 to 275℉ range.

Before any hardcore smoking aficionado's scoff at this method due to that slightly elevated temperature, I assure you that I have cooked and tested many briskets with the charcoal snake setup and compared them against versions cooked on a smoker at the standard lower cooking temperature, and I can confirm that the final texture and flavor of the meat is comparable. The differences are minimal and the result is still very much worthwhile at the slightly higher temperature.

Still, there's no harm in mitigating the temperature swings of the snake method, and one way to do that is to center a large disposable aluminum foil tray filled with water in the center clearing of the coals, directly under where the brisket will sit. The water absorbs heat and, due to the addition of its thermal mass, helps regulate the temperature of the grill, much the way a heavy baking stone can help stabilize the temperature in a home oven. It also catches the fat drippings from the brisket during cooking to help avoid any flare-ups that could raise the temperature of the grill to truly undesirable heights.

If the charcoal snake method doesn’t appeal to you, you can always follow Joshua Bousel’s guide to smoking on a charcoal kettle grill. His method is a bit easier to set up, and doesn’t require counting and stacking the coals to get started, but it does require much more monitoring throughout the lengthy smoking process. If you do use this charcoal grill setup, you will want to follow the timing listed in the recipe for the smoker setup as the cooking temperature mirrors the temperature listed for the smoker.

Steaming the Meat to Finish

Once the brisket is smoked, it must then be steamed until it reaches 200℉ and is fully tender. You might ask, “Why not just smoke it all the way through until it’s fully cooked? Why switch up the cooking method partway through?” The short answer is that this would take too long, causing the meat in turn to become overpowered with smoke. The smoke should act as a seasoning for the meat, not overpower it.

Large chunks of meat, when cooked at low temps, hit a point (usually between 160 to 180℉) when the interior temp stops rising and stays stagnant for an extended period of time. This is commonly referred to in the world of barbecue as “the stall.” A common misconception is that the stall has something to do with the vast amount of fat and collagen in larger tougher cuts of meat, but this is not the case. The stall is caused by moisture evaporating from the surface at this stage of cooking and starting to cool the meat. It has nothing to do with fat or collagen.If you steam the meat at this point, it eliminates the evaporative cooling effect, and causes temperature to rise more quickly to reach a temperature of 195℉ or higher, allowing the meat to become fully tender.

At large scale restaurants like Schwartz’s deli that serve smoked meat all day long, the steaming process is as follows: Rounds of briskets are smoked for several hours until they are partially cooked and reach the desired level of smoke flavor before being cooled down and refrigerated until needed. Oftentimes the smoking process happens off-site at large-scale smoking facilities that have the space and safety measures for smoking large quantities of meat (we’re talking thousands of pounds here). When ready to serve, the restaurants boil or steam the smoked briskets—often in a large-scale, steam-injected combination oven or set over a large professional-grade tilting skillet—until fully tender and ready to slice and serve. You can read more about the step-by-step brisket cooking process at Katz’s deli as an example (in Katz's case it's pastrami, not smoked meat, but the process is similar).

Most home recipes for smoked meat and pastrami try to mimic this restaurant-approach to steaming the meat, not merely out of deference to tradition, but because the steaming step shortens the overall cooking time and keeps the smoky flavor from becoming overpowering. These home recipes first smoke the meat until the brisket develops its desired smoky flavor and is partially cooked (pulled off somewhere between 165 to 180℉) before transfering the meat inside to a roasting rack set in a water-filled roasting pan, covered with a make-shift foil lid, and steamed over a stovetop burner until fully cooked and tender.

But this approach to steaming at home can be problematic. It means you have to shift gears partway through the cooking process and move everything inside. Plus, getting the setup with a makeshift lid to enclose the steam is tricky, and it requires constant monitoring to ensure the steams properly for several hours. But this can be avoided.

I take a different, more hands-off approach to steaming the meat by incorporating a method called the “Texas crutch”—a technique often used with Texas-style barbecue brisket. Once the brisket has reached its point of smoke saturation and has hit its inevitable stall at around 170℉, the brisket is wrapped tightly with multiple layers of aluminum foil (the “crutch”) before being placed back on the smoker or grill to finish cooking. If you wrap the meat tightly in foil, this eliminates evaporative cooling. Any liquid coming off the meat is trapped in the foil wrapping, creating steam, which allows you to power through the stall.

At this point if you’re using a charcoal grill, you’ll need to add about 1/2 chimney’s worth of unlit coals to the still unlit end of the snake to extend it. This guarantees enough heat to finish cooking the brisket. If using a smoker, you’ll continue to monitor the heat source and maintain its temperature. In both cases, there’s no need to add any more wood—you just need to keep the heat going.

When wrapped snugly in foil, the brisket steams in its own juices. The steam helps push the brisket past its stall in temperature to reach 200℉. We’ve avoided the need to set up a steam bath inside.

Rest, Slice, and Serve

After steaming, the meat needs to rest to retain its juices. For such a large cut, this takes several hours and I recommend using an insulated cooler to keep the brisket nice and warm during this time.

Once rested, the smoked meat can be sliced and served warm, or it can be wrapped up and refrigerated for up to two weeks. Both cold and reheated, this smoked meat is delicious served on rye with a schmear of yellow mustard for a classic Montreal smoked meat experience. Yes, it’s a lengthy process for a sandwich, but I guarantee you love-at-first-bite, just as I felt at Schwartz’s Deli years ago.