now, all we need is a traditional romanian recipe for this. if anyone has any romanian contacts and/or can find a recipe and method for pastramă (as opposed to pastrami), please post.

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Hi there,

I’ll give you the traditional mutton pastrama recipe, but I have some comments first.

Reading this thread I got angry. At the beginning. Then I got veeeery angry because I realized that it isn’t people fault, they don’t know about Romanians (history, traditions, etc.). It’s our fault. Mostly, because we loooove to talk, but we really hate to write. And I don’t mean common people like me writing in a forum. I think at scientists who should step aside and show their work, not only to their small community, but the whole world. However, this is a genetically trouble of Romanian people, over 2000 year old. Yes, history evidence written by Romanians is lesser than what foreigners wrote about us. And unfortunately for us, they aren’t always correct.

So…  

Note:

To not repeat myself, please go to my Romanian pastrami recipe page and read there about pastrama origins. You also can find there some different pastrama recipes than that what I’ll post here.

traditional romanian pastramă is a cured, semi-dry smoked meat, hisorically made from sheep but also made from pork, beef or presumably any other animal that produces sizable cuts of meat.

Correction: historically made from mutton and veal/beef (Because people living this land 2000 year ago where sheep and cattle breeders. If they knew what to do with sheep, they certainly knew this could apply to cattle, too.) and traditionally made also from pork and goose (Because a recipe older than 170 years can be considered traditional.)

it is not to be confused with pastrami, which is cured and prepared in a very different way and has a very different flavour.

Explanation: well, US pastrami is a confusion, itself. Why? Let’s take its history threat. But first you have to understand that pastrama it isn’t a meal. It’s a method of preparation, like the stew, grill, boiling, etc. The method consists in tendering and cleaning the meat by keeping it in salt for long time, then drying in the wind. Now, looking at mutton, veal, pork (this isn’t yet on my page, but it’ll be some day) and goose pastrama recipes it’s easy to see that they are pretty different (except, they are all salted and dried meat). And somehow this is normal, because of the different taste and texture of the meats. But looking at the veal pastrama I can tell you this is the oldest recipe. Why? Except the hot pepper (what I think it’s red pepper in English, only this kind of pepper is green in Romania, so, it’s difficult to call them red), all the other ingredients could be found on this land 2000 years ago. But people are creative and love different tastes. So, they added different kinds of spices. The only foreign spices used in all Romanian pastrama recipes are:

-cinnamon what can be a Turkish influence, while they love it so much

-paprika, a Hungarian influence and

-allspice probably from Germans/Austrian people

Please, don’t tell me that garlic is an Asian spice because I already know this. What you don’t know is that I use even today the wild garlic (known as bear’s garlic, too) in my meals. I love it and it’s everywhere in Romania. And scholars say it originates in Central and Eastern Europe.

When the pastrami launched in US those Jewish made their own recipe, on their own taste. Here come some differences. And, as much time their recipe has huge success, I really believe it was good. The trouble with the taste of today US pastrami is the industrial preparation.

the romanian word pastramă...derives from the turkish; păstra in turkish means "to keep" or as we would say, to preserve [or] cure....

This is completely wrong. To keep = korumak in Turkish, to preserve = korumak in Turkish, to cure= tedavi in Turkish. If you don’t believe me just go and check at any online dictionary. None of this words are even close to “păstra”.

More, the “ă” letter and sound from Romanian language doesn’t exist in Turkish language. Some people say this sound has Slavic origins, others that originate in Dacian language.

the origins of pastramă reach far back into history, when the ottoman empire ruled wallachia and moldavia for hundreds years. the occupying turks imported their own dried meat, called pastirma or basturma, which was made from slabs of beef slabs of beef rubbed in a spice paste and then air dried in high mountain curing houses. this method of preparation was eventually adapted by the local citizenry.

No more comment!

pastramă is traditionally made by employing a dry cure; this is achieved by rubbing a cut of meat with a seasoning mixture consisting of crushed black pepper, nutmeg, sweet red pepper, saltpeter, salt, sugar, crushed allspice and garlic. some forms also include cinnamon, ground cloves and ground coriander seed.

Comment: Read the traditional Romanian recipes and you’ll see they use lesser ingredients. All ads are creative cooking ways of people, not traditional recipes.

pastramă is traditionally served sliced very thinly, much the same as spanish serrano ham or italian prosciutto

Of course, because…

a person eating it for the first time cannot swallow it. he chews it and chews it like a piece of american gum

The dried meat becomes somehow elastic. If you take a big piece of pastrama in your mouth, you simply can’t cut it with your teeth. That’s why we use to prepare pastrama from young meat, being much more tender.

now, all we need is a traditional romanian recipe for this

 

Mutton pastrama recipe

I have to tell you I never tried this recipe. I have it from a shepherd from Piatra Craiului (King’s Stone) Mountains, Romania. But I found one later in a book with traditional recipes, pretty much the same.

The recipe measures are in spoons. Wooden spoons. A wooden spoon it’s about 1 ½ of a tablespoon. Well, shepherds craft themselves these spoons. So, they can differ from a shepherd to another.

Important note: Reduce the meal contact with metal and plastic as much as you can.

Ingredients:

½ young sheep (in one piece)

course salt

5 garlic loafs

5 spoons of savory /thyme (dried and crushed)

2 spoons of sweet paprika

1 spoon of hot paprika

1 spoon of black pepper powder

1 spoon of basil (dried and crushed)

1 spoon of crushed allspice

Wash the mutton and hang it for an hour to dry.

Prepare the rub. Crush the garlic gloves in a mortar (if you don’t have a wooden mortar, that made from glass it’s OK). Rub it to let its juice. Add all the other ingredients (except salt) and mix them. 

Take the mutton and make some incisions on the leg, where the meat layer is thick. Make them deep, to the bone and long enough to reduce the layer thick. Hardly rub the mutton with the prepared spices' mix. Do it vigorously on all surfaces, inclusive in every incision you made. Salt the whole surface with a thin layer of salt.

Now it turns difficult. How much salt? Too much will make the meat harder. Too little means your meat can spoil. That’s why our peasants/shepherds prepare the pastrama at low temperatures. It happens generally in mountains, or, in other areas (where the weather is warmer) they do it from late fall to early spring (except cold winter). So, how much? It’s a matter of experience. Sorry, this is what the shepherd answered me. This is what I tell you. The written recipe I found tells only about salt, but not a word about how much.

Roll the mutton with the fat outside and put it in a trough. Shepherds cover it with another trough, or a cotton towel and let it outside (at 6-8 Celsius degrees) for 3-4 days. If it’s colder (not less than 2-3 Celsius degrees), they reduce the time.  The mutton will let a juice. So, turn the whole surface of the meat through that juice once a day, and then roll it back.

When done, hang it in the wind for one day. Now it’s ready to eat/prepare. Don’t keep it in the fridge. We keep pastrama in the store.

Many shepherds don’t smoke the pastrama. They can preserve it until in spring by keeping it rolled in sealed with clay barrels. The best pastrama is that grilled in the first week after drying in the wind.

From all hardwoods, the shepherds use only oak to smoke the pastrama.

i would very much like to try this with deer!

I know nothing about deer/venison. But I found a recipe in a Romanian book with venison recipes. It’s pretty much as veal pastrama, nor mutton pastrama.

 

Deer pastrama recipe

Ingredients:

22 g salt
2 g crashed black pepper
1 g saltpeter
2 g sugar
5 g sweet paprika
2 g coriander
30 g crashed garlic

All quantities are for 1 kg of meat.
Cut the meat in 2-3 cm thick and 4-5 cm wide pieces. Let it as long as is given by the cut. Mix the spices and rub the meat with a part of them. Put the meat in a vase. Press it well. Sprinkle the rest of the spices on top. Cover it with a piece of wood and add a heavy stone over to keep them pressed. Put them this way at cold smoke for 2-3 days. If you use hot smoke, it needs about 3 hours. Serve it cold, in very tiny slices.

Well, this is all. Your call now! I’m really interested in your feed back. So, if you give it a try, please come back and post your experience.

hello, exploromania! and thank you for sharing your traditional recipes!