Up until three years ago I had never eaten pastrami.

I don’t know how this happened. I’m Jewish, I’m from Long Island, and I spent most Sundays of my childhood eating dinner at a Jewish deli in Brooklyn. For shame, so much shame.

It’s not like the Mill Basin Deli didn’t have pastrami. We’d go with my grandparents to end the weekend and as soon as we sat down at the table, bowls of coleslaw, hopefully not too liquidy for my sister, and bowls of pickled cucumbers and tomatoes would appear in front of us. The adults would order Corned Beef or Pastrami sandwiches on Rye and eat the sour pickles while my sister and I were content with brisket sandwiches with gravy, and only the greenest barely pickled cucumbers could touch our lips.

I’m endlessly stubborn so this no pastrami policy carried on for years and it eventually extended to rye bread. The idea of the caraway seeds annoyed me in the way that they mottled the soft crumb of the bread. But things change, you grow up and people want to split sandwiches with you in deli’s and they don’t really want brisket when they could be having corned beef or pastrami.

So I gave up the pastrami blockade and haven’t suffered any ill-effects. I won’t say that it’s better than hot brisket doused in gravy but I probably wouldn’t turn away a pile of pastrami on rye if you want to split lunch.

The story would end here if it weren’t for my extreme laziness. There is good pastrami in Baltimore but it requires leaving the house. I had eyed and bookmarked a homemade pastrami recipe from Food52 nearly two and a half years ago that taunted me with how easy it looked. The only thing keeping me from making it was the list of random spices that are aren’t in my usual repertoire. Luckily, the Whole Foods in the ‘burbs sells bulk spices so I was able to look like a crazy person at the register with a million baggies of tablespoon increments of whole allspice, cloves, peppercorns, and other aromatics. I NEED THEM FOR PASTRAMI, PEOPLE! The hardest thing to find was Shiro Dashi but I substituted some beef dashi that I picked up from the noodle place near where I get my hair cut. I’m sure if I made more of an effort Shiro Dashi could have been procured.

And this recipe was actually pretty easy. The most annoying part was the time commitment. Probably an hour of effort was spread over the better part of a week. Day 1 was toasting and grinding spices for a deeply savory brine that the piece of brisket hangs out in for a few days. Food52 recommends a 5 pound piece of meat but I cannot commit to that much and more than halved the recipe. After 4 days the meat looked discolored, like it had gone bad but I held on to the belief that the brine did its job and things were supposed to look kind of weird. It was also nearly midnight when I allowed the meat to emerge from the tupperware full of saltwater so my tired eyes might have also had something to do with things looking less than fresh.

No matter how weird the brined meat looks, it quickly gets covered in a peppery crust and spends another night in the fridge. Then I poured over my beef dashi and tightly covered the meat in foil and added a little bit of water so it could roast in a very steamy environment. A four hour trip in a low oven finally got me something that looked like pastrami.

Your story could end right there and once the pastrami cools down enough to slice, it can be piled on some bread. But since I had already spent 5+ days watching beef brine and steam, why not make fresh rye bread to really be ridiculous and over the top.

Queen Deb of Smitten Kitchen can do no wrong and in theory lives in Jewish Deli mecca, the lower east side of Manhattan. So her take on Rose Levy Beranbaum’s rye bread was a perfect pair for my pastrami experiment.

Just like the pastrami, the rye bread was easy to put together but did require a bit of waiting. I got the bread started when I woke up in the morning, and other than a few checks to nudge along yeast rising, it was super hands off. And honestly, if you’re being a weirdo and making homemade deli meat just make the damn bread too. My crazy stops at homemade condiments, the store can make mustard for me.