Festival has octopus, tongue, cheek and lamb pastrami; see how it’s done

The definition of what this meat preparation consists of is not a consensus among cooks — some argue that the ingredient is made from curing a piece of beef brisket, which is seasoned and then goes through hours of smoking. But the opinion of the chefs who participate in Pastrami Day is different.

This Saturday (14th), the gastronomic festival organized by the Fôrno restaurant receives 16 chefs, in addition to the house cook, who will present their different ways of preparing pastrami. The event takes place from 12:00 onwards next to the establishment, at number 44, Rua Cunha Horta, in the Consolação neighborhood, in downtown São Paulo.

The chosen date is the same one that celebrates pastrami in the United States, a country that was responsible for popularizing the method of preserving meat widely used by the Jewish community in New York.

On Pastrami Day, each of the guest chefs will make a dish using pastrami as an ingredient, but beef is not necessarily part of every dish. That’s because guests Henrique Behling and Enrique Villela, for example, prepare pastrami from octopus while Marianna Mota and Samila Trindade use pineapple.

The cook at Fôrno, Filipe Fernandes, explains that the main variations in the preparation of pastrami involve the type of curing, which can be dry or liquid, but both involve a type of brine. In Fernandes’ preparations, the meat goes through a dry cure that takes 12 days and then through the cooking and smoking process, which lasts 8 hours.

The greatest innovations in pastrami components, such as the use of beef tongue and cheek, lamb and octopus, come from the chefs invited to the festival. According to Fernandes, when cooks are called to prepare dishes away from home, they like to “travel”, both to show the possibilities of the technique, in the case of pastrami, and to “have fun and do new things”.

The idea of ​​the festival that takes place this Saturday is the same as the previous edition: a celebration among friends, which exalts the gastronomic component. Some of the guest chefs are also the same as in 2021.

This is the case of chef Ligia Karazawa, who prepared bao, a kind of Chinese steamed bread stuffed with duck pastrami. In this edition, the cook prepares, together with chef Bruno Panhoca, the Pastrami Sando, made with beef, accompanied by karashi mayonnaise and sunomono, and served on miga bread.

Rômulo Morente, who made pastrami tongue tacos last year, now shares the space with Thiago Maeda for the preparation of Gói Cuon, a Vietnamese roll filled with beef cheek pastrami.

The festival, which brought together around 1,200 people last year, features performances by musician and comedian Patrick Maia and Banda que Nunca Se Viu.