- [Will] Oh, Oh, Oh!
- [Brent] Yeah!
(laughing)
- [Ben] That was really good too.
- So Pastrami's everywhere in New York.
Turns out though, not many places actually make their own.
The whole thing is highly inconvenient.
You gotta brine it, you gotta smoke it, you gotta steam it.
It takes a week and a half, two weeks to make.
It's a pain in the ass.
- We know one guy, our friend and mad scientist, Will,
over at Harry and Ida's, he makes his own.
So we're gonna go over there, make some pastrami with him
and maybe see what else he's got going on. Let's go.
- Kinda weird.
- [Ben] Oo ooh!
- [Will] What's going on guys?
- [Brent] This place is awesome
and looks like a cartoon science lab.
- [Will] It's a sandwich shop up front, that's
predominantly what keeps the lights on but it's a lot more.
We're just trying to figure that out at the moment.
But there's all sorts of weird shit going on,
I'll tell you that.
- We had a sandwich shop, rest in peace.
- RIP.
- [Brent] Pastrami in particular,
not only does it take two weeks to make,
it's also pain in the ass to do.
- [Will] We smoke a lot of straight briskets
at Docks Eatery, at the restaurant,
and we have a great time doing that.
But the curing process was there for a reason,
and there's a preservation aspect there
that really helps us out as a small business.
What we try to marry here is, how do we take a look
at history and all those different techniques
of smoking and aging and preservation,
and how do we take it and apply it to food waste,
to sustainable ingredients, to cuts of meat that people
aren't using a lot of, and how do we make it more valuable?
I got fish sauce from four years ago I could bring upstairs
right now that would blow your (bleep) mind.
We'll have to have you guys back during eel season.
I think we got a bunch of squirrel in here too.
- So let's back up just one second.
So you're a professional survivalist?
- [Will] This is the three year old brisket.
This is a three year old lardo as well.
I got a buddy down in Louisiana that just makes his fortune
getting roosters that no one wants out of Craigslist.
(Laughing)
- That's amazing.
- We have some ashes and mushrooms in the back.
Two year lardos that are being wrapped in actually
sea-lettuce, and a whole plethora of other things from...
Well, some things I probably shouldn't say.
- You're essentially a front for experimentation?
- It's a good time.
- It seems like your business is essentially, obviously
focused on sustainability and zero waste, but also some
of the dishes seem like you are challenging my palette
and kind of trying to build that trust with your consumer.
- Yeah, it's really tough and at the end of the day,
none of this actually works unless what we're
serving people is (bleep) delicious.
- So with all these experiments, what is your personal
greatest success and also, of course, biggest failure?
- This past year we spent a lot of time working on
finding what those super sustainable ingredients are.
Seaweed has been a huge, huge one.
This is a common seaweed that you'll find right around here.
So we take all of our cornhusks,
and you can see that it's a bunch of bladderwrack seaweed.
This is an interesting seaweed where
actually it becomes chocolatey.
For us, when we think chocolatey, all of a sudden,
when cooking, we think like moles and things like that.
We actually have bladderwrack mole for our barbecue ribs
at the restaurant for the past year over there,
and that's blended together, so really
a lot of the seaweed gets in there as well.
- Oh, that is really nice.
- It tastes like, healthy.
- [Will] (laughing) And in terms of failures,
I've spent a month trying to break down
the calcium deposit of a green crab shell, it didn't work.
(all laugh)
- Let's talk a little bit about the cut.
- [Brent] Deckle, also known as the second cut,
or the point, it's the fattier part of the brisket.
- [Will] A lot of people for these for these popular
burger blends in New York City were using the flats
of the brisket, so we started taking the deckles,
and we started curing and aging the fat
for recipes at the restaurant.
For us, it's just the perfect cut.
(groovy music)
So this has been in brine For about a week and a half or so.
I think there's some of our homemade fish sauce in there,
and we do a bunch of... Anchovies.
Well, we call them anchovies, but really, what our process
is, we just go to the fish market once a year and just buy
the cheapest small fish we can possibly find.
We just salt them all, and they
usually last us for about a year.
Usually costs us about $20, to sell the buy catch.
- [Ben] I mean, I've never seen a pastrami sandwich
having the list of the prime, homemade anchovies
homemade anchovies and homemade fish sauce.
Which is just you further preserving other things.
- [Brent] That's the cool thing about pastrami, is that
it's really simple, but has a ton of ingredients that
all come together, that if it's wrong, you know it's wrong,
but if it's right, it seems so simple and straightforward.
- Our kitchen is so small, and we were doing so many
covers when we first opened, so it was like,
well things either had to be served raw, or we
had to make them ahead of time, days or weeks or months,
or whatever it is.
There's no time to do anything in between, and within that,
there's a lot of honesty, because You know,
if you don't cure something properly after four months,
you're gonna (bleep) know it.
- [Will] Alright, should we season this guy up?
- [Brent] Yeah, let's do it!
- [Ben] Let's do it!
- [Will} I think we have garlic in here, we have a lot of
black peppercorn, a little bit of chili, mainly a guajillo
and we have some coriander, and then we do a little bit
of fermented radish in there, which is a real cool one.
- [Ben and Brent] Fermented radish!
- [Will] This is fermented radish and chili.
- Wow.
- [Ben] That's really, really good!
Just like very, very little bit of bite from the radish,
so you get... that pepper is just, like, mellow.
- [Brent] With a little bit of horseradish kick.
(down tempo techno music)
- Ready when you are, boss.
- Let's do it.
(techno house music)
- So we're gonna go in here for about seven or eight hours.
From there, we'll get it pulled out, and we're gonna
go right in the steamer for another three hours.
Alright.
- [Brent] So what's the steaming do after you smoked it?
- If we didn't do this, there'd be no way
we could properly break down all those elastin fibers
on all that meat without drying it out.
(sharpening knife)
(knife chopping)
- [Ben] You can see, even like...
- Oh my god!
- [Ben] smoking seven hours, and then being in a steamer for
a couple hours, and you can still see all that fat.
- Fat's perfect. The salt's perfect.
Nice and smokey, but cool and mellow.
- Alright, should we make some sandwiches up real quick?
- [Brent] Yeah!
- [Ben] Yeah, man.
- [Will] So this is kind of a homemade mustard that
we do with a bunch of salted Meyer lemon juice.
- [Ben] Really?
- And actually, the same anchovy.
After that, what we do is we take a bunch of cucumbers
that we've lightly fermented in whey, and...
- [Ben] In whey?
- [Will] Yep, whey and dairy is
part of the whole formula here.
So if you're milking a cow and you wanna get the most
use out of that milk, you separate it, and you make cream,
and you ferment it, and you make butter,
and you separate that, and you have a buttermilk.
It's how do we get the most value out
of every part of what we're doing.
- [Ben] Literally nothing just goes into the trash.
- [Will] Yeah.
- Everything, you look at it, and you study it,
and you figure out a way to make it useful.
- [Will] Yes, absolutely.
- I really admire that.
(jazzy music)
- [Brent] I love this mustard!
- It's actually lemony.
You get the lemon out of it.
Great, fresh dill, really, really great to have there.
- I'm not gonna lie, there's all sorts of old guys that
come in here thinking we're pretty sacrilegious for
not having pastrami on rye, but... you know, (bleep) them.
- Do they still eat a sandwich?
- Mm-hm, Mm-hmm.
- If you want the number one chef's table hack
at Harry and Ida's, you finish it with some beaver stew.
This is a three year old aged beaver.
- I've never heard that sentence.
I've never heard anything remotely like
that sentence ever in my entire life.
- [Will] With a little bit of sea lettuce,
and a little bit of aged duck fat, as well.
- That's fantastic!
- [Brent] That is so good. That broth is amazing!
Daniel Boone didn't have it that bad.
- What was he complaining about?
- Yeah.
- So it's got, like, that sour...
Like, a little bit of, like, a sour note to it.
- [Brent] The sweetness from the
apples too, also really rounds it out.
How much seaweed does this have in it?
- [Will] This has about two big bunches
of sea-lettuce, which isn't too strong,
but just enough to pair well with beaver.
- I think we're pretty lucky to have this be
the first time we've had beaver.
- Yeah. Thank you.
- Yeah, thank you guys.
- That was amazing. Thank you so much.
- Absolutely amazing.
- It was good having y'all.
- [Ben] We're just gonna fry a few links of each one up.
(squirt)
- [Brent] Oh!