We own a small butcher shop and we are looking at making pastrami for the first time. We have a prosmoker 300 sg pellet smoker that we use for all our retail jerky, bacon, snack sticks, etc. Just looking to get some advice on how people make pastrami if they are making it for retail consumption.

Brianh I know your post was from a few years ago but I recently bought a pro smoker pk 100. I did some sausages with it and was really impressed with how much smoke it generated. I wanted to try some ribs on it and searched the forums until I found your post. If you wouldn’t mind sharing how you cooked them that would be helpful. I couldn’t find the video you were making reference to as a starting point for me which is why I am asking. I am curious to see how long you left saw dust pan in? How did you have the dampers set? How full did you fill the saw dust pan. Did you change the temp after you wrapped them? I am looking at your picture and they look great so I want to mimic your recipe.

Has anyone ever had salt start to appear on the outside of their snack sticks? I made a batch, vacuum packed them, and 2 weeks later they started to develop what looked like a white coat around them. When I cut the bag open it was salt. Any idea what could cause this or prevent it from happening in the future?

processhead We did taste them. They tasted completely fine other than the grittiness of the salt. We make these cheesy jalapeno snack sticks all the time and this is the first time it has happened. We used to make a pizza snack stick that kept doing it as well and we stopped because of the issue with the salt.