There's some color and light weirdness here because of the time of day and using Picasa to make the meat more visible.

There was a sale on beef shoulder clod a couple weeks ago.  $1.69 a pound.  When's the last time you saw a boneless, gristle-less cut of beef for that little a pound?  Two weeks ago at my supermarket.  That's when.

So I bought the smallest piece, used some of it for chili, and cured the rest of it before smoking it today.  It's kind of pastrami.  You can think of pastrami as corned beef that's been smoked - it usually uses the brisket but didn't always, and they use basically the same seasonings.

This one isn't brisket, and doesn't use those seasonings.  But it is cured smoked beef, and there's not another word for that.

No, instead of the usual pastrami seasonings, I used the Baharat mixture from The Spice House, which is a fairly spicy Middle Eastern mix that I'm actually at a loss to describe, except to say that if you get an accurate sense of the flavor from the list of ingredients at that page, your mental palate is better than mine.  In any case, it's one of my favorite blends from my favorite internet spice purveyor, but this is my first time using it with non-ground beef (it's my go-to for lamb, and I've used it with chicken and meatballs).

I'm curious to see how this is going to be on a sandwich with cheese.  Good good stuff.