This weekend I’m proudly helping to serve up the best meat sandwiches ever served up in Birmingham, probably. Several months ago one of my bakery customers Nick Loman suggested we have a crack at running a pop-up Jewish New York Deli, ‘just-for-the-hell-of-it’. We kept the idea in the bank for a while, but when a potential venue came up in Stirchley we started baking and brining like nobody’s business in preparation for this weekend. As it happens the venue is now in Bournville, and Nick has enlisted three others onto the team, but we’ve all been perfecting our various recipes in preparation for serving you a perfect meat sandwich, and other accoutrements, on Sunday.

I’ve made several test batches of what I’m calling a New York Deli Rye, and settled on a 20% rye recipe that also includes caraway seed and grated raw onion. I’ve also been trying to create the perfect sized loaf, giving lots of equally sized slices to minimise wastage, and ensure you have a suitably sized bready handle to hold onto on Sunday. This has involved careful shaping and lots of linen tea towels.

This week I’ll be perfecting my bialy recipe (kind of like a bagel without a hole), which’ll be stuffed with lox (cured salmon) come Sunday, and deciding how to pasteurize the sauerkraut that’s fermenting in the utlity room.

We’re calling this crazy event ‘popstrami’, and you can see the when and where below. Hope to see you Sunday, don’t miss it!!

When

Sunday 13th March

11.30am to 6pm

Where

Leverton & Halls Deli and coffee house

218 Mary Vale Rd, Bournville, Birmingham, B30 1PJ

You can check out the full menu and other details at http://popstrami.co.uk