Local Food Heroes Blog

Thursday, 29 11 07 - 19:25

Dry Curing Bacon

There is now a full tutorial including a cure calculator in the Modern Bacon Cure posting.

There are many ways to preserve bacon but for good British Bacon you can't beat dry curing.

No white sludge in the pan – fried not poached – crispy if you like it – juicy if you don't – what could be finer?

There are two ways of dry curing. The first, where you make a cure and put the meat in it for a given length of time for the correct saltiness, and the way which I use, where you calculate the amount of salt and curing agent to use so that, within reason, it doesn't matter if you cure it for too long as there are only sufficient ingredients to give an correctly cured bacon.

A word of warning: curing salts whether they are saltpetre or modern sodium nitrite cures are dangerous things so follow any curing instructions carefully. It is also best to avoid cures in older books as the acceptable chemical levels for safe curing have reduced over the years. An accurate set of scales is required. If your cure 1 / Prague Powder is not from Sausagemaking.org, please read this first.

You may wish to read this post about equipment and ingredients before you start.

I am making streaky bacon using belly pork from Heath Farm.

The Cure
For each kilogram of belly pork with the skin on you need:
15g Salt
10g Sugar
2.5g Sausagemaking.org's Cure 1 ( Prague Powder 1)
0.55g Sodium ascorbate or sodium erythorbate (isoascorbate) – Vitamin C salts.

For other meat amounts this cure must be used on a strictly pro-rata basis. One piece of my meat weighed 1273g so I used 19.1g salt, 12.73 sugar, 3.18g cure and 0.7g Sodium ascorbate

I rubbed 90% of this mix into the meat side of the pork and the other 10% into the skin. Rub it well in and get into all the cracks and crevises. I used demerara sugar this time and put a sprinkle of black pepper and dried thyme onto the meat before putting it in a plastic food bag in the fridge. I will turn it over every day for 5-7 days. Then wash it in cold water, and put it in the fridge to dry out for a couple of days. I generally then slice it, vac pack and freeze it. If making small quantities, it's likely to be eaten before you can do this.

This cure will give bacon with 1.74% salt and 1% sugar. The ingoing amounts of Nitrites are 147 parts per million (PPM) and 550 PPM Vit C salts. This meets both British (EU) and US standards.

A bacon making tutorial can be found on Paul Kribs Website. Although it refers to making bacon from a bought mix, the same principles still apply.

Before using this cure, if you have any doubts about what to do, use the contact form and ask. I would rather answer, what may seem trivial, questions about it, than anyone get it wrong.

Dry Cured Bacon - Part 2 - 7 Days On

Comments

hotgoblin - Thursday, 22 04 10 - 18:05 - :

Hi i think i will have a go this weekend but what are Vitamin C salts.
thanks

Phil (URL) - Thursday, 22 04 10 - 20:14 - :

You're probably better using the cure here:
http://www.localfoodheroes.co.uk/weblog/..

The VitC is optional but is sold as sodium ascorbate or sodium erythorbate. It can be bought online from sites such as:
http://www.healthplus.co.uk/Sodium-Ascor..

I got mine from this ebay seller:
http://myworld.ebay.co.uk/returnallhealt..

It's expensive but lasts ages as you only use about 1gm at a time.

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