Superior Pickle for Pork
Ingredients
Directions
Make the pickle
Boil the water and add the salts and sugar.
Skim the mixture well.
Allow it to cool.
Pickle the pork
Submerge small, delicate pork in the pickle.
Let it sit for a week.
Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.
Explore the science
What each ingredient does
- Rock salt
- Draws moisture out of the pork and makes the brine inhospitable to spoilage microbes.
- Coarse sea salt
- Adds salinity that preserves the pork and firms its texture during curing.
- Saltpetre
- Converts to nitrite during curing, helping the pork keep its pink colour and resist bacteria.
- Loaf sugar
- Balances the saltiness and mellows the flavour of the cured pork.
The step that matters
Submerge the pork fully in the cooled pickle. The pork must stay completely under the brine so the cure penetrates evenly and exposed surfaces do not spoil. Cooling the pickle first matters because hot brine would begin cooking the delicate meat.
“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.
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